Should you be looking for an unresolved debate that has bedevilled public education, teachers, students and let’s not forget parents, look no further: It is to be found in the annals of research about homework — what, why, how much and when.
The debate is further obscured by the fact that there are systems such as Singapore’s, which score well on international standardized tests such as the Program for International Assessment. Singapore’s schools have a heavy emphasis on homework and its students are among the world’s most hardworking — at home.
They clock the third-longest time spent on homework. Singapore’s 15-year-olds devote 9.4 hours to homework a week, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
That speaks for itself regarding the value of homework, you say, but then countries such as Finland, which enjoys one of the more widely admired education systems in the world (and which also scores well on the PISA test), advocates nearly no homework at all.
Finnish people believe that besides homework, there are many more things that can improve children’s performance in school, such as having dinner with their families, exercising or getting a good night’s sleep.
Finland, to confuse matters further and according to a UN report, has also overtaken Norway to become the happiest nation on Earth.
Some research has correlated the advocacy of more homework with national panics about the state of education, as if homework were the answer — not teacher training, not (as happens in Finland) a system’s ability to attract the best and brightest into teaching, and not a culture’s commitment to education beyond the unproven and pandering quick fixes advocated by political leadership.
Whenever reformers attempt to improve the academic outcomes of American schooling, more homework seems a first step.
The justification for this probably has more to do with a conservative philosophy (students should avoid temptation by working harder) and also with the convenient fact that increased homework costs no extra money and requires no major program modifications or expenditures.
More often than not, events outside the education system provoke the “homework response.”
As one example, the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the ominous predictions of the presumably malevolent objectives of Russian government scientists led to a push for better math and science education across the western world.
That didn’t actually happen, beyond the ensuing pressure for education systems to “become more competitive on a global scale,” which, in turn, fuelled the practice of assigning more homework.
All that said, with rare exceptions, the relationship between the amount of homework students do and their achievement outcomes has been found to be generally positive and statistically significant, which brings us back to the questions of what, why and how much about homework.
Many school districts in B.C. have adopted homework policies. Many of these policies speak breathlessly of establishing the expectation for educators to assign developmentally appropriate homework at each grade level to enhance student learning and so on.
Few policies address the educational purposes of homework, but stick to prescriptions for amount and frequency, school and teacher responsibilities, student responsibilities, and the role of parents or others who assist students with homework.
The extent to which the effectiveness of these policies is monitored remains mainly within the practice of individual teachers.
So what are the most widely advocated best practices regarding homework?
First and most important, homework should be a review or further practice of something thoroughly taught and learned in class, to ensure that whatever homework has been assigned can be completed by students independently and with ease.
This means that the teacher should have conducted several topic explorations and practice activities in class so that students feel confident enough with the material to work on their own.
The worst outcome of homework, and let’s take math as an example, would be that the student goes home and practises the wrong methodology for solving problems over and over again.
Second, once students have completed homework, it should be checked as soon as possible. Homework that has not been checked is just busy work.
Third, homework is most effective when it is used to reinforce skills already learned and less effective if it is used to teach complex skills that require classroom guidance and supervised practice.
And finally what is the role of parent involvement in all this? As poet Robert Browning wrote in Andrea del Sarto, his influential advocacy of minimalism, “less is more.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
