Is Homework Good for Kids?
Children and parents are often frustrated. Some education experts are calling for a rethink.
by Anne Thériault
The worksheets began trickling home during grade one, and by the next year, my son was getting thick weekly packets of them. The board policy was that children in his grade were supposed to receive around twenty minutes’ worth of work per night, but in our house, the agony was never that brief. One week in grade two, my son came home with seventeen pages of homework, printed front and back—thirty-four worksheets filled with math problems and language exercises. He worked on them every night, but by Sunday, he was only about three quarters of the way through. He cried as he struggled to finish the homework. I cried as I emailed his teacher to tell her he hadn’t been able to finish it.
We both felt like we’d failed. We were told that the work wasn’t mandatory, but that put me in a difficult position. I felt like, as a parent, I should be supporting what his teachers wanted from him, not acting against it. Besides, I believed that homework was necessary to set my son up for success. But it turns out that homework might not be as useful as we think.
“Homework is seen to benefit time management, self-discipline, [and] organizational skills, but there have been no studies that really have shown that homework actually either develops those skills or reinforces them,” says Etta Kralovec, professor emerita at the University of Arizona and author of The End of Homework and Schools That Do Too Much. She’s not the only homework researcher who is questioning how and why homework is done. Linda Cameron and Lee Bartel from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education have critiqued homework practices in Canada, noting, in 2010, that homework “may well be the ‘tipping point’ for the next educational reform movement” because the issue is “now uppermost in many parents’ and teachers’ minds.” Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, has found that, for many students, homework is the greatest source of stress in their lives. Homework stress can lead to burnout and negative impacts on academic achievement.
Kralovec tells me that there is no benefit to homework for elementary school students at all. Are they having more academic success because they do more homework, or are they doing more homework because those advanced classes tend to assign more of it?
ralovec says that not only are the benefits of homework questionable but the practice also has clear detriments. It takes time away from more meaningful things that families can do together, like reading or playing. It can create tension between parent and child by placing them in the role of teacher and student—especially if the child already finds that a nerve-wracking role to play at school. It might also limit the extracurricular activities the child can participate in, especially if they’re expected to do homework every night.
And not all students have a quiet, well-lit space in their homes where they can work. Many parents aren’t home in the afternoons and evenings—due to shift work or because they attend evening classes—and students in those households are often expected to care for younger siblings and cook dinner after school. Students may not have access to computers at home, meaning that they can’t complete work assigned online. Since work assigned to be done at home may make up a portion of a student’s overall grade, those whose home lives aren’t conducive to homework may struggle to maintain a high grade point average. Kralovec says this creates “a system of homework which further
advances kids who are privileged.”..
Source: thewalrus.ca/is-homework
