Every
few years, usually at the start of the school year, researchers, parents,
teachers and students debate the value of doing schoolwork at home (McGrath,
2013). Someone’s research into the effect of homework on families in general
found that homework often punishes students from lower-income families. These
disadvantaged children "have family responsibilities, parents who work at
night and no educational resources in their homes." The tasks that are
done as homework, the researcher says, need to be moved back into the school,
even if that means extending hours and hiring more teachers. The payoff would
be a school system in which working class and disadvantaged children get an
equal chance to learn. If schools keep insisting to give homework for their
students, at least, they should give them less homework and more importantly,
something that students could still handle. Because sometimes schools give
their students some tasks that are difficult to be handled without paying
attention what will the students do to deal with them.
There
are some aspects which will explain more that bunch of homework is not
necessary. According to Kardamis (2014),
there are some reasons why we should give students less homework. Firstly,
busywork is a waste of everyone’s time. If the homework we are
assigning is busywork, then it really is a waste of everyone’s time. It waste’s
the students’ time doing it, the parents’ time helping it, and our time
tracking and possibly even grading it. She said just because a worksheet is
part of the curriculum, it does not mean that we need to assign it. Then she
stated if it does not serve a vital purpose, then what is the point?
Secondly, more work does not necessarily mean more
learning. Sometimes we assign homework because we feel like it’s the
studious thing to do. But just assigning more work is not necessarily going to
mean our students learn more, especially if the student is already overwhelmed
and they don’t know how to do it correctly. Thirdly, Students can be
overwhelmed if the homework is too long. The tough thing about
homework is that the time it takes students to complete it is immensely
different. What takes a sharp kid 5-10 minutes can take a struggling kid 45
minutes or even an hour. We can imagine how a struggling student feels when he
looks at a two-sided worksheet of 30 math problems that he does not understand.
The sheer volume of work is incredibly intimidating and often causes him to
give up before he even tries. Next is when teachers limit the quantity, they
can expect more quality. When teachers limit how much homework they give
and/or how long the assignments are, then they can expect the students to do
quality work on what they do assign. Lastly, family time is more valuable. If
teachers truly want their students to have strong families, then they need to
not take up all their family time with homework. Kardamis finds out that for
lots of students it’s the TV that’s their companion at night instead of their
parents. But that is not how it is with all the students. There are definitely
families out there who want to relax together in the evening but simply cannot
do so because the kids are entrenched with homework. Beside Kardamis, Duvivier
(2008) also stated that there are at least three major benefits of less
homework. First is Increase parent-teen bonding time, her reason is based on
someone’s statement at a recent parent workshop, she said that that person is used
to bond with her child while taking a walk in the woods, but now her child has
too much homework and other school activities, which means there is no time for
them to spending time together. She said that less homework frees-up
opportunities for reconnecting with your teen: nice for you, vital for your
child. Duvivier also takes line from Vaillant (1998) to strengthen her opinion;”
If you are a parent of tweens, teens or college students, this is a crucial age
for family bonding. We need positive relationships to buffer against the
negative effects of stress”. Second is reducing family stress, the high levels
of homework can damage parent-child relationships in another way: students’
school demands can begin to feel like parents’ school demands—and we can end up
nagging our teens because of the pressure we feel to make sure they get the
best possible start in life. At the age where kids most need to know parents
are there for them, school pressures can add to our stress and undermine the
love and trust teens need. Third is free up time for life-changing activities, she
indicates even if parents have maintained a great relationship with their teen,
they still have good reason to question the amount of high school work. Engagement
— “flow”— occurs when parents are absorbed in an activity that challenges their
skills or uses their strengths in new ways, and flow gives kids a chance to
flourish, says Seligman (2003). She implied what better life lessons teens
could learn even though most teens are not engaged in their academic classes,
based on Csikszentmihalyi’s (2003) reports. Duvivier also said that most of the
flow in high school learning happens in non-academic areas—electives, sports,
and arts. Outside of school, activities like hobbies, games, volunteer service
and scouting can be highly-engaging—yet these are often minimized due to
time-pressure. If most of students’ school experience is not engaging, do we
really want to add even more non-engaging homework to the daily strain—and
deprive teens of activities where they can flourish? If people are questioning how
to help their teen thrive, her response is: less homework, more flow.
Steve (2013) stated that piling on the
homework will not help children advance in school, in fact it could well have
the reverse effect entirely. He got that opinion based on a study by a group of Australian researchers. The research found
that the average scores of relating to students’
academic performances against the amount of homework dished out at the end of
the school day, showed clearly that when more time was spent on homework
students were getting lower scores. The research clearly suggested that placing
too much homework can cause lower grades and even lead pupils to begin
suffering from depression. Steve said that homework can cause depressio if a pupil is inundated with too much
homework their life balance is thrown out of all proportion. He
thinks that all children and adults should
adopt an 8-8-8 circadian rhythm to life where eight hours work, eight hours
play and eight hours rest (sleep) plays an important factor to how we all roll. A typical school day might begin at 9am and complete by 3.15pm, so he
concludes that piling on three hours of
nightly homework means schoolchildren must endure seven hours at school
(including traveling time) and three hours of homework, thus robbing the child
of two hours downtime. Steve also has another conclusion, often to make matters worse, teachers will give pupils homework that is
both time-consuming and will undoubtedly keep them busy while being totally
non-productive. Some examples include History teachers asking pupils to hand
write (word for word) pages 113 to 139 of a text book on The French Revolution.
Such remedial homework will do nothing to improve pupil’s scores in exams or up
their grades. There is certainly
no advocacy for the abolishing of homework here; simply that the amount oand quality
of a child extra curricular work after school be re-examined. Good quality
homework practices have been adopted in Finland where schoolchildren were given
just 30 minutes per night to spend on homework and none at weekends. The kids
were stress free and scored highly in their grades. Many parents are even beginning to advocate time limits on the amount of
homework minutes dished out each night. Stress, depression and lower grades are
the last thing any parent wants for their child.
There is an exact study that shown us some
proves that homework leads onto stress. According to Strauss (2014), the study
finds that a heavy homework load negatively impacts the lives of high school
students in upper middle-class communities, resulting in excess stress, physical
problems and little or no time for leisure. Based on the study, published
in the Journal
of Experimental Education, 4,317 students in 10 high-performing California high schools
— six private and four public — had an average of 3.1 hours of homework a
night. Strauss also stated that a
researcher and an author named Alfie Kohn argues that there is no research to
show that homework in elementary and middle school has any benefit and that the
correlation between homework and academic achievement in high school is at best
weak. So this is the context in which this latest study was conducted. The
researchers set out to look at the relationship between homework load and
student well-being in the upper middle class advantaged communities (where
median household income is more than $90,000, and 93 percent of students go to
college) because it is there that homework is largely accepted as having
value. The study notes that there are limitations to the sample of
students used in the study — with all of them attending privileged, high-performing
schools — but they said they felt it was worthwhile to investigate the stresses
of homework on this population of students. The co-authors of the study are
Mollie Galloway of Lewis and Clark College, an assistant professor who is the
director of research and assessment for the graduate school of education;
Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education;
and Jerusha Conner, an assistant professor of education at Villanova
University. Their report says: “Our findings on the effects of homework
challenge the traditional assumption that homework is “inherently good” (Gill
& Schlossman, 2001, p. 27), and instead suggest that researchers,
practitioners, students, and parents unpack why the default practice of
assigning heavy homework loads exists, in the face of evidence of its
negative effects.”. To conduct the study they used data from surveys as well as
the answers to open-ended questions to explore student well-being, attitudes
about homework and engagement in school. The mean age of the
participants was 15.7 years, with ninth graders representing the largest
sample, 28.1 percent. Tenth graders were 22.8 percent; eleventh graders, 23.6
percent; and seniors 19.4 percent; while 6.2 percent did not report their grade
level. About 85 percent self-reported their ethnicity: 48 percent were European
American; 38 percent Asian or Asian American; 4 percent Hispanic; 2 percent
African American, and 0.5 percent Native American. Ten and a half percent of
students checked multiple categories or “other,” and 4 percent did not mark
anything in this category. Also, no relationship was found between the time
spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted
students as saying they often do homework they see as “pointless” or “mindless”
in order to keep their grades up. Their study found that most students said
their homework is only “somewhat useful” in helping them learn the material and
prepare for tests. But it leads to a host of problems, the study mentions about
stress, health issues consequences, and engagement. First is stress, less than
1 percent students said that homework was not a stressor, 56 percent indicated
homework is a primary cause of stress, then 43 percent listed tests as a
primary stressor, 33 percent listed grades and/or getting good grades as a
primary stressor, and more than 15 percent reported parental expectations and
the college application process as stresses. The next problem is health issues
consequences, many students wrote that homework causes them to sleep less than
they should and leads to “headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss
and stomach problems” as well as a lack of balance in their lives. Most
experienced distress and/or lacked time to engage in important life tasks
outside of school. The majority (72%) reported being often or always stressed
over schoolwork …and many reported that they experienced physical symptoms due
to stress (82% reported experiencing at least one physical symptom in the past
month, with 44% of the sample experiencing three or more symptoms). Overall,
students reported getting less sleep than the National Sleep Foundation’s
(2000) recommended 8.5 to 9.25 hours per night for healthy adolescent
development. On average, students in our sample reported 6.80 hours of sleep on
school nights … and 68% stated that schoolwork often or always kept them from
getting enough sleep each night. Many (63%) reported that the amount of work
they received often or always made it challenging to spend time with family and
friends, and a similar percent (61%) indicated that they had been forced to
drop an activity they enjoyed because of their school workload. The last
problem is engagement, duration of spending time on homework is rather too
much, and there was no relationship between “homework hours and students’
enjoyment of schoolwork, and open-ended responses revealed students will often
do work they see as ‘pointless,’ ‘useless’ and ‘mindless’ because their grades
will be affected if they do not.” From those, it can be concluded that students
who spent more hours on homework tended to be more behaviorally engaged in
school, but were simultaneously more stressed about their school work and
tended to report more physical symptoms due to stress, fewer hours of sleep on
school nights, less ability to get enough sleep, and less ability to make time
for friends and family.
In other hand, Robinson (2014) stated some aspects
which are explaining that homework helps students to improve. Firstly, she explains that there
is a research which focuses on whether homework actually does improve test
scores and performance. A set of three studies compared these factors: homework
versus no homework; how much homework is given; and homework versus in-class
assignments that resemble homework. In the first study, researchers compared
how well students progressed when they were given homework and how they did
when they did not receive any homework. Of the twenty studies in this group,
three out of four seemed to favor homework. The study indicated that if a
junior high student from the homework class were placed in the no-homework
class a week before finals, his class rank would instantly shoot up from
thirteenth to tenth. A high school student would improve his class rank from
thirteenth to eighteenth. However, improvement was barely noticeable among
elementary students. Then, she also mentioned about study which is compared
homework to in-class supervised activities. In this investigation students who
did not get homework were required to participate in another homework-like
activity in class. Homework did not seem to make such a great difference in
these studies. In fact, elementary-aged children who were supervised by a
teacher while doing their assignments fared better than the homework students. Again
junior high school students showed some improvement with homework, and high
schoolers did better than the entire group with the addition of homework to
in-class activity. She said that all of the researches are dizzying, but they
keep pointing to the same thing: children seem to need more homework as they
get older and less in the elementary years. However, that statement cannot be
mentioned as an absolute excuse. Too much homework stills a big problem for
students; it cannot guarantee students to get higher score or achievement. According to
Walker (2012), an
educational psychologist at Sydney University, data shows that in countries
where more time is spent on homework, students score lower on a standardized
test called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The same
correlation is also seen when comparing homework time and test performance at
schools within countries. Past studies have also demonstrated this basic trend. Inundating
children with hours of homework each night is detrimental, the research
suggests, while an hour or two per week usually doesn't impact test scores one
way or the other. However, homework only bolsters students' academic
performance during their last three years of grade school. "There is
little benefit for most students until senior high school (grades 10-12),"
Walker told. The same
basic finding holds true across the globe, including in the U.S., according to LeTendre (2007) of
Pennsylvania State University. He and his colleagues have found that teachers
typically give take-home assignments that are unhelpful busy work. Assigning
homework "appeared to be a remedial strategy (a consequence of not
covering topics in class, exercises for students struggling, a way to
supplement poor quality educational settings), and not an advancement strategy
(work designed to accelerate, improve or get students to excel)," LeTendre
wrote in an email.
This
type of remedial homework tends to produce marginally lower test scores
compared with children who are not given the work. Even the helpful, advancing
kind of assignments ought to be limited; Harris Cooper, a professor of
education at Duke University, has recommended that students be given no more
than 10 to 15 minutes of homework per night in second grade, with an increase
of no more than 10 to 15 minutes in each successive year. Most
homework's neutral or negative impact on students' academic performance implies
there are better ways for them to spend their after school hours than
completing worksheets. So, what should they be doing? According to LeTendre,
learning to play a musical instrument or participating in clubs and sports
all seem beneficial, but there's no one answer that applies to
everyone."These after-school activities have much more diffuse goals than
single subject test scores," he wrote. "When I talk to parents … they
want their kids to be well-rounded, creative, happy individuals — not just kids
who ace the tests.".
From
everything, it can be sum up that homework is sometimes necessary, because children need
to time to practise the skills and reinforce the information they learn at
school. Children also need to learn how to set aside time for important work,
plan large projects and discover information on their own. However, if there is too much, it
will lead to negative effects such as excess stress, physical problems and
little or no time for leisure, which are the last things that the parents and
the students themselves want to be happened. As Donaldson (2012) said, ‘Young children
nowadays are burdened by too much homework that stresses them. They shouldn't
be spending all evening struggling with sums or spelling,’ He also said
“Spending too much time struggling with homework can harm your child’s health,
worrying about whether they can do it can make them nervous, anxious and
lacking in confidence, and deprives them of a proper rest after school” (as
cited in Wallersteiner, 2012).
Sources :
http://teach4theheart.com/2014/09/29/why-you-should-give-way-less-homework/
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/march/too-much-homework-031014.html
http://www.eduguide.org/article/student-homework-more-or-less
Cooper H.M. (2001). Homework for
all - in moderation. Educational Leadership 58 (2001):34-38
Kralovec E. & Buell J. (2001).
End homework now. Educational Leadership 58 (2001): 39-42
Ontario Ministry for Education
(2009). Tips and Tools for Parents: 10 Tips to Help Your Child with Homework.
Ottawa: Queen's Printer for Ontario.
http://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/en/news/newsandfeatures/pages/homework-some-is-good-more-is-not-better.aspx
http://neatoday.org/2014/05/13/should-schools-be-done-with-homework/
Shernoff,
D. J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Shneider, B., & Shernoff, E. S. (2003).
Student engagement in high school classrooms from the perspective of flow
theory. School Psychology Quarterly, 18(2), 158-176.
Hallowell, E.(2003). The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness: Five Steps to Help Kids Create and Sustain Lifelong Joy. New York: Ballantine Books.
Kohn, A. (2006). The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. Cambridge: Da Capo Lifelong Books.
Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press.
Vaillant, G. (1998). Adaptation to Life. New York, NY: Harvard University Press.
Hallowell, E.(2003). The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness: Five Steps to Help Kids Create and Sustain Lifelong Joy. New York: Ballantine Books.
Kohn, A. (2006). The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. Cambridge: Da Capo Lifelong Books.
Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press.
Vaillant, G. (1998). Adaptation to Life. New York, NY: Harvard University Press.
Greenfeld,
K. T. (October 2013). My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me. The
Atlantic. Retrieved August 6, 2014, from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daughters-homework-is-killing-me/309514/?single_page=true
Wallersteiner,
R. (September 19, 2012). Homework and Stress. Netdoctor. Retrieved August
6,2014, from http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/healthy-living/parenting/homework-and-stress.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/30/too-much-homework-test-scores_n_1391134.html
By:
Nanda Rani H.
FINAL
PROJECT
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