David Skinner reports on "the homework delusion", or the belief that American kids are swamped with homework. Previous research has suggested that American teenagers do relatively little homework, but some still claim that not only do American kids do too much homework, but homework is in itself unfair:
What gave this story [of too much homework] credibility were its academic sponsors, Etta Kralovec and John Buell, authors of "The End of Homework." What robs their oft-cited work of its credibility, however, are their half-cocked research and political fervor...Homework, they argue, is anti-democratic and "pits students who can against students who can't."
"Anti-democratic"? Who knows what that means? Who is being discriminated against? The kids who get assigned too much homework? And how are student being pit against one another? And how else are teachers supposed to tell who is understanding the class material and who is missing it entirely? If homework is "undemocratic," so are quizzes and any form of assessment.
Yes, there's a kernel of truth to the anti-homework argument. The evidence that homework provides children with an important educational advantage is inconsistent. University of Missouri professor Harris Cooper, a widely recognized expert on the effects of homework, describes only a modest advantage for students who are given homework as compared to students who aren't assigned any...
Homework's benefits, however, increase with age and grade level, becoming especially significant in high school. Positive effects increased, [Cooper] has found, "for subjects for which homework assignments are more likely to involve rote learning, practice, or rehearsal."
This is particularly interesting since a stock element of the homework-horror stories in the popular press is the complicated interdisciplinary "project" that takes many hours, days even, to finish and reduces many children, and their parents, to tears. But as it turns out, American elementary, middle, and high school students aren't spending hours on their homework. Minutes is more like it.
Studies which suggested an increase in homework may have done so only because kids were included who were young enough not to have had any homework before:
Even the increase among the youngest students is being blown out of proportion...The amount of time that 3- to 5-year-olds spend on homework per week has risen by 11 minutes since 1981, raising the total homework burden to 7 minutes per night. The per-night increase for 6- to 8-year-olds stands at 15 minutes. Bringing the total number of minutes surrendered to homework to a hardly-shocking 25 per night.
And for the older kids, NAEP reports that 16 years ago, 17% of 13-year-olds said they had no homework due the day before filling out the survey; in 1999, that number was 24%. It appears some kids might be doing too much homework - most of which is probably busywork - but the overall numbers are nowhere near what the media would have us believe. And why are readers so credulous?
Why then, with such empirical shortcomings, have homework horror stories been treated as sociologically significant? Clearly, American parents want to believe their little angels are so hard-working and such good students, they may be too good. Indeed, too good to be true.
Posted by kswygert at March 2, 2004 11:34 AM