The Homework Question

The Origin of This Post

            I wrote the following paper for one of my education courses this semester in the form of a very long letter to the parents and guardians of my future students. While I wouldn’t send this long paper out to parents, I could send out a condensed and summarized version to parents at the beginning of the school year for my policy on homework. Then if requested, I could provide them with this full version, if they wanted more detailed information about why my homework policy is the way it is. Hopefully, this would also open up a dialogue with my students’ parents and guardians about homework and make parents more likely to voice any concerns they had about their child being able to complete homework before the year even starts.

Dear Parents and Guardians of My Students,

Your children will be in my classroom this school year and I am greatly looking forward to working with them. In class, your children will be furthering their study of Language Arts, or English, which of course includes reading and writing, but also pursues the larger goal of thinking critically. Over the course of year, your children, my students, will read books, write papers, create projects, discuss concepts, and wrestle with ideas that effect life both in and out of the classroom. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, students in Pennsylvania spend on average 6.43 hours in school each day for 180 days for a total of 1,157 hours in a year or approximately 145 hours in my class, specifically (1). While 145 hours seems like an incredibly large amount of time, I assure you each individual class period flies by and before I know it we are out of time to cover material and the students are off to another class. Given this, many teachers assign homework in order to maximize the amount of material that students can learn in a given year.

History Of Homework

The word ‘homework’ has documented in print since 1889, and the debate about homework is almost as old (2). From early as 1900, the debate about whether homework is actually beneficial has raged on (3). As route memorization of facts began to fall out of fashion, teachers, parents, researchers, and politicians began to question the benefits of assigning homework. As with most things in education, there aren’t many moderate positions. The trend tends to be all or nothing. In fact, until 1940 the consensus was fairly strong in the abolishment camp (3). But in the 19080s, the pendulum swung to the other extreme and people rallied behind reinstating homework. Books like A Nation At Risk worried about the state of American education if students weren’t assigned homework (3). Nonetheless, the debate still hasn’t been resolved. As a high school teacher myself, I must engage in this debate out of necessity and since this debate directly effects your students, I believe you should be included on my journey into the homework question.

            A study in Gifted Child Today magazine, found that homework assigned in grades 7-12 produced the largest achievement gain and that there is more of a correlation between higher achievement and homework in secondary education rather than elementary (4). Additionally, the OECD’s (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) found that homework widens the gap between the achievement of students in higher socio-economic statuses (SES) and those in lower SES (5).  This makes sense as students in lower SES have less time to complete homework due to non-school related responsibilities, such as working a job to help the family, watching younger siblings, etc. If this includes your child, I want to state here that I am more than willing to work with your child to extend or otherwise alter assignments so that they may complete them. There is no reason to penalize a student’s grade because they didn’t have time to complete an assignment.

Confusing Information

The next four studies gave conflicting information (4, 5, 6) at this point, I was feeling confused by all the research that was out there and was beginning to doubt the claims that there was “not enough” research on homework and worried that no consensus could be reached. I found yet another article. However, this one was a meta-analysis, which looked at all the research surrounding homework from 1987 through 2003 (6). It threw out the studies that didn’t follow the latest scientific standards for research studies and again concluded that homework works best for secondary students. However, they did find something new that could explain the discrepancies between the research articles that I had observed. While there was no correlation between time spend on homework and course grades, overall more time spent on homework did correlate with higher standardized test scores, especially in science and math (6). This conclusion made me pause.

What Even is Learning?

What am I supposed to think about homework now? This result brings the homework question to an even older educational debate: “What actually is learning?” and “How can we measure it?” Is it learning found in tests or classwork? I have never heard anyone say neither, but many claim both. Clearly, I want my students to do well in my class, but according to the meta-analysis homework doesn’t help with course grades. Nevertheless, as a teacher I cannot ignore the realities of the world today, where testing is important both for schools and for students as they prepare for the SAT, if they wish to attend college.

My Answer

Where does that leave my students, your children, and me, their teacher? Oddly enough, I feel teachers should strive to make themselves unnecessary in their students’ lives, meaning that teachers should give their students the ability to learn the content and skills such that they can do so completely independently of the teacher. Ideally I would assign little to no homework except the very infrequent (once per month at absolute most) assignment so that students can practice those study skills independently. In class reading presents its own both practical and ideological educational problems from keeping students on task and attentive to greatly reducing the amount of content being covered. Plus, it has the potential of giving students the false impression that reading is only a school activity and shouldn’t be included in every day life, which couldn’t be farther from my goal. Therefore, I will only assign reading as homework.

Here I would like to state if a student has non-school related responsibilities that keep them from completing anything, they as well as their parents are welcome to talk to me to come up with a plan to assist the student or come up with alternate assignments so that they can still complete the work, but in a way that is more manageable. Occasionally, students might leave class with the ‘assignment’ of bringing in the name of a song or two that they listen to or something to that extent or be asked to come into class having thought about a particular topic, but I can’t see the benefit of any other type of homework. matter what, I want to always have a thought out reason for the activities we complete in class and the homework I assign for the students. If I can’t even satisfy myself with my answer to the question “Why are we doing this?” then I will not assign that activity or homework whether in class or out. Hopefully, this approach will provide the students with a good balance, but as more research comes out and I teach more classes I will reform my homework policy accordingly.

Sources:

(1) “Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS).” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a Part of the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Education, 2007, nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_035_s1s.asp.

(2) “Homework.” Etymonline.com, Douglas Harper, www.etymonline.com/search?q=homework.

(3) Gill, Brian, and Steven Schlossman. “The Lost Cause of Homework Reform.” American Journal of Education, vol. 109, no. 1, 2000, pp. 27–62. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1085422.

(4) "The Debate about Homework." Gifted Child Today 30.4 (2007): 6-7. ProQuest. Web. 2 Apr. 2018.

(5) Carr, Kerri. "Great Homework Debate." Education 96.3 (2015): 16. ProQuest. Web. 2 Apr. 2018.

(6) Maltese, A. V. & Tai, R. H. & Fan, X. "When is Homework Worth the Time?: Evaluating the Association Between Homework and Achievement in High School Science and Math." The High School Journal, vol. 96 no. 1, 2012, pp. 52-72. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/hsj.2012.0015