Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
3people
2009–2018years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I can't praise Alfie Kohn highly enough.
I've read numerous books by him in the education section and they deserve so much more attention! For example, did you know that the vast majority of studies done to show the benefits of homework failed to show benefits? If you like that -- read The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing.
- A few years ago, I found The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing an interesting read. It shaped my views on homework [context: US public schools].
- Interestingly the complaints would disappear if they just got rid of homework.
No, I'm not being facetious. If you read The Homework Myth you'll find out that homework in grade school is a net neutral from a learning perspective. The benefit is that you get more practice. The downfall is that without supervision it is as easy to practice the wrong thing as the right thing, and practicing the wrong thing sets you back.
Studies have shown that, in practice, the net effect is that homework causes academic performance to become more strongly correlated with the parent's socioeconomic status, but overall across the whole population there is no net change in learning outcomes. Plus assigning homework is a source of stress for families that causes students to dislike school. The strength of these effects is roughly linear in the amount of homework assigned, all of the way down to no homework at all. (Instead students have to do in class exercises, under the supervision of teachers. Which they have to do anyways.)
The reason for that is that homework causes enforcing correct practice to be the job of the parents, and so how well the parents understand the material determines whether homework benefits or hurts. While my family educationally benefits from the trend (me and my wife can assist correct practice), reduced stress and inequality makes no homework seem fair to me.
And hence the problem underscored by this article. With homework, when we teach students different techniques, we need to think both about how easily the students will learn them, and how well the parents will understand them. Without homework the parents lose that responsibility, and we're free to just focus on what works for the kids.
- Reading this reminded me of The Homework Myth (see http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/hm.htm for more on that).
I'm not looking forward to arguing with my kids about doing homework. Particularly when I know how useless it is.
