I just have an anecdote from doing this as a TA, not data, but in my experience flipped classrooms work great for motivated students; they can jump right in to problem sets or labwork, having completed some preliminary reading, and take advantage of 1-on-1 conversations as needed with the instructor. But unmotivated students will skip the preliminary reading and then get even further behind because the whole class period is supposed to be occupied by experiential learning; there's no time for lecture. And this was in a college class; I suspect it would be even worse in, say, junior high.
Agreed. It's something that works really well...for small, selected groups. Like every other educational fad, it doesn't scale. And it requires a very strongly-motivated, very good-at-creating-content teacher as well. And those don't scale either.
I had to teach maths lectures this way (at the undergrad level) and hated it. However I think it can work in some circumstances, depending on 1) the personality of the teacher, 2) the subject taught (maths does not work very well with this format but maybe history would work great) and 3) the autonomy of the children/student
Overall I think it's the poster case for the main problem with evaluating education methods : something may be hugely positive for some combination of teacher and student and a complete bummer for some other combination.
I tried it once and I got the worst results + teacher evaluations of my entire career.
My main error was to underestimate the time and effort it takes to organize classroom activities Instead I put all the effort in the videos/home reading part. Half of the students, on the other hand, came to "class" unprepared hoping to wangle it...
Horrible, just horrible.
(The class was introductory mechanics for first year students at a European university)
One of the math teachers at my daughter’s middle school does this. My daughter says kids “hate her.” That is interesting that hate is the reaction in some of the other comments.
I've had one flipped class, and it was pretty decent. I think it has the potential to waste far less class time than typical education. Actually interacting with a teacher when you're struggling beats the heck out of watching them present a set of information. But it suffers HEAVILY from being unconventional. It relies on people to actually do their reading/watching ahead of time, and requires people be prepared for class. Since that's mostly never necessary in normal classes, compliance tends to be low.
My class had a graded pre-class quiz every day to help force the required transition. Super-easy multiple-choice quiz, just testing that you actually read the assigned text. That helped, and I think the class would have fallen apart without it.
I supoose that it isn’t actual research, but my department had an extra 10% of their classes pass precalc after swapping to the flipped model.
That said, I think part of this success is because a flipped model helps to make what would be an otherwise incompetent teacher be able to do a bit better
I've found that *any* change will be positive, even strongly negative changes, for a small amount of time.
But yes, if an actually competent teacher is the one preparing the materials, it takes some of the downsides of having an incompetent teacher away. But I'd rather just fire the incompetent.
That is interesting, hadn't heard of that before. My mom (former homeschool teacher now in public elementary) does something similar in that her time is spent on one on one interactions working problems and most students at any one time are on computers doing problems and receiving instructions.
I'm a teacher (a Latin teacher, as a matter of fact, so I quite enjoy the fact that we've had a post on vocab acquisition and a post on homework in consecutive days). I wouldn't say I do a "flipped" classroom; I do mostly upper-level classes and I'm not teaching lots of brand-new grammar material like someone teaching lower-level classes would. But I don't tend to assign much homework (apart from AP, where it's basically a necessity to plow through the syllabus). In class I want my students to read & translate Latin. What I want students doing away from the classroom is focusing on vocabulary (and some of the other basics as well, but mostly vocab). Most of them use Quizlet; I don't know if it's the best spaced-repetition software, but it seems to have the teen market cornered.
I think the ideal way of scaling the flipped classroom method is to have people watch something along the lines of Khan Academy videos. The teachers I know who have done a lot of flipped-classroom stuff have usually ended up putting in a crazy amount of time recording videos. If you have a huge variety of well-made videos with a good teacher, you don't need to do everything yourself.
And as has already been mentioned, the flipped classroom still requires students to do stuff outside of class. If they don't watch the video about how to figure out the equation of a circle by completing the square, they're not going to be able to do it in class the next day.
As for homework itself, I think it works--sometimes. Its effectiveness will vary across different subjects and ages. I wouldn't want to be prevented from assigning it, and I wouldn't want to be forced to assign it every night either.
> The teachers I know who have done a lot of flipped-classroom stuff have usually ended up putting in a crazy amount of time recording videos. If you have a huge variety of well-made videos with a good teacher, you don't need to do everything yourself.
Some teachers in my country produced a lot of YouTube videos as a reaction to covid, during the months when kids stayed at home and learned online. Those teachers realized that making a video and then having a Zoom discussion about it is more efficient than trying to explain stuff on Zoom. The kids can watch the YouTube videos at a time convenient for them; they can pause them whenever needed; they can watch the videos twice. And if you teach multiple classes, you only need to make the video once. You could even reuse it the next year.
What I was thinking someone should do (but I was too lazy to do it myself) is to collect all those videos, group them by topic, and arrange them according to the school curriculum. So you would have a web page where you could click e.g. "Math, 3rd grade elementary school", see a list of topics, and then a list of YouTube videos for each topic. After two or three teachers made a good video on a topic, you do not need to make your own; so people would only have to make new videos if they believe that there is something wrong about the existing ones and they can do a better job.
I do a flipped class where I've made videos for all my lectures, with a time investment of about 1 hour for every 5 minutes of content. Class time is for kinetic demonstrations, projects, lab time, etc. Seems to work well. I went this route after I realized I'm a much more effective teacher 1 on 1 than 1 on 30, despite the efficiencies. Then covid happened, and I was pre-prepared for remote content delivery.
Sucked when I tried it in high school (just meant that class time was spent doing boring busywork instead of that busywork being homework). Worked a lot better in junior-level fluid mechanics in college, where the professor spent class time lecturing but expected us to watch videos about each derivation before class rather than doing it in lecture.
From what I've experieaced, hard part about a flipped class seems to be making class time valuable for every student if most of the content delivery is happening somewhere else. Also, if you get through a homework assignment in half/double the time it takes your peers, you're free to either go do something else or put in an extra couple of hours. That doesn't work as well if you're in a classroom and trying to work in parallel with everyone else.
NAEP data (National Assessment of Educational Progress) suggests that over the past 50 years we've seen no or very little progress for white males and females, more for Latinos and much more for blacks, especially females (40% improvement).
Interesting, thanks. In any case, the numbers broken down by race and gender show some (if very little for whites) improvement. The flatness of the aggregate is a classic Simpson Paradox. Every group is doing better but Latinos made up only 5% of the dataset in 1970 compared to close to 20% today, and since they are below average, although improving too, they've kept the average flat.
Of course the claim that there was no improvement could still be true if one only considered whites. Students most likely to drop out are non-whites, and results of whites have remained flat-ish over 50 years.
In other words, we spend a lot more money on K-12 education today (spending adjusted for inflation per student has tripled over 50 years); that spending has had near zero effect on whites; but it has possibly helped non-whites, especially African-American females. (It's also possible that it's not the spending that helped.)
Hmm, sounds like selection/confirmation bias to me. Lincoln is an outlier. I’m not Einstein or Shakespeare either, but somehow I still consider myself well educated. Do you have anything more substantial to back up this sentiment?
Where are you living where teachers have gobs of money to throw at problems? I have never met a teacher who hasn't had to buy their own pencils, let alone having actual support and resources
This trend has continued all the way up to 2022; it now costs something like 3 or 4 times as much to send a kid to public school as it does to send them to the Manhattan Preparatory Academy, or Willowbrook, or any other private-school-for-future-presidents. Tuition at Ravenscroft (an expensive elite private school with famous powerful alumni) is about $200,000 for a full thirteen year K-12 education for one person. Public school in the same area ends up costing about twice that.
From my privileged position as an evaluator/auditor of federal grants, I can say with some confidence that almost all of the added money above 1970 values has been spent on corruption, usually in the form of the principal hiring his brother-in-law to run an afterschool program using GEARUP money, or similar. Very very occasionally, we evaluate a program that was actually well-meaning (but which still had purely negative effects). Often these programs are accidentally hugely racist or classist. Ask any student what it's like to get referred to a dropout prevention program, you'll find that it has horribly negative consequences for their academic career, like a black mark on their permanent record that makes every future teacher automatically perceive them as a failure who needs compassionate remediation... yet many of the programs are designed in such a way to 'help' as many minorities as possible by placing them in such programs, even if they are currently a straight-A student who hasn't missed a day of school in their entire life and just finished their applications to Harvard and MIT.
I strongly suspect that if we actually gave all the added money to the teachers, it would be enormously good... but the way party politics intersects with education policy currently makes this impossible. Instead, every 2 years some bright young congressperson has the great idea for a new bill to finally fix the problems with education by increasing the annual budget by a few billion dollars, the money gets allocated, then the money mysteriously disappears into the black hole of bureaucratic corruption and do-nothing NGO nonprofits. Then 2 years later we get another pack of naive junior congresspeople and someone has the same bright idea all over again.
John, your comment certianly reifies my innate pessimsim, but beyond that I appreciate your insight as someone close to these problems. What published work would you recommend that documents the corrupt allocation process of educational monies?
Honestly there's nothing. The only proof I can show you is that if you try to figure out where the money is going, you won't be able to find out, because it's not documented. That should immediately raise a bunch of red flags, but it doesn't actually prove that 90% of the money is vanishing into NGO pockets as I suggest.
I've got a couple of evaluation reports I can show you, but they only document problems at individual schools
People almost universally thought I was making bullshit up, so I got my boss to let me treat this as a full project, and we got our writer involved, and pulled up the mendeley library with all of our citations, and wrote a real full-on paper describing what we'd seen: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DxFFeJoczRp2rPS2K/?commentId=oHHRcwxX5HAfcdG9t
The first post got 300+ comments, the second got seven. Once I could actually prove what I was saying, it was a bit like, nobody even knew what the fuck to do, the situation was so much worse than anybody had ever believed before that they just kind of ignored it. It was not a ringing endorsement of less wrong rationalism, I'll tell you that.
Thanks for the reply! I'll certainly read everything you linked.
If your work is correct, it's horrifying that it's not getting more attention, but I can't say I'm surprised. In my own field (medical oncology) there are enormous methodological problems which lead to untold mountains of money being wasted on meaingless clinical trials, but when I point this issues out to colleagues, they just shug and say, "yes, that's probably true" and they follow it up with some empty saying like "some data is better than none" or "we have to work with the system we're in."
I've seen numerous data points on private school tuition at $40k plus per year. In comparison, I believe California (my state) spends $14.9k per year on public school. So it seems like the actual figures are largely the opposite of what you're claiming.
It depends on how you measure things. I taught at a ~$20k (tuition)/year private school in Florida, which officially spends ~$9k per pupil per year. But that's a combination of secondary school (much more expensive) and elementary (much less expensive) while we were only high school. Also, that usually only considers the direct state spending, and a lot of things get pushed into other budgets and so don't count (such as capital expenditures, which are a huge chunk of change and had to be accounted for in our budget but not in theirs, as they're funded separately largely via bonds). And the variance between locations in each state is huge--florida in 2021 varied between ~7.5k (rural Gadsden county) and 37.2k (the specialist Florida School of Deaf and Blind). Even without that outlier, it was 7.5k - 16k. And that's just operating budget, not capital budget.
I think you can make the numbers come out just about any way you want. But what you can't do is obscure the *trend* in spending--that's up. Way way up. But mostly for a couple things:
1. students with special needs/disabilities. When you need a 1:2 (at most) staff:student ratio with a bunch of specialists, that gets expensive, fast.
2. Admin overhead, especially compliance at the district level. This includes useless "technology" that never actually makes it down to the classroom level, as well as junkets, trainings, staff, etc.
Teachers and classrooms saw very little of this ballooning spending. And there's effectively 0 correlation between spending and outcomes beyond the extremes of the distribution. It's as if there's a certain minimum, below which you get bad results. But above that other factors dominate and more spending doesn't change much.
What private schools get is selectivity--being able to curate the student population. But that's a different issue.
I would like to point out that students with special needs or disabilities, as soon as school started getting more money for them they started applying the label to almost everybody. Here in North Carolina the state put a cap, no school can have more than 15% if their students labeled as disabled (I think the actual percent changed recently). I do know that every school in the state is right at the cap. They followed their incentives all the way down the gradient.
Yeah. And it's not just the school--the parents also play a major role and are reinforced in doing so by the school. And it's not just that (at private schools)--if your school starts getting a reputation as being "good for kids with <X>", the population starts shifting until you have more and more kids with <X>. Even if that wasn't your intent. Happened at the school I taught at, and not in a good way. <X> there was "substantial, but not crippling autism" (as in "verbal and can deal on their own, but extremely maladjusted and needing substantial support". Which we were *not* equipped to give them without compromising the education of everyone else.
I'm a elementary school board trustee in California. Which penny do you want to trace from when it enters my public school district to when it exits?
I don't know about other states, but in California, it's the publicly funded private schools, i.e. charter schools, that are the most cause for concern. No new for-profit charters are permitted, but existing ones are allowed to continue. Think about the incentives at a for-profit school. Are they aligned with the educational needs of students or of investors? Perhaps they are designed to produce high quality teachers?
As Greg G points out below, private school tuition is multiples higher than the per-pupil cost of public schools, at least in California. I should know the cost of educating children in my district because at every board meeting we approve every purchase order, i.e. before the money leaves the district in the form of a check. And we review and vote on a budget, then we approve three more budget documents: two interim budget variances, and one final independently audited financial statement. The basic requirement is that they all add up.
I don't know if anyone has made a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request to a district for the raw SACS data that is sent to the county and then on to the state. It's a summary of all the activity in every fund that districts manage. (All financial activity in public schools goes into or out of some fund, e.g. the Cafeteria Fund. The General Fund, not unexpectedly, is the most active.) The format of the SACS file is well-known and the tools used to view the data are widely available (MS Access). I also don't know if anyone has requested the raw financial records of a district as opposed to the detailed-but-not-raw SACS data.
So, if you want to track a particular penny from when it enters the district to when it leaves, the data and the tools are there.
Your first link is to the Cato Institute. I don't think the Cato Institute is interested in education. To a conservative, any successful public program is an anathema and must be destroyed because a successful public program invalidates a core belief: profit is all that matters. The Cato Institute's agenda is firmly to promote right wing conservatism. They are going to do everything in they can to show that public education is not worth the money spent on it. One of the things they do is to completely ignore the value of the outcome of public education, i.e. the nearly $28 trillion economy that is the United States where almost everyone was educated in public schools. They focus exclusively on the cost of education, and to make the numbers even scarier, the total cost of a K-12 education. The benefit side is ignored.
The Cato link you provide shows a graph of total cost of a K-12 education vs NAEP scores. What do you think NAEP measures? Certainly not educational outcomes because the U.S. has built the world's largest economy since WWII with NAEP scores that have essentially remained static over that period. So what is NAEP measuring? Nothing that I as a parent, teacher, or board member is interested in. Perhaps NAEP measures test-taking ability which I would expect to stay more or less constant over time.
All that being said, it is [unfortunately] not the case that public schools are examples of what can be done to provide a high quality education that matches the needs and aspirations of every child. Our district does particularly well, but I am not convinced that we do as well as first appears if income, health, employment, educational attainment and food/housing/personal security are taken into account. Could we all do better? Of course and so we try.
My district tries to meet every child's needs. For example, we spend five times as much on average on a child with special needs as we do on a child without special needs. We offer a summer program to children who need the extra help to get to grade level. We track the progress of every child in becoming proficient in every subcategory that we have determined to be an essential part of the Common Core. We practice differentiated instruction and we use project-based learning wherever we can. We have a robust program of professional development and we encourage teachers to share the tools and techniques that they have found improves educational outcomes.
After that extended pat on the back (we are totally wonderful), I need to mention that we are failing to provide about 15% of our student body with the education they need to achieve their college or career goals. Suggestions?
I do not understand what you're saying. I've read civil war letters [and we must remember the selection bias in which get read- it is mostly a handful of civil war letters that are read over and over]. They read like they were written in a particular style. That style has its charms, certainly, but it in no sense seems to me to be clearly superior to contemporary style.
Consider Sullivan Ballou's letter, which seems to be quoted everywhere, and take up 30%> of the mental space people assign to civil war letters:
"As for my little boys, they will grow as I have done, and never know a father's love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue-eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the dimmest memories of his childhood. Sarah, I have unlimited confidence in your maternal care, and your development of their characters. Tell my two mothers, I call God's blessing upon them. O Sarah, I wait for you there! Come to me, and lead thither my children."
Now I'm not denying it's good, but when we factor in the selection bias that goes into bringing it to us, it doesn't seem especially remarkable. It's profuse, affectionate, but wordy and melodramatic. I see better writing than this on Twitter everyday. Not reliably, or in every tweet, but I do see it, perhaps every 50th Tweet.
To prove I'm not bluffing about the selection bias, here's another civil war letter:
My Dear Wife,
I now take my pen in hand to let you know that I am well and hope these few lines will find you the same. I am well at present. I have got over the neuralgia in the head.
We had a great parade on last Thursday, the 19th. The governor of Rhode Island was here and presented the regiment with a nice silk flag called the regimental flag. There was also present the governors of Massachusetts & Connecticut with a large number of the members of the Assembly, as was also one of the old 76 soldiers who said that we were good soldiers, very good. And we also fired 8 of our largest cannon from our newly mounted fort, the work of our own hands. We had a very fine band of brass music from Massachusetts.There are now 8 full companies on the ground, commencing at “A” and going down to “H”. There is now in Providence another Co. by the name of “I”. It is full and about 80 in Co. “K”. The Company I belong to is “E”. We are about building barracks for 1200 men.
There is a young man coming home with me when I come--I don’t know when that will be--by the name of Mr. Johnson. Tell Mary(1) to have her cap set for him when I come home as he is the handsomest man on the ground.
I have got an office but I don’t like it though it is something similar to that like I had in church assistant secretary(2). We have meetings every night in the week.
I want you to have your daguerreotype and Mary’s and Sis all in once case if you can send it by the next letter; and if you don’t put them in one case, have them taken separate as I should like to have them to look at, being that I cannot see your face. Write to me twicea week and let me know how you are getting along and how produce is selling, as we do not get but a loaf of bread and a cup of coffee during the day.
We live in cloth houses and lay close to the ground but we are in hopes if we trust in God to be in the barracks. And then I am in hopes that I may gain my strength and through the divine providence of God and his mercy, I yet live and one day or another I expect to arrive at home through storms and hurricanes. I expect if I never meet you on this shore or never see your face anymore, I expect to meet you in heaven, God being my helper.
My dear little daughter, I want you to write your papa a letter as it would please her papa very much to have a letter from his dear little daughter. Papa sends her 5000 kisses. Papa thinks a good deal of her.
Tell Sarah to tellPresilla(sic) to forward this letter to William(3), in the name of the Lord, as he is all the time “grumbling.” I had forgot it almost to the last, I want you please to send me those flannel pads that I wear on my bosom to keep me from catching cold. Give my love to all enquiring friends, especially to Julia Mary(4) and mother and the baby. Tell Mary not to forget to write me a letter.
Dear Wife, I send you 10,000 kisses. No more at present but remain your true and affectionate and loving husband Simeon A. Tierce. The reason why we cannot get any furloughs is because there has [been] too many run away.
Poetry
The rose is red, the violets blue
sugar is sweet and so are you.
Since woman to man is so unjust
it is only you that I can trust.
And if in war by battle slain
my love for you shall never frain.
If you loved me as I love you
no knife would cut our love in two.
As blood and water will not blend
my heart is true unto the end.
So good bye dear, I now must close
in these few lines with love below.
Please to direct your letters to Camp Bailey, Dutchs Island, 14th Regmt, Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Colored Battalion, Co. E in the care of Lieutenant Harard for Simeon A. Tierce.
Lots of confounders there...if you used the same teaching method but you had 10% non-english speaking at home kids and/or immigrant etc. and then that numbers goes up 40% in your school..then the success rates will go down. When you look at more homogenous or non-immigrant heavy populations in some European countries vs others or the USA with higher rates of immigrants etc. you'll find most of your answer there.
Education is doing well enough and the rich kids in private schools are doing just as well as ever. We are seeing demographics and cultural shifts much more than any sweeping changes in education with the main difference being the removal of physical punishment.
Certainly not a knock on anyone's intelligence or capability, but an influx of poorer people who are also struggling to learn to speak the language and the culture...they're just not going to do as well on average and it can take 2-3 generations to linguistically and culturally acclimatise.
This is well known in immigrant families and educational studies. It just takes work, time, and generations even to overcome all the challenges faced by people in those circumstances. I know I'd struggle if I moved to France and didn't speak French and couldn't' use my education and the people there spat on me and refused to offer me jobs, anyone would struggle and that's what is largely happening in the USA.
While if you look at easier transitions such as the kids of an English or Irish medical doctor who moves to Canada or something where there isn't a huge transition cost or cultural challenge, then you wouldn't see that effect. While an impoverished person from Hondouras with no education moving to the USA and working menial jobs...their kids will struggle more and have less support at home to even learn English, much less do well in school.
The broader decline in speech patterns, formal speech, etiquette etc. are a separate matter and not part of schooling. People used to all wear hats and even poor men would wear a suit of some sort when leaving the house. Is that cultural shift also due to schooling? It would be silly to attribute everything to education, especially when people back in the 1960s received so much less of it with high school completion rates being lower than today.
Parents (probably moms) with more than a couple kids or other responsibilities may not have time to help their kids with homework. A parent needs to be involved to get the kid started doing his homework and maybe with any tough spots, so finishing is more likely.
I don't quite get the alleged joke. Thinking back to my secondary school days, I think the subjects I spent the most time on homework were those I enjoyed *most and least*. Least, because it was excruciating to force myself to slog through the tasks; and most, because I genuinely enjoyed those subjects and put extra time and effort into trying to do the work particularly well.
Behold, the prophets have told that Scott shall one day ban his only begotten son, so that whosoever believes in him shall not be banned, but have everlasting accounts.
There's homework, and there's homework. When I was in school most of it was busy work. In college though, most of my problem sets were actually a good way to practice things.
I wonder if parents could just say to their kid that they didn't have to do any elementary school homework. Would a kid who otherwise performs well get away with not doing any homework? It would probably depend on the school.
Right, the idea of comparing two hours of word matching compared to 20 minutes of something compelling in the same research under "time spent" seems futile.
Are projects homework? I remember spending quite a lot of time on things like the science fair and various presentations, dioramas and posters. These were probably not particularly edifying but I rather enjoyed them. I could spend infinity hours painting tiny houses for a 3D visual representation of the feudal system.
A friend recently was telling me a very interesting anecdote from the great depression, turns out he learned it when he was assigned to interview his neighbor for a class. I had a similar assignment, and never stopped to think about how valuable that sort of thing is. I would never have done that on my own.
School projects are often just a really great way for kids to spend their free time. Not always, but it happens. I'm generally pretty anti-school, and I tend to think of school as preparation for something (effective or not). Worth remembering that sometimes it's just a straightforward good use of your time.
School and homework have another effect. They use up your time in a positive way. Think of the trouble kids could get into without direction. Germany kept kids in college because they didn't have enough jobs for everyone. Better than loose on the streets.
I definitely agree that there are multiple types of homework and I would not expect them to have comparable effects. The trickiest subset is homework that's drilling known material to be automatic material - comparable to doing scales in music. It's boring as hell, and doesn't teach you anything new, but it is effective at making a particular task both faster and effortless, so it can have utility *if the task itself is worth the investment*
It wasn't customary for kids in my family to do HW (primary through to secondary), but I did learn a few French verbs at school. As a teacher>35 yrs (Eng.Lang/Lit, including 'special'(dyslexic/complex needs students) I was expected to set HW, and students mostly complied. There is lots of evidence, in my experience in the UK, of parents having a big hand in HW tasks, especially at Primary level, less so in the case of older 16 -18yr students. It seems deeply unhelpful to set lengthy, time-consuming HW tasks when there is no support (space,time,or interest) in the home. Schools and colleges demand that teachers set HW, whether individuals benefit in terms of acquiring knowledge, thinking skills, or learning how to learn, must depend on a multiplicity of conditions. Years ago, somewhere (?), I read that doing HW was a waste of time i.e. had not been shown to be effective. In the UK the education system is inadequate in many ways as it's a political football. If HW was proven to be useless the state school and many private schools here would do it anyway.
My elementary school didn't assign homework and I found it very difficult to develop the habit when I went to high school (England has a single seven-year secondary school rather than splitting secondary into middle or junior high and high school).
I wonder if there are elements of school education that are most useful because they develop habits of time allocation and learning skills rather than for the substance of what is learned?
My parents told my primary school they wouldn't get me to do the busywork homework, and I didn't have to do it. I did perform well otherwise. In high school, I was one of the worse people in my class for not getting work done on time, and I'm still not great at time management.
I'm tempted to just sit and do all my elementary school aged daughter's homework for her - or rather, sit with her giving her all the answers. I wonder though if that's the worst of all possible worlds. Time still wasted on lots of writing (for both of us) - challenging problems always results in immediate capitulation.
I think will adjust my prior away from painful homework interactions. Assume she's going to be able to learn something easily next year and move on rather than labouring something until its nailed.
That balance between avoiding the crap and encouraging/allowing autonomy.....That mad assumption that we all develop our interest and focus at the same time, in the same degree...
I currently teach primary maths to a delightful boy who seems to share my memory deficits and is not helped by his lovely parent who wants to answer every question, about anything, for him.
You know your child best - lots of forced writing? Noooo! Whatever a child does is enough; schools differ. 'Elementary school curriculum' - I think of play outdoors, groups of kids, fun, stories, experiments, dance, song, music, swimming, mostly child-led seems optimal; a bit of English 'n' Maths as can be made useful. My son went to the local Primary school, learnt guitar and other stuff. I don't remember him doing homework. Could have been neglect on my part.
Did you ever start needing to do the homework (e.g., college)? Was that fine, or did you feel like you could have used better habits around getting it done?
I'm not Angus, but I had a similar "problem". I never did any homework, until the last minute, which essentially meant I was rushing homework during the breaks right before the session I was meant to turn it in started. I taught me to work well under pressure. And I was able to sail through my entire school career like this.
However, when I went to university I had to learn some very painful lessons about time management, which resulted in me finishing my degree several years (!) late. I could have completed my degree in 6-7 years, but took 10. For two of those I blame the institution I wrote my thesis at, the rest is on me.
Interesting. In most schools in the US that I am aware of, it's literally not possible to get good grades AND not do homework as the homework component may represent anywhere between 25 and 50% of your total grade for the course. Someone that got a perfect 100% score on every exam, test, and project that did not do any homework would likely end up with a C for the class and your transcripts would look like absolute garbage.
I remember when I was in middle/high school, I did most of my homework in study halls. Why not just make school longer, and add mandatory study halls, so kids aren't still doing algebra problems at 8:30 pm, 14 hours after the school day started?
Or just 'get rid of schools'! Kids are pretty good at learning when they're motivated to do so.
_Some_ algebra is pretty useful, but I'm _very_ sure basically 'zero' adults ever need or want to solve quadratic formulas, let alone anything more 'complex'.
I've (happily) done some mathematical research/literature-review as part of my jobs/career (mostly software) and I have a Mathematics BA, but almost everyone else seems pretty happy/content to just use a calculator/formula/software for anything beyond basic arithmetic.
thing is, "doing homework" is in itself a skill. i got pretty far without, as long as doing homework wasnt really necessary. then when the subjects got sufficiently complex i decided to maybe do some homework but struggled hard.
I think a lot of this has to do with "how much you already know", which is why elementary school homework seems so pointless for higher performing students.
By 3rd grade, I was reading high school level texts. The benefits I got from anything other than math assignments and French assignments in school was probably pretty close to 0.
Conversely, going out during summer learning activities on field trips to the local swamp and learning about the local wildlife and plants and animals, I learned a lot, because it was stuff that was literally in none of my books - they were more focused on macro scale things (evolution) and cool things (tigers, whales, etc.) than local flora and fauna.
If we did more tracking, I suspect people would have more appreciation for homework.
That being said, I also suspect that elementary school is not very useful in general compared to middle and high school, and that most elementary school teachers are not very good at their jobs or are following rules that existed since ancient times.
You know what was useful?
My 2nd grade classroom (in 1992!) had a bunch of computers in it, one per student. This was in a public school. We got to mess around on them, play games on them, use them for various minor tasks (I believe we used early word processors sometimes), etc. I am sure that a lot of kids had never used computers before then, and they learned the basics of using a desktop computer from that class.
Tracking works best in large schools, and primary schools tend to be much smaller because primary-aged kids are less independent and can't travel as far as secondary-aged kids. If you only have two classes in a given grade, then you can only split students into a top 50% and a bottom 50% which isn't all that great for assigning radically different school work: both classes will be predominantely students close to the median.
You need five tracks just to get a top (and bottom) class that averages a full standard deviation from the mean.
1) The student body follows a single bell-shaped curve (which is often untrue).
2) All classes must be the same size (you can have smaller classes for the gifted and severely disadvantaged students - in fact, most classes for severely disadvantaged students are already smaller by necessity).
Also, your math is a bit off.
With four classes, even with a standard distribution and identical class sizes of 25 students per class, if you were looking at, say, IQ, you would have two classes in the middle (90-100 and 100-110) and then two classes for the extremes (110+ and 90-); the median in the above and below average courses would be above115 and below 85 (16% of the population is above 115, 16% below 85, so as each class has 25% of your student body in it, the median would end up around 118 and 82 for the extreme classes, if I am doing my math correctly).
You would only need a student body of 500 students at a grade 1-5 school to track out the top 25% and bottom 25%. If you assume class sizes of 30, then you still only need 600 students.
If you wanted to make it so no one in the "gifted" class was below 1 SD above average, you'd have to have at least 6 classes, which would be a student body of 750 with class size of 25 and 900 for a class size of 30.
If you allow the classes to be of different sizes, and maximum class size of 30 and a minimum of 16, you can track out all the students 1 SD above average and 1 SD below average with only 100 students per grade level.
If you want to track out the 2 SD students, then you will either have to settle for very small class sizes or a large population - you'd be getting only 2.5 per 100 students, meaning you'd need 1,000 students per grade level to get 25.
On the other hand, when I went to elementary school, myself and the other most advanced student were given alternative work to do by the teacher while she was teaching the rest of the class lower level math at one school I went to (one of the things I recall is that we got to learn exponents and square roots while the rest of the class was still working on lower level multiplication and division; I recall we also got to do some applied math, which was saving the book club parents time and effort but hey), while at another school, there was a small "TAG" group which had its own meetings outside of the usual class during normal class times where we would be taken out during certain subjects and basically learn about other things with less supervision.
This sort of alternative arrangement is possible even without a huge class size.
You can also potentially pool the gifted students and the disadvantaged students across the school district into particular tracked schools.
Disadvantaged students need extra support anyway and this is probably more efficient and effective than spreading out these resources thinly across a lot of schools; if you put them all in one place, you can have more specialists there.
Let's just continue with something of unknown utility. Why not?
Schools went overboard on homework for common core. It sucks. Most of it is poorly designed. It seems more designed to indoctrinate students to be complaint than to learn.
As a parent dealing with schools for almost 20 years, learning doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Compliance is the lesson perhaps. And not a bad one for most kids who will be working on jobs where they will be told what to do most of the time. Some see this as onerous or take a conspiratorial attitude, but most schools formally or in recent history were quite up front that obedience is part of schooling.
That's what school uniforms do in most of the world and/or where they are used. That's what being 'on time' means and it is why missing too much class/school will fail a kid even if they can pass the exams. Compliance, reliability, consistency...these are the lessons kids learn for the life most will lead.
Is it shitty...sure...the world is shitty...but is it the wrong approach to take? A high school diploma if that's all one has shows a person is reliable and comes from a steady enough home or mindset to be a good worker. For those bound for intellectual greatness or whatever in University, then the high school diploma is left behind and doesn't matter after they get into university/finish it for an UG degree.
Isn't that a far broader argument about social/economic structures though? Most people will be wage zombies once they turn 16/18/21, so gearing education towards it seems logical. Pretending what you're really doing is turning them all into Voltaire may seem a bit ridiculous, but I don't see that a democracy could do anything else short of not educating people at all.
We can do like Germany and push people into trades and services. Let's stop pretending college is for everyone. Let's get kids to train to be carpenters, plumbers, nurses, dental hygienists, electricians, bookkeepers, fireman, programmers, etc. earlier.
We are not educating people, training them to think for themselves, anyway. Schools are against education, and more about socialization and programing.
"Schools are against education, and more about socialization and programing."
More than one teacher has said that to me. If John Taylor Gatto is to be believed, the last thing they want in a school is for the students to be educated, for the educated are intractable.
Exactly. The truly educated student has a mind that questions and inquires and refuses to accept the narrative. These students become "difficult" and "challenging" and the schools push the parents to medicate them. These are the students that score high on SATs with poor grades, the lost smart kids ignored by the meritocracy.
If this is true, why not let kids test out of "can be punctual and reliable"? Many high school kids have jobs. If they can provide a letter from their boss saying they're a good employee, maybe we should let them complete less homework as long as they can still pass the course. For that matter, is reliability and showing up on time really such a difficult thing to teach that it takes 12 years of a person's life? I suspect that, if anything, school is measuring reliability rather than teaching it. Just collect attendance and assign homework for a month or two and you'll have enough data to make a pretty good estimate of a person's potential as an employee.
This reminds me of the thought experiment where there's a tradition of people hitting themselves on the head with hammers all the time, and coming up with justifications after the fact for why that's a good idea, except that in this case we're hitting our children with hammers and saying things like, "in life most of these kids will lead, they'll bang their heads on things from time to time and it's important that they develop a thick skull early", or "of course being struck repeatedly on the noggin with a wooden mallet isn't an exact simulation of the modern workplace, but the ability to remain stoic and focused in the face of adversity is a trait that is highly valued by employers".
In the current system, lots of people accept that students who have jobs are more reliable than students who aren't. Partly, this is because someone "independent of" the students is vouching for them/prefers to keep employing the student instead of replacing them, partly it's because the students will probably become responsible if they can attach a time and effort cost to money, but also, partly it is because the student can demonstrably juggle the commitments of work and study. Therefore, the students get advantages in interviews and such.
I suspect that if homework exemptions for working became more common, all of those benefits would be lessened - some employers would pay less and accept a lower quality of worker, if the workers got a separate benefit from the job, and it would take less effort and show less responsibility to hold down such a job. These wouldn't be everywhere, but they'd reduce the status attached to having a job in high school. (Also, high school is when there is a benefit from homework.)
(See how cognitive dissonance/"sour grapes" sounds from someone who didn't have a job in high school?)
A lot of things in the modern industrialized human world are unnatural, so unnatural that it takes decades to socialize a human kitten into accepting them.
Obedience is anticorrelated with any job actually worth doing. In fact, junior employees usually have to _unlearn_ obedience-based habits to get anywhere, and these habits drive their mentors up the wall. Importantly, obedience-based education teaches you to _conceal your uncertainty and errors_ , which is the single most disastrous thing an employee can do.
A different thing is Heinleinian "be able to give orders, be able to follow orders" mindset - also known as teamwork, taught in schools not at all.
On the other hand, self-discipline is important in all aspects of life -- the ability to (sometimes) do the unexciting thing that's required of you rather than the fun thing you'd rather be doing right now.
I'm not sure whether homework teaches that effectively (I never learned it until I hit university) but I don't think you can write it off as "evil Prussians want to turn us into wage slaves"
Personal projects teach you that as well, beyond a certain point of complexity/skill everything contains drudge work. If anything we should put a heavy focus on building things and finishing them, which will inevitably teach self-discipline instead of bouncing off the hard parts.
I’d venture that the obedience-value anticorrelation shows up significantly more in jobs that (in our society) require undergraduate education or higher than in jobs that don’t.
Those obedience-centered habits are more likely to be useful in e.g. waiting tables than in computer programming, though both jobs are (or at least can be) valuable.
How are obedience habits useful in waiting tables? You have a room full of guests and have to handle their requests, juggling a whole bunch of ongoing issues at the same time. A person strictly doing what they are told will be a pretty terrible waiter that lacks initiative and ability to handle unexpected situations.
Obedience habits are maybe useful at a 19th century assembly line, that's about it. Perhaps first line staff at a call center benefit from them, but that kind of job is miserable, based on humans pretending to be script-driven machines, and already being automated out of existence.
I suppose that a curriculum designed by Heinlein would run along the lines of:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I've never heard that most of the world uses school uniforms for compliance. That's interesting. Where do you get that from?
Everyone I've talked to that has taught in schools with uniforms or has students in one in the US the professed reason behind uniforms is to remove clothing/class bullying and reduce sexuality.
Not saying the US is "most of the world" but it seems like those two problems are present elsewhere as well and wondering where the alternative explanation (compliance) is coming from.
I attended school in the UK in the late 90s through to the early 2010s. Uniform standards were enforced at all ages – teachers would tell you to tuck your shirt in, students were only allowed to remove their ties on hot days if the headmaster's office announced it, etc.
I understood it to be partly about teaching standards compliance, partly about being good advertising for the school, and partly a broken windows argument that being "dressed to learn" would promote the right mindset.
Anecdote. Many years ago, I met an university lecturer from Singapore who had been sent to Britain to look at how the education system encouraged rebellion, or at least free-thinking. The Singaporean government were concerned that their education system produced clever, obedient drones who failed to innovate at a rate necessary for their future economic success.
I have no idea what the outcome of this study tour was.
Interesting idea for a story: a 1984 / Brave New World / Public Schooling System designed to be repressive and banal not because it creates drones, but because it foments rebellion, and rebellious minds advance and benefit society much more than a bunch of well-adjusted happy people. Therefore justifying the suffering / broken students / poorly educated students the system creates.
When the rebels go off and advance society, the designers know their work is worth it. If any of them decide to start trying to bring down the system that caused them to suffer, they are shown behind the curtain and realize they love Big Teacher.
My complaint/criticism is that 'school' probably isn't even that great even for teaching this stuff – and I'm happy to admit that this stuff IS useful.
I don’t know you so I have no basis to contradict you, but how do you know you wouldn’t have hated learning, or failed at college, even without the homework?
I mean, I hated homework too, and didn’t have either of the adverse effects you reported. Without a larger sample, how can we tell if homework actually caused those effects?
* * *
A completely irrelevant anecdote, just so my comment is not too antagonistic: Somewhere around what we called 10th grade, i.e. the second year of high-school, my math teacher noticed a couple students hadn’t done their homework, and started going desk-by-desk to check everyone.
I hadn’t done my homework. When he reached my desk and found out, he looked a bit surprised. (I was a relatively good student.) I don’t remember if he asked anyone else, but if so the answer was probably in the usual dog-ate-my-homework category.
So he goes “Why didn’t you do the homework?” and I just say “Out of habit, Mr. Professor”. After a bit of speechlessness he say “what do you mean?” and I explain that I hadn‘t done my homework all year.
Good thing he was a decent person, nothing bad came out of it. I think the stopped checking the other desks at that point.
Next year he moved to Australia, but I’m pretty sure that was unrelated.
> Let's just continue with something of unknown utility. Why not?
When faced with a lack of compelling studies, the right thing to do seems to be to fall back on intuition. And intuition says that if you spend more time on something then you'll probably get better at it.
If you spend more time doing something that is counterproductive, then you should stop. Intuition is often wrong, unfortunately.
As a parent who has dealt lots of stupid homework assignments, that did not contribute to learning, I have seen the disservice this has done to children. One school went so far as to count all assignments, tests, and quizzes the same, so a busy work assignment counted the same as the final. Teachers didn't care if students learned, but only if the work was done, even for children with disabilities.
Advance of 50->100 and 100->150 actually seems pretty linear. 0->50 probably has very quick growth from having any homework at all, and after that it's linear for some time...
I don't know how their metric works, but it looks kind of like standard deviations which I worry is already close to grading on a curve and makes it hard to say things like this. In general this is a hard problem: if controls gets 75% on the test, and the intervention group gets 100%, it it fair to say the intervention "improved performance by 33%"?
The purpose of homework isn’t learning. The purpose of homework is to sort those who will conscientiously put the new cover sheets on the TPS reports from those who won’t. It’s to filter for conscientious and agreeable personality traits as well as work ethic.
Yeah, as a musician, I’ve always been confused by the claim that homework is completely useless. If you only do math during the hour or less per day that constitutes math class, I would have thought it would go sort of like just showing up to orchestra rehearsals and never practicing the music beforehand. Which, unless the orchestra plays at a level far below your own, such that the music is too easy for you, is usually a very bad idea.
Orchestra and sports have something in common, which is that people only play one or the other if they have the talent to perform at their chosen level, so it's a really pointless comparison.
I'm not sure it's that pointless. Skill playing the violin is useful/necessary for performing as a violinist. Skill with middle-school maths is useful for all sorts of things, from shopping, budgeting, route planning, anything you might want to engineer, cooking, anything you might want to measure statistically. There's a *lot* of roles to play in adult life where it matters.
I don't think the musician example works. The musician knows how to play all of the individual notes, knows how to read the music. The repetition is creating the muscle memory to do it effectively.
Homework isn't reinforcing muscle memory - if you know how to solve the problem, you are just demonstrating
1) You know how to solve the problem.
If you don't know how to do the problem then maybe:
2A) it forces you to figure it out?
2B) Guess?
2C) Skip it?
I doubt homework has much, if any effect. Any result that occurs happens all at step 2A or perhaps 2B if you have a parent that reviews your homework.
I think mathematics homework in particular is an exercise in pattern matching. The way I recall the most useful homework was: each type of problem has 1-2 clearly worked out solutions, followed by 4-5 very similar practice problems and maybe 1 harder variant. Then, a section where all the "problem types" are mixed together and the student needs to figure out which technique to apply to each problem.
Learning the technique, then practicing recognizing the pattern is essentially creating muscle memory so that when similar problems pop up on the standardized test or whatever, the student immediately matches it to the correct technique and is able to execute it.
I think the key in maths homework is that recognising the pattern is hard. You do a handful of variants of the exercise because they all look slightly different so that it's not immediately obvious how the pattern applies, but because you're doing all the exercises at once you know which pattern to look for, and then you can learn to see the pattern even with less of a hint about which pattern to use. Maybe homework is less relevant in lower years because there are fewer patterns to recognise, you just need someone to explain things so you can understand them.
I’d say that math homework can do two different things (but usually the first thing).
First, it can build that muscle memory. I can factor a quadratic very quickly in my head, simply because I’ve done it so many times. Times tables, basic integration/derivatives, etc can all benefit from this sort of “muscle memory” approach. And it helps long term when you get to complex problems, since if it has 20 basic steps, you need to be able to do your basics quickly.
Secondly, it can help reinforce the sort of analytical thinking that’s useful in advanced math. But homeworks aimed at that are rare.
Problem solving has it's own form of muscle memory, even abstract mathematical problem solving. Look at something like Sudoku. You can learn the general solution to every single Sudoku in five minutes but that doesn't mean you're as good as you'll ever be at the puzzle You learn short cuts, patterns and more advanced or niche processes while practicing which make the puzzle easier and faster to solve.
In high school, I took calculus, and it was clear to my teacher that I knew the material on a conceptual level. I often wouldn't remember the formulas while taking the test, but I would rederive them during the test as needed, and he knew that. But I wasn't finishing the test at all in the time I was given. This was partially because I was working slowly and carefully; I rarely made mistakes. But it was also because I knew the general idea of the subject matter, and I knew it well enough to rederive it, but I didn't know it so cold that I didn't even need to think about it. His goal wasn't just to get me to take the test faster so I could get a higher score, his goal was to get me to know the material really really well, so I didn't need to waste energy thinking about it, and then it would be easier to learn the next unit in the curriculum and handle more complex material.
The solution was lots of homework with lots of practice problems. After only one homework problem, yes, I had already demonstrated that I knew the material. But doing it over and over again helped cement it in my mind so that I could do it faster and with clearer thought than before. It really was the mental equivalent of reinforcing muscle memory.
I have no doubt that is true - but I also don't think your experience is generalizable to the overall population or related to whether or not homework 'works'.
No, I think it is generalizable based on my discussions with multiple math teachers. They are concerned with the "automaticity" of doing lower-level calculations, and if the kids don't get enough practice doing those so they can do them quickly and accurately, it's going to be very frustrating when they go to upper-level math and have to spend all their time remembering how to do the lower-level calculations.
It is actually very similar to practicing lower-level music muscle memory so that you don't have to think about it while playing, so that you can concentrate on the musicality and more "upper-level" considerations.
This is something actually in my area of expertise (I taught physical sciences at a relatively pricey private high school for 7 years). Math homework and drilling lots and lots of practice problems was actually crucial for everyone. Because by the time they got to chemistry or physics (even the baby intro versions that were all that were required), those who didn't have that automatic "muscle memory" were lost as soon as a number went up on the board/paper. Yes, they could eventually figure it out, but spending 2-3 minutes (no exaggeration) doing a simple "convert 1 m to mm" problem and not having any mathematical intuition when they'd plug it into a calculator and get something bizarre (because they put in garbage) meant that they'd mostly just get lost.
Drill-to-perfection is critical especially for arithmetic and basic skills. No, common core, it doesn't really matter if you know why 2 + 2 = 4 (which isn't actually something they teach anyway) or have 27 different ways of doing that operation. What matters is that you don't have to think about it--you see basic operations such as shifting a decimal place and it just happens transparently in your head with no mental overhead. So you can get on and do the real interesting part. And that only happens by repeated, frequent practice until it's not even a conscious process anymore.
And I saw it with my own physics homework--there was a literal "ah ha" moment when someone had practiced enough variations of the same problem. The light came on and then that kind of problem was easy from then on. And it generally took quite a few repetitions and almost-identical-but-not-quite variations. It was a phase transition between "this is impossible" (in teen-speak meaning "this requires effort") and "why was this so hard? This is trivial." Different people hit it at different points. But everyone who had the necessary foundation hit it some time.
From the point of view of someone who has spent more than 20 years teaching students unfamiliar concepts, I have to say that this comment strikes me as very, very, strange. The point here is that the claim is really a circular argument. “If you know how to solve the problem”, has no meaning before having practiced it, does it? How would someone “know” how to solve it then? Is the implication that the teacher shows students how to solve the problem in class, then the students practice it in class, say, a few times, and, at that point, they “know” how to solve the problem, and therefore all future practice is irrelevant? What school, class, curriculum, activity or skill does that resemble that exists in the real world? I can think of no non-trivial skill for which that is true. Nothing, from woodworking to math, vocabulary, learning a foreign language, etc. for which additional practice outside of the initial exposure to the concept would be needed before a learner would be able to describe themselves as “knowing” how to solve the problem without substantial practice. My son is quite gifted in math, and I teach honors students, and even for those types of students I have not found that I simply demonstrate a concept once and that zero additional practice is then needed. Certainly when kids learn fractions, decimals, complex grammar rules, how to craft an essay, etc. I have never observed that a single exposure is sufficient.
Thus, I agree with you: continuing to drill past the point of mastery is not good. But the only route to mastery is practice. Theory is that HW is an opportunity for practice. The counter argument is that many students do not do their HW, the parents do it, they don’t use it for practice because they do only a perfunctory job on it, etc. None of that changes the point, which is that the sine qua non of developing skill and expertise in a given subject still requires additional practice, and the musician analogy is pretty good.
By the way, there are numerous good papers in the literature on the development of expertise on how differently experts and novices look at problems, and just how much can be gained by additional reinforcement / development of expertise through practice. One seminal citation by Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon & colleagues: “Expert and Novice Performance in Solving Physics Problems”, Jill Larkin, John McDermott, Dorothea P. Simon and Herbert A. Simon, Science (1980) - sorry, paywalled, or I would paste a link.
> “If you know how to solve the problem”, has no meaning before having practiced it, does it? How would someone “know” how to solve it then?
Of course it has meaning. Having a skill is independent of having demonstrated that skill.
> Is the implication that the teacher shows students how to solve the problem in class, then the students practice it in class, say, a few times, and, at that point, they “know” how to solve the problem, and therefore all future practice is irrelevant?
Yes, that's the underlying question of 'Does Homework Work?' If it transparently obviously worked it would be easier to detect positive correlation between homework and results.
> Nothing, from woodworking to math, vocabulary, learning a foreign language, etc. for which additional practice outside of the initial exposure to the concept would be needed before a learner would be able to describe themselves as “knowing” how to solve the problem without substantial practice.
Practice without a feedback loop is worthless. Homework, largely, is a one-time demonstration - the answer is right or wrong and you move on. Underlying skills can get exercised more often - but simply going through the motions of homework isn't practicing any specific thing often enough to make 'muscle memory' a convincing argument.
On the other hand, in a homeschool environment and a "homeschool teacher teaches in a public school" environment, I have seen 5-15 minutes of one on one instruction, combined with 45 minutes of human-computer interaction and an infrequent group activity to work wonders.
It may not produce people who can do math at the London Symphony, but most people don't need that level of skill.
Whose purpose is this? The teacher's assigning the homework? I can't imagine any teacher I know saying that - it seems like they assign homework because they genuine believe it's an important part of learning, and do so despite that it makes more work for themselves.
I know the ACX answer to "whose purpose" for these kind of questions is usually "Moloch", but I don't know that that's true - are there actually meaningful Molochian forces pushing teachers to assign homework? It's not part of college admissions, it's not really part of the huge standardized test pushes, and, surprisingly enough, when I interviewed for a job, they didn't ask if I had done my homework. (Which is good, because I didn't)
(On the other hand, I do increasingly think a 4-year college degree is more about establishing work ethic than actually imparting specific knowledge: but you can see that in how it's an important filter in the job application process, in a way that homework - especially elementary/high school level - is not)
The _assignment_ of homework is not necessary for college admissions. Yes, if you are assigned homework and don't do it and your GPA drops that's going to matter.
But we're talking about the reasoning why homework is assigned in the first place. If my teachers had all collectively decided to not assign homework because they stopped believing it was useful, it's not like I'd get to college admissions and be told "well, we see that your teacher never assigned you homework..."
So again, I don't think "college admissions" is the reason teachers are all assigning homework.
Are the teachers freely choosing to assign homework as a conclusion from their reasoning and observation that it works best, or are they required to, or do they just replicate the tradition of teaching that includes homework? And if they are required to, who is requiring them?
I think this is an underrated response. The reason most teachers assign homework is because it was assigned to them in school, their peers do it, the curriculum given by the admin provides it, and they may have heard in some lecture somewhere that it was useful.
And the reason it is in the curriculum is because most teachers expect it.
And the reason it is talked about in lectures is because the lecturers did it, and assigned it, and their peers assigned it, and they had their own (possibly confounded) opinion about it.
Do teachers get a choice whether to set homework? I always assumed it would be a school policy, based on some education authority policy, that they had to do it. Even if it's not explicit, would a teacher get a load of flak for not setting homework?
I'm asking this, because not setting homework seems massively advantageous from a lazy teacher perspective. Unless they get paid overtime to mark it, but aren't they generally salaried?
Every district is different, but in many cases yes.
Now, get a reputation for being a bad teacher, or have enough students "fail to progress" and you get called into annoying meetings, which means sticking with what you know / what the community does is a safer bet. And also a lot of teachers want to have done a good job.
I have known some teachers give out a large stack of homework and then only grade a random portion of it. I have also known other teachers that share students complaining that teacher X puts out so much homework the students don't have time for THEIR homework.
My mother doesn't follow the curriculum very much for some of her subjects. If/when curriculum providers (private company) catch her, they mark her down to have the admin address the matter with her and other teachers. The admin dutifully admonishes the other teachers for not following the curriculum and when my mom brings it up the admin tells her it doesn't apply to her. Because she usually gets several years of progression with her students each year.
Heck, the school even mixes grade levels so they can get some students to work with her for a few months during the year in mixed-age groups. It's really stressful for her to keep changing students every few months, but it maximizes her impact to a wide variety of students (and the other teachers can't complain if a student that is on the record "theirs" suddenly shows improvement on a subject they didn't even teach them...)
You have to wonder about how many studies about X curriculum actually check to see if the successful (or failing) teachers actually use the curriculum as provided.
This seems silly. Is there actually a level of employment where people are chosen based on GPA and yet some of the people who are chosen are too incompetent to properly format and present a relevant report? This is certainly not the case in my (tech) industry.
Of course we see college hires that can't cut the mustard in the role they were hired into. We put them in marketing. ( \S sort-of)
But we never see grades when hiring (even college hires). They never asked for my grades either and only for proof that I had in fact graduated after offering me the job. Even if we did see grades, I do not think it would strongly impact who we hire.
We are not tech (kind of...) and recently we have been seeing GPAs on a lot of the applications we received for unknown reasons. And a lot of those GPAs are sub-3.5 so we ask ourselves why this person is volunteering this...
Absolutely for regular white collar office jobs for random college grads you absolutely get people who can’t work a computer or printer or think/spell there way out of a wet paper bag. Absolutely tons of people who get college degrees without basic skills. Especially in math or anything analytical.
Fuck practically 1/3 of my career is having a basic working knowledge of computers, being able to learn quickly, and middle school math. I provide pretty high level financial consulting and have used say calculus or above less than 5 times. It is almost all being great at arithmetic and analysis.
You might say “only accountants need to be able to handle a ledger”, except tons and tons of white collar workers have random little ledgers and tables and tracking spreadsheets they need to be competent with. Way too many are not.
In college, maybe, but what's the point of filtering in 1st grade? Everyone is going to get passed on to 2nd grade whether they do the homework or not, and potential employers are never going to look at their grades from elementary school.
Kohn is not "[taking] the studies seriously anyway." He argues that the studies are, as you wrote, inconclusive at best and that one should recognize the demonstrable harms of homework and limit its use (seeing as it's not particularly compelling that it does much). It is easy to find compelling articles on the harms, including physical health, and it extends to even competitive environments where it actually negatively impacts learning (but helps with the educational rat race). e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220973.2012.745469
Kohn acts many times like there's strong evidence homework isn't useful. For example, in Rethinking Homework:
"The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied. "
If it were me, instead of "the results are stunning", I would have said "the results are meaningless and can't tell us anything". If he in fact doesn't believe the studies, then he's doing a particularly annoying version of the "no evidence" thing - see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
Unless you have other reason to think that Kohn is generally intellectually honest, that "particularly annoying version of the 'no evidence' thing" seems like a very plausible explanation for the quote provided.
Maybe I'm too cynical for my own good, though - sure, I save a lot of time by being dismissive but it's a lot harder for me to be corrected on assumptions I'm mistaken about.
> Kohn: "The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research"
Is there any compelling RCT-based evidence that spending more time sifting through the research makes you more knowledgable about it?
That's not the same as "any meaningful measure of improvement". He's saying that doing homework is not correlated with any objective measure of success--that is, it's not necessary for success and there's no guarantee it will help you achieve it.
If people can achieve at a higher level without doing homework than those who do homework, then there's no meaningful measure of achievement.
Surely *some people* can achieve at a higher level without doing homework than *certain other people*. For instance, if you took me at twelve years old and had me do my algebra homework and put Euler at twelve years old in the same algebra class and told him not to do the homework, I guarantee you he would out-achieve me. But the relevant question is whether homework helps ceteris paribus. (Which it seems like it probably should. How could practice not help?).
Ah, thanks for this.The only point I wanted to make was based on 'ceteris paribus' - I know no Latin! The fact that eg today in the UK children in poverty, with working parents, is around 72% matters when one considers the state of education. HW, set in the context of a particular education system, has inherent barriers. Many, many children do not even habituate a home environment where homework might comfortably happen.
What do you mean by child poverty in the UK being 72%? The first Google result is a group called Action for Children, and they say it was 31% in 2019-2020. Yes, that's two years ago, and it's missing the "with working parents" disclaimer, but surely they don't make that much of a difference?
says this too "Work does not provide a guaranteed route out of poverty in the UK. 75 per cent of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works."
and "
There were 3.9 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2020-21.1 That's 27 per cent of children, or eight in a classroom of 30."
I think it seems too great a percentage to be true ie it is shocking - we are regularly informed by the Tory govt. that the best way out of poverty is 'work.' 'Working our way out of poverty' is not working.
"But the relevant question is whether homework helps ceteris paribus. "
My point is that this is not a relevant question. Homework is not essential to learning, nor does it guarantee learning. It might improve understanding slightly, but even that's not known.
Forcing kids to do homework when it doesn't improve and doesn't guarantee mastery is just nonsense. Just extend the time needed to learn *in class* for those who need it.
I would hazard a guess that homework vs proficiency would produce the exact same results in elementary school. If you throw more time at a skill the better you get, that seems pretty straight forward.
Practicing piano is another good example they should study. If you don’t practice every day, your progress would be limited. And the age works as well because the most amount of kids in piano lessons is likely elementary school. If they don’t have the drive to practice (such as myself) eventually they will quit.
The same goes for sports. Starting early and spending more time practicing will produce oversized results.
However if you graph enjoyment vs homework, I’m sure the graph would be inverted but that’s the whole point of parenting, isn’t it? To force your kids to learn skills they otherwise wouldn’t on their own?
One of my friends was essentially neglected as a child and spent most of the 80s and 90s watching TV. He’s in his 50s now and has no skills except for being a substitute teacher. I love him to death but I would never let him teach my child anything. He’s basically the poster child for forcing your kids to do homework.
One huge question is how much of elementary school is actually helpful for children later in life and how much is just busy work so that the schools can function as daycare. Teaching reading and writing is definitely important while memorizing state capitals is probably less so. Plus, many of the skills taught in elementary school can likely be learned more quickly later in life. So if the homework is helping you to practice a useless skill, it's useless.
Beyond that though, not all skills are like piano or sports. There's some maximum possible amount of arithmetic that an average eight year old can learn, and it's very possible that the amount that elementary schools assign is more than that. So that homework would be a complete waste of time.
There's a good middle ground above your friend and below "all elementary schoolers do school work 24/7". Evidently no one knows where it is, but I suspect it's somewhere below the current level that most elementary schoolers are assigned.
A significant amount of what kids learn in early school is socialisation, cooperation, attention, learning-to-learn, etc. You wouldn't to wait to later life to get onto this, though it's probably less important if you're getting a good version at home and elsewhere.
I agree that using homework to take the place of good teaching is the wrong approach. It should be used to reinforce taught material. I don’t think kids should be inundated with homework but I do think that homework is important. Putting in the time to solidify what they learned in important otherwise they will forget.
My kid is in that camp, he goes to a private school with a no homework policy and while it’s great for us parents I worry that he’s not getting anything he’s learning reinforced. He’s advanced in math so he has a minimal amount of homework for that every day but not in a way that I think is productive but i guess we will see how things turn out.
Kids are normally in school for about 6 hours a day, right? that would seem to suggest that approx 1-2 hour per weekday of homework, total, is "ok" and anything more would be overtime, going by standard full time hours. I think a lot if the issue is that homework can be very "spiky" - if all your teachers assign a lot the same week, it doesn't really help that the previous week was easy.
> I'm quite confident that the most successful students in my school were those who most consistently worked the hardest at their homework.
Me too, although I'm also quite confident that the students who worked especially hard weren't the ones who achieved the greatest success in later life. My observation is that high-school super-swots tend to start struggling when life becomes a little less structured. Doing exactly what you're told very conscientiously is a great strategy in high school, but an okay-at-best one in real life.
And in the homeschool world (selection effects apply) many people do far less schoolwork and homework than schooling, sometimes even only one or two hours a day or less.
Sure, you can say "but those are students who would excel in any environment", but the traditional school crowd has the same problem. You can't tell if a kid succeeded or failed because of homework or teacher or curriculum design or because of who they are.
I think a lot of what you learn in early school years is about giving you a framework to fit other facts into.
Memorising capital cities has gone out of fashion as a way of learning geography has gone out of fashion, but it's not totally useless. A kid who has memorised every national capital in the world has at least _heard_ of every country in the world now. Knowing that a country's capital is called Georgetown or Santo Domingo lets you guess a bit about those countries' histories. You learn a bit about the languages of the world when you learn cities like Mbabana and Ljubljana. And you have a little box labelled "Sierra Leone" in your head so that when you hear another fact about Sierra Leone you can file it away alongside Freetown.
Maybe all that still doesn't justify memorising national capitals. But still, primary school education is largely just about applying layers of intellectual undercoat; at some point you have to learn things like "There was a Roman empire" and "water is a liquid" and "other countries exist" and so forth.
This is absolutely true, but it's a feedback loop rather than a waterfall process - a conceptual framework gives you something to hang the facts off, which makes it easier to think about the concepts, which gives you more places to hang facts off... I've spent a lot of time learning facts using spaced repetition, and I've learned the hard way that cards for which I have no use or context quickly become leeches. Wozniak's first rule of effective spaced repetition is Do Not Learn What You Do Not Understand (https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules).
I think you have this backwards. I was made to memorise national capitals at school (and my bête noir, English county capitals), and sure, I could remember the famous ones like Berlin and Beijing but not the more obscure ones like Majuro or Maputo. What made a difference, years later, was watching Geography Now on YouTube, which does a 10-30 minute video on every country in the world (they're currently up to Trinidad and Tobago). Once I know a bit more about the country, I have something to hang the bare facts of its location, capital and flag on, not the other way round.
Agree. And not only that, elementary-aged students are frequently (judging from my own interaction with them at least) *hungry* for facts about things. It's the kid who can tell you everything about dinosaurs or trucks or whatever. They're at an age where most of them are sponges for facts.
You can't critically think about things where you don't know the foundation. And having context knowledge (which comes from repeated exposure, mostly) is critical to even *understanding what's being talked about*. I had students who would deadlock on problems because they didn't understand basic words even when those words were entirely filler. They could do the problem if it was phrased differently (throwing a football vs firing a gun, same ballistics problem, just different context) so it wasn't incapacity with the subject matter. But it was basic "I don't know anything about the real world" lack of context. And if you don't learn it when it's easiest, it's way harder to cram in later.
Learning to "see through" the irrelevant words to the common maths underneath is a *huge* part of learning maths, especially at school level. Was the problem that they didn't understand that bullets behave like very fast footballs (lack of object-level knowledge), or that they didn't have that habit of generalisation? The latter is a definite (and learnable) skill.
IIRC, the actual problem was something about dropping something from a plane (vs throwing it from the top of a building) and the word that caused utter blockage was some (irrelevant) part of a plane. I often said that the hardest part of physics (and chemistry) *wasn't* the actual math or science. It was the reading. Because most of the time, that was the core blocker. If you boiled down the problem for them, they could (mostly) do it. Or at least start. But they were either such slow readers or had so tiny a vocabulary that they'd lock up just trying to parse the english words of the questions themselves.
But both of those problems (object-level knowledge) and the inability to generalize were quite common. Especially the latter. It was as if some kids just had boxes for things. THIS happens in math class, THAT happens in science, etc. Or even worse--when I was a grad student teaching at college (pre-med Physics I, aka basic algebra-based mechanics), I did a problem as an example (hitting a baseball over a fence) and told them "this will be on the test." It was, except I changed the words to "football" and "goal". But the underlying problem was identical. Many people who could do the first problem absolutely failed to even start the second. Because they'd memorized the problem statement verbatim and so their pattern matching just failed if you changed even one small, irrelevant detail.
So you really need both parts. And the ability to abstract (generalization, but more) seems to be really really hard for some people. Those who had it found physics really easy. Those who didn't, floundered. In high school, it seemed to just "turn on" at some point for many kids. They'd be incapable as sophomores in Chemistry, but by the time they took Physics the next year, their brains had turned on and it was, if not easy, at least tolerable.
> THIS happens in math class, THAT happens in science, etc.
I have very very little autobiographical memory, I can barely remember what I did last week, but here’s one thing stuck with me:
The main subjects we had when we began school were “writing” — where we started with stuff like straight lines, slanted lines, loops and such, and the advanced to letters and short words – and “math” — which mostly meant learning the digits, then one-digit addition and so on. I imagine that’s how it goes everywhere, but I don’t really know, so take it as context.
Anyway, one of the very few memories I still have from a very young age is when, somewhere in second or third grade, the *math* teacher started writing *words* on the blackboard for the first time. (It was probably some problem statement like “I have X apples, etc”.) I can still remember the shock, and turning to my desk-mate and asking in bewilderment “There’s writing in math class?!”
If you are going to learn a foreign language, I know of no substitute for memorizing vocabulary, memorizing grammar rules, memorizing the exceptions.
If you are learning Latin, and you strike up a conversation with an Ancient Roman, you can't be constantly thumbing through lists of words because you can't remember the word for "fish sauce".
Vocabulary, yes. Grammar...sort of. I learned Spanish in school for 5 years (and didn't take it seriously) and then Russian "on the streets" (limited formal study, especially around the alphabet, but mostly just talking to people). And my Russian was (comparing peaks) WAY better than my Spanish ever was. In fact, I'd say I spoke better Russian after 2 months in-area than I ever did Spanish, despite living (as a child) in Spanish-speaking areas. Why? Constant immersion and needing to use it to communicate.
But yes, there's a lot of memory work involved in doing just about anything worth doing. Some doesn't have to be list-based memorization (which I hate doing)--learning a new programming language (syntax, standard library, common library routines, etc) is mostly about doing and context, but it's all memory work. You can't get away from it.
1) Memorization of simple facts about the world is underrated. Where is Brazil? What continent is it on? Where is the Amazon? Why is the Amazon important or interesting? These types of general knowledge facts require a basic knowledge base about the world, and arguing that people can simply Google every fact or question will not work.
2) There is only “sort of” a maximum amount of arithmetic that an average 8 year old can learn. American children are quite behind the rest of the world in math, on average. It is simply not possible that American kids are genetically inferior to the rest of the world in mathematical ability. Thus, (a) our kids could be much more facile with arithmetic, and earlier (in my son’s relatively wealthy, suburban classroom, there were still children in the 5th grade who were not 100% on their times tables!), and (b) we could move much faster in math for many children, if not the average. (c) homework is quite likely to help with almost all the tasks that develop quick facility — problems like times tables. In some sense, we know that this is true, because cultures that drill a lot of problems get very good at these types of activities (Asian countries, for example), and they develop these skills quite broadly, as well.
The Amazon is in Seattle and it delivers crap I don't need directly from the internet to my front door :)
(I was in an "advanced placement" program in elementary school and they didn't even try to teach us multiplication/division until we were in ~4th grade. Then again, the insistence that arithmetic is the first and most important kind of math is weird? We could be throwing calculus and logic at kids much younger and leaving the times tables until they're old enough to understand how they're useful.)
My kid is advanced in math. I introduced him to basic concepts of calculus like limits and derivatives and relationships beteeen distance, speed and acceleration. he finds them interesting but without a strong fundamentals in algebra you can’t put them together.
Do I disagree that you can push those fundamentals off and introduce higher concepts usefully without them. You can only scratch the surface and then you’re stuck without deeper fundamentals.
I guess I feel like arithmetic is also just scratching the surface, except it does it in a boring and unnecessarily painful way (especially the rote memorization of tables part). Understanding concepts like rate of change even without the algebra loops in well with kid-level science projects and, like you said, they're *interesting*. Basically the entire reason I like math now and liked it as a kid is that it leads to interesting places. Plus, I feel like even a 10-minute introduction to calculus would help kids understand why they're being asked to memorize a billion facts about parabolas.
Then again, I'm not a teacher and I don't have a huge amount of experience with kids. I could totally be wrong! Most of this comes from my own experience learning math. (Which reminds me, another thing we could be doing a lot more is math competition style logic problems. I was never particularly good at them, but I have fond memories of math club and they're a good challenge for advanced students.)
Oh, and if you haven't shown your kid Vi Hart's "doodling in math class" series you totally should - she's awesome, and any kid who can get the basics of calculus can follow her math videos. I think I was introduced to them at 11ish?
Sure, Algebra comes before the advanced stuff, but algebra has very little dependence on arithmetic. One is in trouble if they can't do times tables accurately at all, but drilling for speed seems largely pointless.
I disagree pretty strongly about the basics being delayable. Last year I taught precalculus and watched many students struggle with being hamstrung by being unable to do basic manipulations of fractions and distribution
EDIT: Part of the problem is that there are actually only so many different kinds of word problems that you can ask (and hope that the students will be able to answer). If your students couldn’t even do basic things like multiply, there would be even less
This. Or even basic things like recognizing that 2*10 = 20. I had students pull out their calculator to divide small numbers ending in 0 (like 100) by 10. And not being able to do it. Or who insisted that (1/2 + 1/2) == (1/4). As premeds in college. And if the calculator gave them something weird (because they forgot a parentheses, for instance), they'd not recognize it as weird at all. Had some tell me that the drift speed of electrons in a wire under current (usually ~1 cm/s or so) was either ~10^-45 m/s or ~10^20 m/s. And had no clue why either of those was nonsense. Because they had no number sense and were blindly writing down what their calculator said.
Basic arithmetic serves to give you a number sense. It also lets you see patterns because you can group and ungroup things without mental effort.
People who are good at math frequently favor math that delves into “deeper explanations” and “why”? This is, in my view, totally misguided. Every functioning adult in a developed nation needs to be able to perform certain mathematical tasks, which include taking percentages, working with fractions, reading graphs, etc. in order to fully participate in a democratic society, but also to even understand basic consumer finances, business, insurance, etc. They do not need to understand “why” any of these techniques work — they need to be able to reliably produce the right answer to “what is 6*7?”, “an item is $60 and is 33% off, how much will it cost?”, “a recipe calls for 2/3 of a cup of flour. You are doubling the recipe. How much flour should be used in doubled version?” My students (in college) routinely misunderstand percentages, compounding, etc. Many students in many High Schools in America have trouble with questions like the ones above, and they are necessary for everyone.
Would it be useful to some students (likely the most interested/advanced) to have some exposure to interesting concepts from advanced mathematics at younger ages to see where things were going? I’m open to that idea. But I think this overstates how much intrinsic interest there is in these concepts. Well-chosen word problems in general make the problems relevant. All word problems are more difficult than “bare” problems, however, and thus there is a tradeoff while students are learning. One of the skills that we would most like students to develop in math is the ability to translate words into equations.
Yes. This weekend, Nikki Haley put up a tweet saying that inflation was 67.2% this year:
"The graphic said the price of hot dogs had increased by 15.6%, soda by 13.2%, condiments by 11.9%, ice cream by 9.6%, bread by 8.7% and watermelon by 8.2%.
After these six items, the graphic summed everything up by saying that the total increase was 67.2%."
Yes: she added the percentage increase of each item to get the overall inflation rate. And, yes, the tweet was soon deleted because it was so incredibly wrong. But I'm torn between thinking that her staff actually made this mistake and thinking that the staff thought that enough voters would be swayed by it that they didn't care.
I think the pandemic has given us a very good example of why every citizen needs to understand what a derivative is in order to participate in society. I've watched many people have unbelievably hard times grasping ideas like "the number of covid cases is going up, but it's going up more slowly than it was in the past and that means something about the world".
As for the "why", I don't think we need to, like, *test* kids on why things work. But kids love knowing how things work! They're little scientists who love to pick apart systems and solve puzzles. All I want is for kids to grow up with an understanding that there *is* a reason why math works and for some of that reasoning to be available if they're interested in exploring it.
> People who are good at math frequently favor math that delves into “deeper explanations” and “why”?
After you have mastered the basics, it becomes interesting to talk about more abstract stuff. That doesn't mean that teaching the abstract stuff before the basics is a good idea! It's the other way round; having mastered the basics allows you to discuss the abstract stuff meaningfully.
Trying to teach the abstract stuff first would encourage kids to "memorize the teacher's password", because that's pretty much the only thing they can do with the abstract stuff at the moment.
Now, before someone generalizes this too far, it makes sense to explain some "why" right after the basics were explained. For example, if I teach kids addition, and they notice that e.g. 7+5 gives the same result as 5+7, we can discuss this interesting fact. (Discuss it using the kids' vocabulary; avoid words like "commutative".) But we should discuss this after they noticed the fact, not before; and definitely not before they learn addition.
My point was that we do far too much of this right now in America. Kids learn 3 ways to multiply 3 x 3 digit numbers, they learn about commutivity as you said (even without the word), etc. This is all actually irrelevant to becoming a functioning, productive adult, and is actually completely uninteresting to 99.9% of students (and parents) who simply want to know how to quickly and accurately get the correct answer to problems that they will encounter in everyday life. We should make math, in particular, more interesting by first drilling basic concepts to mastery, then embedding them into more interesting word problems. Advanced students only can learn theory and abstraction. All students can learn theory that is necessary for the next necessary concepts (e.g., cannot ignore distributive property if we want to teach algebra). There is way, way too much focus right now on “why” and not enough on getting the right answers.
Same thing, by the way, in writing. Teachers no longer reliably teach the “5 paragraph expository essay”, on the grounds that it is “too formulaic” or “too limiting”, etc. Know what? 95%+ of my students would have their writing improved if they wrote using a formula. Their problem is that they haven’t been taught basics of grammar, style, organization, etc. It is the same problem. Too much complexity. Introduction culminating in a thesis sentence. Supported by exactly 3 points, covered in 3 paragraphs. Conclusion paragraph. Teach kids to write that way. The 5% top writers will learn to deviate from that, and they will exceed the constraints of the system. For the rest, practice, feedback, constraints, and more practice is good.
Not *optimal* — to be clear. For optimal, send your kids to a $30-40,000 / year private school (or even better, an even more expensive boarding school like Exeter or Andover), provide private tutoring, or be fortunate enough to have the educational attainment to be able to pass on a legacy to them through by having one or both parents tutor the kids themselves without the need additional money.
Same, I never learned my times tables. I learned the fives and the tens and then add or subtract to get to the number I want. Memorization is not the solution for everyone.
He didn't say he can't perform basic mathematics. He said, he might be a bit slower than someone knowing them by heart on some instances. Which isn't a big deal because real mathematics don't really deal with numbers all that much. Time tables aren't mathematics, they are simple calculus; exactly the kind of problem computers/calculators are far superior to us.
Heck, I don't get my time tables straight without using some offsets; and I was doing three digit by four digit number multiplications in my head as a kid when I was bored on a long drive. I can still do it in mere seconds. And I passed fermi approximation tests with flying colors when the (German) army was evaluating my logical thinking skills.
Having a good feel for mathematics has little to do with being able to learn lots of trivial calculus fast. The reason I still didn't learn the complete set of timetables is that I'm a lot more efficient using all the little shortcuts I've accumulated to do calculus in my head. If needed, I can multiply two ten digit numbers in my head accurately. It's a useless skill though, as it will take me in the order of several minutes to do so; and take only seconds to type into a calculator.
That being said: making kids practice calculus a lot in elementary school is a good thing. One doesn't get comfortable with numbers without a lot of practice ... and COVID has taught us that we can't have a substantial amount of citizens who can't even calculate percentages, let alone understand probabilities without major drawbacks for society...
> He didn't say he can't perform basic mathematics. He said, he might be a bit slower than someone knowing them by heart on some instances. Which isn't a big deal because real mathematics don't really deal with numbers all that much. Time tables aren't mathematics, they are simple calculus; exactly the kind of problem computers/calculators are far superior to us.
It's a joke. I am also a math major who has failed to solve 1+1=2 in a timely manner (the next class period after solving an integral that nobody else in my class did).
The biological child of people who weren't very attentive, motivated parents doesn't have genetics that promote being highly attentive and motivated toward challenging tasks?
In fact he was an adopted child, and early on identified as “gifted” in elementary school. So this is truly a case of nurture over nature. We saw how neglected he was during school, he was the epitome of “latch key kid”.
How old is your child? If he's in high school, and if you're really worried about how much he's learning, and in particular if your child also wants to learn more, you could send him to a tutor. You'd have to make sure to find a good one, who will ensure the work is rewarding. This won't work if your son doesn't also want it - if your son resents it, he will put in less effort at school and learn less than if you hadn't tried. I would suggest asking your son if he wants a tutor in one or two subjects of his choice, if your aim is to give your son proficiency in a subject that he will find valuable.
If there are skills you want your son to learn, I would be surprised if school subjects were the best way to teach them. If you want to teach him a work ethic, encourage him to take a position of responsibility in a club, or to start his own club, or to volunteer somewhere that the volunteers get some independence. If you want him to learn to communicate, suggest he does debating or Toastmasters. If you want him to learn logic and reasoning, start a project with him.
Another potential confounder is that incompetent teachers almost certainly will either assign far too much or far too little homework. My own homework requirements were much more reasonable than those of my friend's kids, for example.
Speaking personally, I found it useful in some subjects, not useful in others. It depends on what you are given and how much of it there is to do. I think it made a lot more sense in the context of classes where they said "OK, we have this much work to do, and it's due tomorrow." If you finished in class, you finished in class - nothing wrong with that.
in junior high?!? that type of "homework" is important to get very young kids to practice their fine motor skills - colouring within the lines is a skill, and being able to hold one's hand steady is generalisable and actually important to day to day life - but to a teenager?!?
From a quick glance at the Nawaz and Welbourne study, it seems that they didn't look at performance in classes other than the algebra class.
I take the default model to be that with no required homework, students will nevertheless spend some time at home trying to keep up with the material in all of their classes. When a large amount of homework is required for one class, they will do more work for that class, and do better in that class, but will do less work for other classes (there's only so much time in a day), and do worse in those classes, for zero (or negative) net benefit. If you don't measure performance in other classes, you have no evidence against this default model.
Even if the total time spent at home on school work goes up as a result of requiring homework, and overall performance in all classes improves, it would not, of course, follow that this was a net gain. Kids have other important uses of their time, which may well include work on projects unrelated to the classes they are taking, but which would be considered "academic" work if it happened to have been assigned in class (eg, reading novels).
That's an interesting point, but where is this "default model" coming from? You're claiming K-12 students will voluntarily spend significant time reviewing material (other than cramming for tests)?? I maaaaybe knew people in college who would have done that, but everyone I knew in college was a total nerd, myself included.
I'm taking it to be the model that they have to refute if they want to show that homework is beneficial - not the model that is most likely to actually be true, a priori.
They instead seem to be assuming that students don't do anything useful at home other than required homework, and then try to show a benefit if you make that assumption.
It’s so sad that we have almost no good data on this, despite the massive amount of time spent on it. My prior is that if it’s a skill (math, writing, analyzing arguments, probably reading), then everything else being equal time spent practicing it makes you better. The biggest confound is that a lot of homework is busywork, at least in elementary school.
It seems like edtech should help us get more data points like the algebra study more easily. Hope there’s more data out there that we just don’t know about yet.
Wait, this is really all the literature??? We have education departments at every university and this seems like a really easy thing to do randomized studies on.
Have you seen [1]? They differentiate elementary school, high school and middle school and also look at the students homework quality (rated by teachers) as possible moderator.
I was personally surprised that things worked out so well in this study because I found the program they tested to be buggy and annoying. But I guess it was better than the alternative in this study.
Well, good news! These studies are typically not performed by education departments. It's typically done by your local psychology department.
I think the reason these studies are of low quality is (a) bla bla bla everything is terrible in social sciences but also (b) it's actually quite hard to measure this stuff. Every researcher agrees that it's difficult to isolate the effect of homework in a dataset. It's hard to know what is happening at home. Changes in homework policy also change what happens in the classroom. The home environment matters for all this. There are non-learning variables involved here, including motivational ones and family ones. Also, homework can have negative effects (especially in the younger years) that counteract any positive ones.
I don't think our reaction should be "oh this is so easy to measure, edu departments are dropping the ball." I think what we should takeaway is "seemingly simple educational methods are hard to measure."
> it's difficult to isolate the effect of homework in a dataset. It's hard to [...]
I guess it’s true that given a dataset, it’s hard to isolate the effect of stuff in it if the dataset wasn’t assembled with the purpose of isolating that specific effect.
But randomization is pretty well known a the solution to “how to make a dataset to isolate an effect”. And sure, you can’t double-blind homework, but Scott had trouble finding even one ambiguously-randomized study. And “education” has a ridiculously reliable stream of research subjects, everyone is more-or-less forced to do it for decades, you have a very regular crop of new subjects yearly, and the state has a lot of control on it. Sure there are confounders and other difficulties, but what research subject doesn’t?
It’s like complaining that “it’s hard to use agriculture to feed everyone, because there are pests and such that eat your crop”, when in fact nobody ever attempted to use a plow or sow anything, let alone investigate if something like pesticides might exist (except that one guy seems to have tried to score the earth with a stick, but nobody’s sure if he did it on the entire field or something).
I agree with all of this, I just interpreted the earlier comment to which I replied as being about research performed by education departments themselves, which they DO do _somewhat_ (if even more terribly than basically every other social science subject/area).
I've had a teacher friend tell me that homework in elementary school is useless. But as someone who spends an hour a night helping a kindergartener and first grader with homework, I'll be annoyed if it doesn't help.
I don't doubt that the material is better ingrained in their minds having done homework. However, whether that has lasting importance is another question. They'll eventually learn reading, writing, and arithmetic with or without homework.
One-on-one helping a child with homework is completely different to assigning homework and forgetting about it. If the homework is something really unimportant, maybe skipping it is fine (your child will be fine if they don't have enough practice gluing paper), but if you're explaining concepts to your child and they're internalising them, then ipso facto they're learning skills that will help them in school the next day.
Either they are capable of understanding it or they aren't. If they aren't, explaining it is a waste of time and a stressor. If they are, they will do just as well in the long term.
And 'help them in school the next day'? Good lord.
Have you ever tried to explain something to a child trying to do homework, in a one-on-one setting? Most students have more than enough raw intellect to understand most of their syllabus. It’s just that their worksheets are presented in a confusing way, and once someone explains what it means, they can do it. Or it’s scary, and they don’t realise that if they just do it, it’s easy. Or it’s something like reading, which is just a matter of practice but which lots of students don’t do for fun, so they benefit from someone sitting there and watching them do it. It’s not all students and all subjects, but if you start in primary school it’s a lot of students.
And yes, in maths at least, basically everything builds on something else, so there’s a lot of overlap between questions on successive days.
"Have you ever tried to explain something to a child trying to do homework, in a one-on-one setting?"
I spent 6 years as a tutor and test prep instructor and I've been a teacher in three subjects for 13 years so um, yeah. I've spent thousands of hours more time on this than any non-teacher you have in mind.
If I were doing this I might is a hot control or comparison with tutoring. Most tutoring and time spent with a tutor is essentially 'doing homework' and/or working through sets of problems. Especially if one were to look at tutoring centres vs scores...this could be a good approximation of how much 'practice makes perfect'. Though you'd be hard pressed to not be swamped with bias fo who goes to tutoring. But with a bit of hand waving statistics one could compare similar SES kids who get tutoring vs those who don't to see if practices helps.
Another way, which I'm surprised to see is missing, is to look at homework completion rates and scores. Few teachers bother to do this consistently, but there are some who collect and mark all homework as part of a homework score. This happens a lot more in Maths or Science classes than in something like english or history but can be found all over if homework is a formal part of their summative grade.
I found it was a good opener and I'd have a 'do now' problem at the start of class and/or I'd have them do a quick peer marking to swap their homework and mark each other based on answers I'd put on the board (with some QC from me). Then I'd collect that to have them do the marking for me and get the valuable experience of engaging in marking. This sort of actual homework submission is a decent proxy for 'practice' and better than time spent. If a kid spends 5 minutes per problem or 1 minute per problem because they are smarter/already know it etc. who cares? The main thing is the number of practice problems they completed, in my view.
And they would be a good method to compare if completing x% of practice sets with x% accuracy helps or not using their marked homework submissions. So yea I'd think to look at homework completion rates of a given band of high/middle/low achievers and their homework completion rates to show effort and the scores they get in that homework to show mastery.
e.g. If two students gets a 60/100 on their prelim test at the start of the school year, then one does 80% of their homework with 90% accuracy and the other does only 20% of their homework with 90% accuracy....what will their final exam results be? Will that extra practice by the 80% homework effort kid result in a higher score than the other kid who clearly didn't practice as much?
Time spent is always going to be fraught with incredible inaccuracies akin to people self reporting their dietary/caloric intakes...only worse since it relies on children to report timespans.
Another point too...longer school days....what do students do with longer school days? They practice more and are given more time to read or do what would otherwise be homework.
Most studies show longer school days are better for test scores...is this not a good proxy to answer your question as well? Not on 'homework' as a concept of doing work at home, but in terms of if practice makes perfect / if repetition helps learning.
With a tutor you have a person who can correct your mistakes and give you pointers when you are stuck.
If you dump a bunch of homework on a child, either they can do it (in which case it's not very useful) or they can't (in which it is not useful at all). It implicitly relies on having someone to help out when the child is stuck, so it's essentially outsourcing education to parents.
In first grade, my mother helped me with my homework, which was mostly reading oriented. One day, my teacher made fun of a student saying their mother probably helped them with their homework (which, assuming my memory is accurate, and it might not be, was a horrible thing for that teacher to do). After that, I decided to do my homework myself. I did a poorer job, but at least knew it was my own work.
Whether I actually learned anything and whether the homework was actually helpful, hurtful, or neutral are different questions.
> either they can do it (in which case it's not very useful) or they can't (in which it is not useful at all)
That’s silly, there are lots of things between those two extremes.
They might be able to do *some* of it, and not other parts. This is useful because they (and, hopefully, their teacher) can learn which part they should explain again.
They might be able to do “all” of it but with mistakes in *some* parts, which is useful because (see above). Also it’s likely they’ll do *fewer* mistakes after practicing.
They might be able to do all of it, but parts of it they might do easily and parts of it they might need to struggle with and maybe look at their notes or books, or even ask their friends, which is useful both because (see above) and because struggling and looking at the material *can* teach them both that struggling or cooperation can help you succeed *and* help them learn the parts that weren’t easy at first.
They might also be able to do it all, but slower or with more effort than others, and after practicing they will (almost certainly) do it faster and with less effort than before. Speed is not always essential, but it’s not great if it takes you five minutes to figure out how to split 15 bucks to two people and you’re tired afterwards, even if you *can* do it eventually.
Now, I didn’t like homework either, and it’s almost certain that it’s less helpful for some people and some situations than other things, and it’s obvious that you can have too much of it, or that *what* the homework is matters and you can easily assign stupid homework. But just saying that it’s always useless and it obviously can’t do anything is silly.
The teacher will not return to a previous problem because some kids couldn't follow the other day. It's their problem (= their parents/tutors problem). If your teachers cared about situations like this, your education was in top 5% worldwide.
Most importantly, the _kids_ won't admit they had problems because they don't care that much and they don't want to draw attention to their incompetence.
Who will check their mistakes, if the problem book often doesn't even have answers, or the answers are provided without any reasoning how they were arrived at?
Do you expect a moderately engaged child to ask friends or dig through notes for 1 out of 4 of homework assignments they have to do today? Because I'd just say "fuck it" and write whatever. A child that would do it is already a straight A student.
I agree with the importance of repetition and building the mental equivalent of muscle memory - but repetition can stabilize skills that you already have. If you barely understand what's going on during the lesson - and that's easily half of any given class - then homework is completely useless without a tutor or a parent to guide you.
Those all seem like problems with your particular learning environment, not homework in particular.
If teachers don’t check homework, it works worse. But if teachers don’t check that kids understood the problems they do in class, that also works worse. If they don’t check that kids understood the explanations, that also works worse. That doesn’t mean “teachers are useless”, it just means these particular teachers are crappy.
If kids won’t admit they couldn’t do some part of the homework, they also won’t admit they didn’t understand the explanation in class, or in the book, or whatever. That doesn’t mean “checking for understanding is useless”, it just means you’re not doing it.
If homework books don’t have answers, or reasoning for those answers, then maybe the teaching books also don’t have explanations, just lists of facts? Maybe even the facts are wrong? Or just aren’t any books? That absolutely does happen in practice, at least in some places. That doesn’t mean “books don’t work for teaching”, it just means you have bad books.
I personally did dig through notes to figure out and remember how to do homework, not always but sometimes. And we did with some frequency ask each other before class stuff like “how did you do X” or “what answer did you give to Y”. Those who did it were *not* straight-A students, and I *certainly* wasn’t. Although we did usually ask the straight-A students, or at least those with better grades on the subjects in question, and they helped. And in the younger grades all but the worst of my teachers checked the homework, or at least asked something like “did you have trouble with any part of the homework”, and did go back and explain parts that we missed, at least from time to time. Maybe my education was in the 5% worldwide, but if so that just means that homework is useful at least if you do education well enough to be in the top 5%.
If you barely understand what's going on during the lesson, I’d say that the lesson itself is nearly useless. Of course homework won’t help in that case. It’d be like sending kids to baseball practice without explaining what the bats are for, they’d probably kill each other.
(That said, I’m interpreting your “barely” as mostly “don’t”. If you *just* understand something, just a bit but you do understand it, then that seems like the moment where practice would be most effective, and well-chosen homework would be very useful. Of course, if you don’t choose the homework well it won’t work, but that’s true for anything.)
It wasn't generally, but in 5th grade, we had quarterly movie parties that you didn't get to attend, and had to do worksheets instead, if you had too many "demerits". (I usually ended up doing worksheets - on the one hand, I didn't get to see Atlantis... but on the other hand I learned Roman Numerals from one of those worksheets)
Math teacher here. Homework is unquestionably good for math proficiency for many students if it is the right kind and there is the right amount of it, but the problem is that some students might need 10 problems while others might need 30 so there is a danger of assigning too much for some and too little for others. My proposal is to offer a large number of homework problems, not count homework performance for the students’ grades, but guarantee that X% of the problems on the test will literally be from the homework, where the ideal value of X may vary depending on the class and subject.
I don't know what age you teach, but I find digital programs like DeltaMath perfect for homework in high school. (I typically do two DeltaMath assignments per week.) Kids can continue practicing as much as they want, it costs me very little in terms of prep time to put together a new assignment, and there are worked examples as feedback for every problem.
Seems obvious that practicing anything makes you better at it. That homework may be so poorly designed that doing it does not lead to improvement is possible but seems a different issue -- e.g. quality of teachers, of educational materials.
Personal anecdata: I did very well in almost every class that assigned homework (I have always been diligent about doing what was assigned). I did quite poorly in almost every class where homework was not assigned. This pattern repeated from middle school, through high school, undergrad and later grad school.
I know others whose results were completely uncorrelated with the amount of homework assigned and/or performed.
My guess is that the distribution is so wide, individual differences are drowned out by the inter-person variations. Or worse, the distribution might be multi-modal.
My results were pretty much the opposite. I did the minimum amount of homework I could get away with but always did quite well on tests regardless. So the more heavily weighted homework was in a class's final grade, the worse I did.
Homework is good if/when it gives children a chance to practice concepts they have not mastered. For a study to show homework to be helpful, it would need to take into account when students master material. I have four very different kids, and can not make grand sweeping statements about homework in general, but it has always been useful for each kid to practice skills until mastered.
I agree that the literature is a mess, and its messiness is frequently mentioned by researchers. I think I ended up feeling happier about the non-experimental studies than you did -- check out those Trautwein papers, I think they're starting to figure out where to look for this stuff.
Here was my conclusion: "For the youngest kids, homework matters a lot to parents but probably has less of an impact on achievement. Parents are often helpful, but sometimes it can turn into a negative experience at home. To handle that, teachers can assign higher quality assignments that won’t trigger negative interactions. Sounds tough, but OK.
For adolescents, classes that assign homework frequently are associated with more learning. But not classes that ask for more time on homework. And not classes that assign more homework that students think is more challenging. But yes classes where students think the homework is interesting or well-selected. And students reporting they put more effort into homework is associated with learning.
It sounds like teachers need to thread the needle for teens. They need to frequently assign homework that is purposeful – it can’t be busy work – but it shouldn’t be too hard. And there’s a possibility that homework isn’t really as much about practice as it is about taking the class seriously, feeling in control, taking responsibility for their own learning."
Basically: homework will be a net gain if kids actually do it. But when you're dealing with adolescents, realistically there are a lot of ways for them to get away with not actually doing it. (A lot.) Completion rates in most places aren't terrific. So the first question is, how do you get kids to do it and do it seriously? And the second is, what are the benefits of that sort of practice? I think research (along with common sense) supports the idea that there are on average benefits to kids when they do it.
For early elementary reading and math, Slavin & Madden at Johns Hopkins developed “Success for All” and.. they say there is research… maybe it’s hiding. Also it is more than a homework program, it’s class work interlocking with homework in a specific way and classrooms divided by level rather than grade. So it is not directly comparable to “homework only” but it might be something to look at.
Even if we were to accept that "homework," as some kind of undifferentiated treatment variable, has some net positive benefit, treating homework as an undifferentiated variable seems pretty useless from a pedagogical perspective. What kind of homework? For what kids? Going to what schools? Under whar kinds of conditions? As compared to what other type of intervention variable?
To build on this a bit further - I would guess that the efficacy of homework would be associated with the pedagogical paradigm of the classroom environment. Schools that focus on memorization and rote skills and didactic teaching might have a better fit with homework than schools that focus more on meta-cognitive skills and student-centered, project oriented curricula.
Between the ages of about 8-12 I had assigned homework that amounted to about an hour a week. I found it too easy and boring, just like most other schoolwork. But at that age I was messy, disorganised, terrible at time management, and good at coming up with excuses to get out of things I did not want to do. Because these things were challenges for me, it was good for me to have to a) remember to take it home, b) keep the pages clean and unwrinkled, c) initiate and complete a task I found boring and pointless, d) do this on a deadline, and e) remember to return it. My parents and teacher let me choose my own strategies to manage this, and then asked me to reflect on whether they worked - and this actually helped considerably with my organisational and task management skills, moreso than imposition of these strategies would have done. I also find it interesting that I can pinpoint things that are still issues for me (task initiation, leaving things to the last minute, losing items) back as far as early primary school.
From my memories of school, the quality and usefulness of homework varied wildly, even within the same subject ("math") and even with the same professor. My naive guess would be that repetition is differently-useful for different lessons in a way that resists sweeping generalizations, to say nothing of different students learning differently.
That said, most of my homework before the university level was crap.
On the plateau model: mathematics tends to be taught as a series of plateaus (plateaux?). You are introduced to a concept like "multiplication" or "sine function" or "Lebesgue integration" and then you work through a zillion examples until it's been thoroughly beaten into your head; you reach the plateau where you finally understand what a sine function is. Then you can move on to the next bit of mathematics, which assumes you understand the previous bit.
Unfortunately the number of examples you're obliged to work through is some constant, insufficient for the dumb kids and excessive for the smart kids. So the smart kids are bored doing the same thing over and over again while the dumb kids never quite reach the plateau and get left behind.
Some other subjects are unlike this. You don't need to understand the history of Ancient Greece before you can understand the history of Ancient Rome. Furthermore, while you can reach the "sine function" plateau pretty easily, no high school student will reach the "Ancient Greek History" plateau. So you can spend an unlimited number of hours studying ancient history, if you like, understanding it more and more deeply, although possibly not in any way that can show up on a high school exam.
As (somewhat of) a 'mathematician', I am very confident in asserting that almost no one, even theoretical physicists, 'understands' mathematics anyways!
And I'm somewhat 'pissed' that 'school' almost ruined history for me. I LOVE history now – now that I can just learn what I want when I want instead of being forced to, e.g. memorize dates and the names of rulers/generals/whatevers.
My primary experience of homework is that it contributes to my performance in classes if it's one of two categories:
1. homework that strongly resembles material on the test
2. homework that covers information that won't come up in class
Type 1 homework is a waste of time for every purpose except improving my GPA.
Type 2 homework is actively useful (obviously, because I wouldn't have learned that information otherwise). This has been true for my entire life - I remember independent learning assignments as early as first or second grade, and I've always found them more useful than lecture-based instruction. My capacity for self-teaching has improved since I was six, and I can go longer without support/feedback now, but the basic principle is still the same. This is probably less useful if you have unmedicated ADHD or otehrwise aren't much of an independent learner.
(Unfortunately, type 2 homework tends to correlate with useless busywork during class time. The most notable example I've run into was high school AP bio, which was a "flipped class". 100% of my time outside of class - mostly reading the textbook - was useful; 90% of my time in class was spent doing repetitive worksheets or listening to the teacher repeat the textbook in smaller words. Then again, I probably only did 30% of the assigned homework. It was a weird year.)
I guess there's a third category, which is homework with the goal of improving fluency/speed at some task. Teachers love to give this kind of homework, but they're often remarkably bad at designing it. IMO, this sort of homework should include lots of very short problems, instant feedback, and enough surprises that making an excel spreadsheet/python program that solves the problem for you is more time and effort than doing it by hand. Also, my experience this literally only works for symbol manipulation problems (eg the kind of math that engineers do/basic proofs/sudoku). I have experienced many painful homework assignments that attempt to turn interesting real-world problems into fluency drills - this is both painful and probably actively detrimental to learning.
But if Type 1 homework improves your GPA sufficiently that you're able to access a competitive program or receive free money that covers some or all of your tuition...surely the fact that that's "all" the Type 1 homework is good for is no knock against it.
Those are all 0-sum gains. Type 1 homework gets set because it benefits that teacher and that class relative to everyone else, but if everyone sets an hour a day of it, all the students pay an hour of their time and everyone's relative ranking is unchanged. All of those programs and scholarships are in practice based on rankings (even the ones with absolute grade thresholds will quickly adjust those if needed, because the constraint is a ~fixed pool of money)
Sure, but just because you're involved in a zero-sum competition, it doesn't mean that a certain kind of practice for that practice is "useless busywork".
If you spend an hour practicing for a math test and become better-prepared for that test, and the results of that test are going to determine your opportunities in life, your time hasn't been wasted just because all of your peers also practiced for that math test.
Goodhart's law. Students optimizing for 4.0s are no longer optimizing for thinking or learning. Teachers optimizing for good grades on their tests are no longer trying to teach students how to think. Institutions optimizing for accepting students with good grades are no longer optimizing for accepting students who can learn and perform.
So as Thor says it's 0-sum, but also it's 0-sum in a way that rewards memorization, neuroticism, and guessing the teacher's password. IMO, that actively causes a certain class of students to lose out (smart and thoughtful, but not willing or able to do the required rote memorization).
I would be surprised to learn that the students who optimize for perfect grades end up learning *less* than the rest of the class. I think there's a bit of a counterculture myth that the gifted-program, ADHD-juggling "chaotic good" student is somehow doing a superior intellectual thing by blowing off his homework and making academic trench runs on instinct (speaking as a former member of that tribe, to be clear).
Like, sure, the ability to bang out scales and boring technical studies on your instrument doesn't mean you have any artistic talent, but the top ranks of professional musicians are disproprortionately (entirely?) people who woodshedded their instrument until their fingers bled, and who either know their scales and studies perfectly or would not find their creativity in any way hampered by a request to hammer out a scale on an instructor's demand.
Maybe this wasn't clear, and I'm sorry about that. The sort of type 1 homework I'm imagining *literally does not contain useful knowledge*.
A particularly egregious example is a chemistry class I took a few years ago: I was assigned to spend time working on a website called ALEKS that was supposed to help me practice concepts. The way they did this was very simple and cheap to code: they would write three word problems for each topic with slots for quantities (eg if X moles of gas is heated from Y to Z degrees celsius, what is the percent change in volume?), then generate random numbers to fill in those slots. They would then serve you these questions multiple times until you got approximately five in a row correct. They would then assess your understanding of the topic... by giving you the exact same questions again with different random numbers.
As a student, this system is very clearly not incentivizing you to understand the ideal gas law. It does not care whether you understand the ideal gas law. All ALEKS wants is for you to come up with the right number by applying the exact same steps to the exact same problem every time.
So yes, at the end of the class I learned something, and I probably learned it better than most of my peers. But the thing I learned was not the ideal gas law, and it was not "how to solve problems", and it definitely wasn't how to understand the principles of chemistry, it was "how to make ALEKS think I know things as fast as possible so it will go away".
Moving back to the way this can make it harder for smart students to succeed, type 1 homework occurs when a teacher first decides what's going to be on the test, then tries to teach students how to take that test. It's the equivalent of a music teacher deciding that they're going to test their students' performance of a sonata by having them play one scale, then asking them to drill just that scale over and over. By the end of the class the students are probably really good at that scale, and sometimes that's genuinely useful, but it's doing them a disservice to then walk out and claim that students who got a 4.0 in "playing D major" are actually playing a sonata.
And say you're a college admissions officer or scholarship application reviewer for a music program. You get to look at students' grades, but you don't get to listen to them actually play music. If there's a lot of type 1 homework going into those grades, you have a problem - you don't know which students got good grades because they're good at music and also drilled in scales, and which ones only drilled in scales. The problem isn't that the best musicians are pushed out of the top, it's that your test no longer has the *sensitivity* to distinguish them from the people who are only good at drills.
Agreed: the horror of guessing the 'agreed' answers in GCSE and A'level English exams in the UK. At one time, 1980 I recall, English Lit. concerned the exploration of one's own ideas in relation to a text/the writing of one's own text. Now the demands are very, very specific thereby stultifying individual writing development.
Is the batch of no homework students pulling down the average that much in the final study cited? I'll gladly take the side of "some math homework is useful, and more is technically better on average, but less still represents better than average progress" if it isn't. Less is definitely more of my time back.
Challenge: imagining arbitrary resources were available, but no more cooperation from teachers, students and parents than you'd normally expect, how would you design a study to effectively look at this? How would you control for teaching styles/techniques/skill? Circumstances in student homes? Quality of homework curriculum? Alignment of homework type with subject matter (Algebra isn't Geography isn't writing)? How do you isolate variables we can't agree how to measure?
We struggle to assess teacher quality in general, or genuine variation in student ability. In that context, figuring out how effective homework is seems like determining how good a chisel is without knowing the skill of the sculptor or the quality of the marble.
The post already mentions all of these considerations, but let me come out with an anecdote.
I was a somewhat gifted student, finishing comprehensive school (9th grade) with the highest possible grades (outside of P.E. and art classes, anyhow) even though the last time I did any work whatsoever beyond showing up was during the first grade - before I figured out I didn't need to do any. I continued on this route in high school and while I maintained top grades in some subjects, my grades in mathematics, physics and chemistry tanked (more specifically, calculus was my breaking point and upon being introduced to the topic, I received a failed grade), and I dropped out of school. I've since continued studying in university and I'm receiving good grades, but this time I'm doing the bare minimum and subjectively, I would expect to fail most courses if I didn't do that much.
What I gather from my experience is the following: Homework is useful, but only up to a point dependent on the individual and the topic. For me, at least as far as the granularity of school grading system goes, there was no use up until high school, but at high school level failure to do any work was sufficient to drop the math grades from excellent to failed. Presumably, other students might find homework to be the difference between success and failure at an earlier or later stage than I did. But perhaps more crucially, it has the additional effect of building up work ethic: to this day I find myself unable to cope with a workload of doing more than half of the number of courses expected of students, and I can only assume this is because I never did any work prior to university. This alone seems like a good justification to have mandatory homework, although it would be better still if homework wasn't seen by some students as arbitrary punishments handed out in child prisons, but gifted students could skip grades to the point where doing homework is actually required of them.
As an addendum anecdote: for me, in maths and physics, the point at which merely turning up stopped being sufficient and homework beyond the assessed assignments became necessary was grad school.
(P.s. In school I struggled with essay writing and did end up practicing a lot for the final exam, but that was to get the grades for a scholarship and I might have been fine to pass without that work? my issue with essays is more psychological than a matter of understanding the material)
The way the problem is posed (like so many of these sorts of reviews) is problematic.
What matters is not just how well homework does (or does not work) cross some aggregate of all children, but what works optimally, ideally for each child and, when that is not practical, for whatever subgroups are easily isolatable.
I would say, for example, that my experience (unlike Scott's) is that I learned a lot from homework, more so than I would have from whatever the alternative on offer is (either "just listen in class" or "read the chapters of the textbook"). Some of that may be my idiosyncratic personality and "learning style", some may be my school, but *I* would be very reluctant to throw out homework until I'm presented with what looks (to me) like a better alternative.
Certainly some (not all, not most, but some) of that homework was a waste of time insofar as I learned things I didn't much care about at the time and have forgotten. But that's a different claim from the efficacy of homework; and I'm not sure how we resolve it given that kids (even at college age!) often are really not sure what they will ultimately find interesting and helpful (let alone secondary social goals like insisting on the teaching of the "second" language in a bilingual society).
To add to what I said, in addition to the "do different people learn differently" axis, there is also the "different subjects" axis.
I think few (especially serious practitioners) would deny that you learn math, physics and programming by doing. Lectures are helpful, reading is helpful, but nothing can replace doing in the sense of one damn problem after another.
I think most people who have studied a second language would say the same thing.
Writers seems to say the same thing, that you learn writing BY writing, not by reading, not matter how much you enjoy that.
So ultimately what's left?
Are we arguing that homework for history (which, at least in my case, was mainly writing essays) is a waste of time that does not help you learn or think about the material? Seems a stretch.
Or are we arguing for more choice over what subjects fourteen year olds should study? Maybe so, maybe not, but that's a different argument.
Or are we arguing for no homework until 14, with the expectation that kids who have never done this before (and based on claims that it's not useful for 8 yr olds) will now easily adapt to the rigors and demands of homework? Sounds like crazy talk to me.
It's one thing to argue that we have too much credentialization and "book-learning" forced on much of the population for whom it's inappropriate. I'd agree with that. But
(a) I think everything about homework, both the content and the self-discipline, are required for those who do want to go into academic/professional type jobs and
(b) deciding at a young age who should go down which path is hardly trivial. Again, regardless of whether it was, in some sense, optimal, this has been derided in so many countries, whether the cutoff primarily affected a particular ethnicity (eg Australia or Native Americans) or a particular class (eg UK Tripartite system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_System_of_education_in_England,_Wales_and_Northern_Ireland ).
Realistically, I don't give a damn how you structure it in terms of color-blind race-blind gender-blind income-blind testing at various ages, different groups will be routed to the different streams, this will be considered unacceptable, and the fighting over it will never end. Which is exactly why we are where we are today, with the default assumption being that every kid has the potential to become a professional, and as such needs the training and self-discipline required from an early age to develop the skills and habits of such a job/lifestyle.
It's also a problem that's a little bit like classical NIMBYism - nobody's happy for *their* kid to be the one labelled as a janitor aged 11, even if they'd previously have accepted it as a sensible system. They'll always be in the majority, so the people who don't like the system will win out.
It's interesting that everyone is uncertain how well academic homework works, including myself, but I don't think anybody doubts that if one afternoon you showed a group of ten-year-olds how to throw a baseball for 40 minutes, and that night one of them went home and practiced throwing a baseball for two hours, the next day that one kid would be the most likely to have improved at throwing a baseball.
Homework *sucks*, and I personally find the prospect of inflicting it on my future children abhorrent (they have one youth, and *that's* what they're going to spend it doing?), but on a purely competitive level, those who put in the hours at any given activity are in general those you can count on to rise to the top performance-wise.
Sometimes the point of repetition in the form of homework is not to be able to answer the question at all, but to be able to answer the question quickly and easily without having to think about it. It's more like training than education; the point is to develop unconscious competence so that you can just do the task automatically. I've been a great math student, but I tend to do mental arithmetic relatively slowly; I always came up with tricks to compensate for a lack of immediate recall, so I never got to the point where I could multiply any two single-digit numbers instantly. For example, if you ask me to multiply 8 by 7, I might not remember immediately that the answer is 56, so I'll remember that 7*7 is 49 and add 7 to that to get 56. In second grade I discovered that I could calculate 13 - 7 by calculating 10 - (7 - 3) instead of by knowing that the answer was 6. When school math did become more complicated than arithmetic, being clever with numbers and manipulations was a big help, but at the level in which memorization is the fastest algorithm I didn't quite keep up.
I think it also depends on what you are targeting. Homework is good for practicing a particular action so it becomes easier, and memorizing things. I'm less convinced that it is useful for understanding concepts.
50 years ago, the ability to memorize facts and be good at executing certain repetitive action was useful in some cases (math, writing) but I would argue it is far less useful now. I think in modern society, computers/internet/automation have removed a lot of the value in memorization and mastery over repetitive tasks. The way I'm able to be a high functioning member of society is specifically by *not* memorizing things (wastes time and mental resources) or being good at repetitive tasks and instead I'm good at looking stuff up on the internet and knowing how to ask WolframAlpha good questions.
If we want children to be good at taking closed book tests, which is completely non-analogous to the modern real world, then sure, homework may help. This feels like Goodhart's Law in action though as test taking just doesn't represent reality at all.
Did they include hours watching TV while doing homework? Homework took me a long time because I did it while watching my favorite after-school TV shows.
I'm going to conjecture that homework in elementrary school has some value if it's set to "overlearn" - what non-educationalists call "practice until you can do it in your sleep" or something - basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic (particularly number bonds, times tables etc.).
When you're trying to do 3 x 14 or something like that, not having to "context switch" to work out 3 x 4 really helps, and this is consistent with cognitive load theory in psychology, which as far as I know does have good studies behind it. How do you get 3 x 4 without having to stop and think? Lots and lots of practice. Homework is one way to find extra time outside classroom hours to do that practice.
A school with no homework but a longer school day would probably do exactly the same, there's no reason why the practice has to be done at home. But it does have to be done.
From my own school experience, homework was a mixture of practicing things we'd already done in class, reading new things in preparation for next class, and busywork. The latter of course doesn't have much learning value.
Back in the dear departed days of psychedelic experiment, there was a phrase to describe the most important predictors of the experience of a proposed 'trip': Set, and setting. Set, the person's emotions and attitudes to such a possible experience. Setting, the surroundings - kind of surroundings, comfort, trust in anyone there to support you. 'Bad trips' (unpleasant or disturbing ones) could be largely avoided by personal confidence, and pleasant surroundings with trusted friends.
I suggest this is a useful way of thinking of investigating the experience ('outcome') of homework. It becomes evident that in particular 'setting' is crucial - a noisy, chaotic small apartment is not conducive to calm 'homeworking' - no matter how long spent on it. I'll bet one factor not even thought of by the investigators was hunger. I'll bet not one of them had ever feared for security of food, or indeed been hungry beyond a half hour beyond usual mealtime.
In other words, cliched experimental designs give cliched results - useless for educational technique guidance.
Thank you! I base my remarks (fortunately) not on my own experience as a kid, but on that of many families I've known - some, my own younger cousins. Plus, work as a counselor in some of the more 'challenging' parts of LA, quite a while back.
I think that unfortunately, a great deal of educational investigation is atrociously badly designed statistically, leading to useless - and hence misleading - conclusions.
I believe that absolute support, encouragement and acknowledgement of a child's potential can help them to blossom. (I recognise that sounds like it comes straight from my CV 30+ yrs ago, oh.) There are many examples of young people's experience akin to Michael's in terms of labelling, unhelpful testing and ignoring his actual potential when his fundamental needs are outside of formal education.
The causes culminating in a failure to meet so many children's basic needs are many. Children do not suffer because there's a dearth of evidence regarding basic prerequisites for a decent life. As for labelling IQ and one's abilities, in spite of ubiquitous practices, much is known about individual needs and propensities for learning stuff: maybe context is everything.
One high school I taught at gave me 'the unteachables' as I was the part-time, single-parent, outsider to the department. My classes were shoved outside of the school building into prefabs.
My GCSE pupils failed to reach 'passes' across the board in other exam subject areas but managed to get grades of 'D'/'C' and even one 'B' in English. (C, B and 'A' being the esteemed grades/acceptable towards further education). Each year the Head Teacher would remark that I had 'broken the mould' and I was highly disliked by the Heads of Dept precisely because - even though a small percentage of the work was moderated in school, around 70% was external examination - my students were considered the hopeless cases and were out-performing 'more able' students in their own classes. Also, I am strongly child-centred which is not universally true of teachers; I can be annoying:)
A guy called Ajahn Brahm (Theravada Buddhist based in Perth, Aus.) often repeats his tale of organising an anonymously marked Math exam in a London high school (he taught for a year and thought better of it!), whereupon he 'secretly' [only he and the Head Teacher held the data] streamed the children based on the results of this one examination. Over the course of the school year Brahm/whatever his pre Buddhist monk name was, proceeded to give positive attention and praise to the student who achieved the lowest examination mark. Within one year, this kid who was given attention and support, free from other teacher prejudice (they had not seen last year's results), scored at the top of the class of his peers.
The above examples sound simplistic, and yet caring about, and holding students in great esteem, plus appropriate pedagogy, seem to me to be a basis for fostering learning possibilities. We are emotions/feelings and thinkings,, all requiring care.
(My own son taught himself to read when very little, as his exhausted teacher-mother neglected to encourage his 'education' preferring to read fiction at weekends.
Not sure about that. Michael Oher's parents basically paid for him to take a bunch of online courses to get his GPA up, and there's no evidence his IQ jumped. That claim comes from Michael Lewis's book.
What probably did jump was his willingness to take an IQ test, but he almost certainly isn't in the triple digits.
Well, I looked closer. Michael Lewis said he picked up "30 points" on an IQ test, which is where I got that number, and I'd assumed he'd started at 60 or 70 because he was so dysfunctional.
But in fact, he scored an 80 IQ, which is quite good for a black kid who'd been so severely abandoned for most of his life.--just under the black average. He almost certainly didn't have much experience with the test. And then later he scored just over 100. That suggests he had a much higher than average IQ for a black kid.
So it's unlikely that his IQ actually increased in capacity, but rather that due to the stultifying environment he was raised in he had no school time to learn.
If I understand the study, "the students with more homework" did *not* do better in an absolute sense. They improved their baseline scores more.
The public policy issues with homework are almost never studied. Instead, people diddle with this nonsense as if it matters, and oh, lord, the elementary school parents talking about it! Jesus, people. Homework at that level is irrelevant, because nothing in elementary school matters, gradewise.
But the public policy issues with homework dwarf the piddling possible improvement it may or may not reveal. Some of you have mentioned this. At the high school level, the only relevant issue with homework is that it substitutes compliance for ability. It's very common for kids with high abilities to get lower grades than kids with lower abilities (and also similar abilities, which is just as idiotic).
Grades in America are a fraud, and we are now in a world where these fraudulent grades are the only legal tender for college. It's revolting. Meanwhile, people spend time and energy wondering whether a kid who counts on his fingers will get one more problem right out of fifty if he spends 30 minutes a night laboriously practicing.
Crazy. Michael, I thought your summary was fine and very clear.
Parents of elementary school children: homework is irrelevant and you shouldn't waste a single second worrying about it. If your kid doesn't understand classwork, find a shrink to see what LD he or she has.
Parents of high school kids: do whatever you can, including bribery, to get your kid to do homework. Do not make it a moral issue or a learning issue. Make it clear that it's bullshit, asinine hoops they need to jump through to keep their grades up.
If, on the other hand, your kid copies homework just to get it done, judge them severely and wonder where the hell you went wrong. The first kid is far superior.
On the third hand, if you have a kid who just does the homework even though he or she knows it's bullshit and genuinely enjoys ticking off tasks, well, they're weird but it makes life easier for you.
I don't give homework. I turn anything important into classwork. I write it about it a lot, but here's The Rules that Matter:
I. Teachers assign homework or they don't assign homework.
A. If they assign homework,
then they grade homework or they don't grade homework.
1. If they grade homework,
homework is essential to understanding or it's not.
a) If homework is directly essential to understanding,
then the homework grade is the same as the assessment grade.
b) If homework is not essential to understanding,
then the homework grade is corrupting the assessment grade.
(1) If the homework grade is corrupting the assessment grade, then the school's administration will prevent this or accept this.
(a) If the school's administration prevents grade corruption then the
public will scoff.
(b) If the schools administration accepts grade corruptions, the district will
prevent this or accept it.
(i) If the district prevents grade corruption, see I.A.1-b-(1)-(a) (ii) If the district accepts grade corruption, this is a typical school. 2. If they don't grade homework, then students won't do homework.
B. If they don't assign homework, the public will scoff, and policy makers will scowl, but that's why god created tenure.
I've always hated homework and frequently didn't do it when it was assigned. The particular details of when I would or wouldn't do it are complex.
In high school I ended up doing all the assigned math homework anyway, and in college I did much less than that. And it seems pretty clear to me that this directly impacted how much material I ended up retaining; the quality of my learning is much lower for the college material.
So I would say that yes, practice matters in math. On the other hand, I would estimate the amount of homework that's necessary to fully learn and retain "9th grade algebra" at zero. It's not at all complex and doing work further along in the curriculum will provide more than enough drill in the basics of algebra.[1]
Moving back to the topic of the post more generally, I would bring up the result that student performance in math generally tracks "exposure to math in school" pretty closely, whereas performance in other subjects (and most notably reading) does not. I find the argument persuasive that this is mostly due to the fact that students rarely do more math than they are assigned in school, whereas many students do a lot more reading than they are assigned in school.
[1] Another thing that seems obvious to me is that different people will require different amounts of practice to learn and to retain the same material.
I think that homework is important, because to me it's practice; you wouldn't say to a kid "did you learn that music piece/recipe/sport?" and have them say "Oh yeah, we did it in class" and then "well have you played the piece/cooked the recipe/played the sport?" "No need, we did it in class, I remember it!"
We see the value of practicing/trying out practical skills, I don't think mental ones are much different. For primary school, leave homework until they're older (7+) and only a little, because at that age it's (a) getting them into the habit of having a routine and doing it and (b) physical practice like writing so they get the skills.
I don't know how much homework secondary students get in America (or indeed what it's like in modern Ireland); in my time coming up to the Leaving Certificate (final year national exam for ages 17-18 school leavers) we were recommended by our teachers to do an hour per subject study every night. You could be doing 6-8 subjects, so I don't know how many people did spend 6-8 hours every night studying. But you do need *some* time studying and not just relying on "we did it in class and I remember it".
I agree that "amount of time spent on homework" does *not* correlate with "results on tests" except very crudely; good students may spend more time on homework because they are studying, and good students will probably do better on tests. But you have, as pointed out, smart students who skip or spend little time on homework, who will do well on tests anyway, and poor students who spend a lot of time on homework because it's hard for them and will do not so well.
> For primary school, leave homework until they're older (7+)
What does “primary school” mean in Ireland? For us in Romania school started (and AFAIK still does) at 7, *rarely* at 6 for children born in the autumn, early after the start of the school year. Younger than that we called it... well, not kindergarten because we don’t speak English but that’s what the word means.
(Irrelevantly, it’s interesting that our word is etymologically similar. In Romanian we say “grădiniță”, which is a diminutive of the word that means “garden”. So literally it means something like “wee garden”, but in some sense it’s close to “garden for small people”.)
(Just for clarification, I am German so that is the "your native language"-subject.)
I spent less time on homework in German (the subject, I mean) than in math but the reason was not that the German homework was less, it was actually more. I just didn't do it because it felt like it was too much and very not fun to me while math was always fun (either it was easy or it was like solving riddles designed to be easily solvable). I think another reason was that you get a lot of "I finished part of it" rewards in your head, since Math homework was usually a bunch of different tasks while German homework was usually one big essay kind of thing. I did English and French homework more regularly too and that was usually a bunch of little tasks and not one big essay.
I’m a professor, and I research (among other things) learning and the development of expertise. I think that much of the (very interesting) discussion seems to ignore or downplay comments about the quality of studies in this area. The lack of good studies on HW specifically should motivate us to rely more on theory and on related literature (and improve studies).
We have lots of studies that are more theory driven, and we do have first principles. When we ask a question like “is homework effective?” What is the assumption about when students will practice the concepts that they have been exposed to in class, if not via HW? Just theoretically, if we had a complete dataset on the exact amount of time that every student spent doing HW, is anyone hypothesizing that in elementary mathematics (say), there is no relationship between the amount of time students spend practicing a task such as adding fractions with unlike denominators and (a) their accuracy on a test of that material, and (b) their facility / speed given a consistent level of accuracy (i.e., expertise) with which they would be able to execute concepts such as these? (Controlling for other relevant factors such as ability.) In other words, is the conclusion of the “anti-HW”/“HW is useless” crowd that, given a perfect dataset with full controls (or random assignment and perfect measurement in terms of time and attention), deliberate practice on tasks like learning times tables, adding fractions, working with percentages, word problems, etc. would have *zero relationship* with expertise as measured by tests?!?
If that were true, it would be very surprising, to say the least. In laboratory experiments where people are required to learn things, practice (and attention - “deliberate practice”) and time on task are strong predictors of learning. I used mathematics as an example, but if the concept were “knowledge of history”, or “knowledge of geography”, it does not seem possible that this relationship would be zero. Learning to write well involves writing, then seeing feedback on that writing (and preferably, a chance to fix whatever errors were made, without punitive grading), etc. All of these practice opportunities cannot be fit into a class day without sacrificing instructional time.
What many commenters seem to be getting at is that much elementary school HW is a waste of time in comparison to the hypothetical HW that I have postulated (one person mentioned coloring assignments, but there are so many “silly” things, many of which are really “parent assignments”). I do agree with other commenters that some of those comments are too strong, because it implies that academic skills are the only skills that elementary school is cultivating, which is untrue.
As a final point, the academic literature in Education does not tend to be the strongest in terms of statistical or analytical rigor. As just one example, the analyses in most of the HW literature fail to account for attenuation of the focal variable due to the (gigantic) measurement error with which HW time is measured (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_dilution if this is unfamiliar to you). This is one of many similar issues that plague this kind of work, and which may or may not be affecting our conclusions.
Given the high levels of disengagement among secondary schools (Gallup survey cited below shows only 1/3 of high school students are engaged), I think of most of secondary school as "learning theater." Thus while I'm certain that deliberate practice works, and that students who engage in homework with an intention to improve their skills do improve their skills, most students (if they do homework at all) do it in the most perfunctory manner. They are not trying to learn - they are going through a tedious, meaningless ritual to try to get their parents and teachers to quit annoying them so they can get on with things they want to do (social media, gaming, watching videos, etc.)
For most students, the goal of school is to learn as little as possible while getting adequate grades to satisfy their parents or other goals (e.g. getting bonuses from their parents, maintaining eligibility for sports, not dropping out, etc.) School is only valuable for the social life it provides. Classes are an boring, annoying time between opportunities to hang out with their friends. Maybe a time to catch a nap after having stayed up most of the night online.
Gallup:
"Almost half of students who responded to the survey are engaged with school (47%), with approximately one-fourth "not engaged" (29%) and the remainder "actively disengaged" (24%).
A closer look at the data by grade level reveals a disturbing trend. Engagement is strong at the end of elementary school, with nearly three-quarters of fifth-graders (74%) reporting high levels of engagement. But similar surveys have shown a gradual and steady decline in engagement from fifth grade through about 10th grade, with approximately half of students in middle school reporting high levels of engagement and about one-third of high school students reporting the same."
Not going to argue with that. However, (a) we have a moral obligation to provide the opportunity to learn for those who wish to take advantage of it (can lead a horse to water…), (b) it isn’t clear that there are zero returns to what you are describing as “perfunctory” completion — that’s an empirical question, (c) the data you present on engagement runs counter to the data on homework/etc. Based on what you wrote, one would expect that HW would be basically useless as children get older and enter HS, whereas the data show that, if anything, HW becomes more useful as kids get older.
I think that the more general point is this: Scott’s post focused on “homework”. The broader point here is that “well-spent time on task”, meaning some degree of attentiveness given to a particular task where it is being practiced, is about the only mechanism we know of by which learning occurs. Yes, smarter people / children will need less time on a given task to pick it up, and prior knowledge permits faster integration of cognate knowledge, etc. so individual-level controls are necessary. Overall practice predicts performance. Longer school days, longer school years, etc. all predict greater achievement. Long summers cause a great deal of forgetting. These are uncontroversial findings. Homework will help to the extent that many things come together: the HW is relevant to the topic, students do the work, there is feedback on their performance, and there is some motivation (external or internal) to improve. To the extent that your data are correct, it sounds like a good argument for moving to a more European-style system in which more children enter vo-tech type HS programs and are sorted much earlier. To do that, they need to master basic skills much earlier than is typical in the USA as well.
"there is no relationship between the amount of time students spend practicing a task such as adding fractions with unlike denominators and (a) their accuracy on a test of that material, and (b) their facility / speed given a consistent level of accuracy (i.e., expertise) with which they would be able to execute concepts such as these? (Controlling for other relevant factors such as ability.)"
If you control for ability, there's no point. If homework doesn't make people who do it objectively better than those who don't, then there's not much point to it.
Scott, your post is about about the need for meaningful, systematic data and the woeful, pervasive lack of that data. Therefore, I'm going offer an anecdote from my own personal experience, which of course will totally, definitely resolve the issue once and for all (for reference, I was born in the early 1970s and had the standard range of k-12 public schooling, along with college and grad school):
1. In elementary school, most homework seems to have been busywork to do so the teacher could say they assigned homework.
2. Exception to #1: Beginning around 5th or 6th grade (maybe as early as 4th grade?), we were assigned short stories to read and book reports, etc. There wasn't enough time in the class day to read in class, so we had to read those at home.
3. Another exception to #1: Well, it's only a partial exception. Even when it was busywork, it taught me a measure of self-responsibility which ultimately was, for me, empowering. I learned to schedule and to plan. I probably overlearned those skills and became a little obsessive about it. Or a lot obsessive. It also made it harder for me in college and, especially grad school, when I had to learn to put things aside for a while and focus on other things because there was too much to do all in one night.
4. In middle school and high school, homework was sometimes busywork, but just as often necessary to learn what I was assigned. With some subjects (history, French, English lit), I really looked forward to it. With other subjects (math, physics, chemistry), I struggled through the homework and didn't learn anything.....until I had a trig and calculus teacher, in my junior year in high school who had a different approach. She assigned the problems first and had us teach ourselves how to do them. The next day, we went over the problems and what we didn't understand from the textbook. I, for one, loved this approach, because it taught me to take control over my own learning and not depend on the teacher's lectures. (Of course, that approach didn't work for everyone.)
5. In college and grad school, homework was most of what I had to do when it came to learning. The lectures helped. I wouldn't've been able to get by by teaching myself and reading. But (ugh!) graduate seminars (where we all talked as if we knew what we were talking about, having pretended to read the first paragraph of the introductions of any given book) did very little and it was the homework. And, as I said above, the "responsibility" and work ethic I learned from my early years of homework made it difficult to triage.
Not that anyone really cares or needs to know, but my "sense of responsibility" came about because I saw homework as something I needed to get done before going on to my real life. Whenever I got home from school, I made sure to do my homework first. That usually wasn't because I loved homework, but because I saw it as a chore, all the better to finish quickly so I wouldn't have to worry about it.
Also, I said that college and grad school is where that obsession showed its dark (or at least inefficient) side. But in retrospect, the drawbacks were already apparent after I started working during the last two years of high school. It was harder to find time to do the homework. I will say, though, that working taught me to appreciate school more. Not in the sense of, "if I get an education, I won't have to have jobs like this." But rather, in the sense of, "at work, I have to stand all the time and be 'on' when I talk to customers while at school, I am the customer and I get to sit down and be served by my teachers."
Before I read this post, I pre-registered my thoughts about homework. Updated thoughts are at the bottom.
How important is homework?
I am sure tat if you look at large aggregate data, it will show low effectivness for homework with respect to learning an future earnings.
So where should you look?
First a definition.
Homework is type of practice of the concepts, processes, and skills one learned through instruction. It’s self-guided exploration in the zone of proximal development.
Second, some comparisons.
Singapore, Finland, South Korea all have homework; they are the three of the best education systems in the world, maybe they know something you don’t.
Third, the best interventions we know of in schooling are ability grouping and direct instruction. Both of these interventions would change the nature of homework. Turning inconsequential “practice” flailing about completing worksheets with deliberate practice that is up to the level of the student.
Fourth, I run two schools which only give homework two days a week and have three days a week of in-person instruction. We consistently achieve above average on standardized tests and one consistently rank in the top 20 of schools. So, I both am prone to belief that practice is important, and that the quantity of time spent in school is gratuitous.
Given these facts, I have the following hypotheses:
1. Homework will be as effective as one’s practice regimen.
2. Homework will be effective if it employs the right quantity of a student’s understanding.
3. Homework is necessary, because learning happens in the space between one’s ears. If one is not doing something with the brain, it is not learning.
Maybe these are uncontroversial and nearly tautologically true?
---
Update:
Scott brings up a question I haven't thought much about. How does homework's importance change with time? At the same time time, he admits that's practicing algebra problems probably makes one better at algebra. To the question about hand, I don't think the answer changes much. When I watch the curriculum closely, I notice that fourth grade homework is especially focused on memorization and dozens of 'microskills' like placement of punctuation, building up 3 digit multiplication, and the "states and capitals" world context stuff.
While we don't know the value of homework in the RCT Sense of 'know', I will still put my confidence levels in the value of homework as high as my confidence levels in the value of unguided deliberate practice.
"Singapore, Finland, South Korea all have homework; they are the three of the best education systems in the world, maybe they know something you don’t."
Oh, lord. First, Finland isn't doing nearly as well as it used to, once they had to start worrying about immigrant performance. Singapore and South Korea track ruthlessly and oh, hey! Asians!
I found this article about homework help (when parents help their students), which gives some additional reason to think that consistent homework help does increase student achievement between 1st and 3rd grade.
About halfway through my engineering degree in college, I realized that if I wanted to get good grades, I either needed to attend class or do the homework. This realization served me well till I graduated.
Regardless if having homework for elementary schoolers is conducive of their learning, it does seem useful to have it at all if doing homework is useful for high schoolers, right? I had barely any homework in elementary/middle school and remember having a culture shock early in high school when I realized I couldn't finish all my work in ten minutes anymore.
I don't think if necessarily follows that if homework is useful for high school students, then younger students should be given more homework to prepare them. Maybe some at the end of middle school to help them transition, perhaps, and/or a few seminars in high school home room to help them figure out time management, homework strategies, and such.
But if homework isn't productive for younger kids, surely there are better things for them to be doing with their finite amount of time. E.g., playing sports or doing dance or some other physical activity, to develop physical health and kinesthetic intelligence and teamwork.
I know it's only anecdotal evidence, but when studying partial differential equations in college, it was not enough for me to attend class and do the assignments; i had to spend significant extra effort doing all the problems at the back of each chapter to really learn the material well enough to pass the course. I was motivated to do that and ended up with a B in a class I was initially failing. So at least in this one case, 'homework' made a big difference.
Public school teacher here. I’ve observed the current trend to be moving away from assigning homework. In my master’s program for teaching, we were told homework was not equitable because not all students have the privilege of free time or the proper environment at home. Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of that. Many of my high school students are not motivated by failing grades. Like others have said, if they don’t want to do it, they won’t. Granted, some subjects do require more practice and time, so I don’t see a way out of some homework. Like others, I developed my own intrinsic motivation to learn in university. In education research, the studies are quite pitiful. Over time, I’ve just settled on the belief that you can’t force anyone to care about anything- especially youth existing in the current state of public education.
Who says you have to keep kids in class longer or extend the school year? Good lord. Just teach less. And yes, some kids finish early, and you give them more work.
We've just established that homework at best helps tangentially with learning. Just because you teach stuff doesn't mean kids learn it. So teaching less and giving them more time to absorb it is better than pretending to teach it and pretending they learn it at home.
How is it punishing best performers to give them more work? I'm teaching them more.
This would work best if "more work" is not just more of the same, but an advanced version of it, or the same thing in a different context or from a different perspective.
(Giving the best performers more of the same would be a punishment, because presumably they already understand the stuff -- that's why they have finished first.)
> We've just established that homework at best helps tangentially with learning.
Wait, what? I thought we just established that nobody knows how well homework works?! And that the only people who maybe kind-of sort-of might have done a study that in theory might be evidence think it helps a lot?
Well, the term homework implies it’s done at home, correct? I teach English, so it’s rare that I ever assign work outside of class. My students really appreciate that, and I’ve accepted it as the lesser of two evils. Either we spend a whole 3 weeks reading Gatsby in class or only 20% of them read the book at home. I do the best I can with a 53 minute class period.
1 - Even if younger students don't benefit as much from HW, you'd be hard-pressed to start instilling the habit starting in their teens. That's a losing battle for parents, it's like asking your kid to do chores starting at age 14. Extensive amounts are probably redundant, but I'd foresee a benefit to their assignment in the long-run.
2 - Some have shared anecdotes that they performed well in school despite ignoring HW wherever they could. This doesn't account for study time ahead of tests and exams, which, for classes like math, amounts to the exact same thing as HW. I've seldom encountered people make the claim that they excelled in school despite doing no HW *and* not studying. Those that have likely possess superior focus and memory skills.
Understanding the concepts is one thing, but retention (let alone of the details) can be fickle, and benefits enormously from repetition. It's an important foundation for understanding and applying more advanced concepts in layers. I think it's a mistake to blow up the importance of long-term retention such that performance in tests is then thought inconsequential. The skill instilled from study or hw is probably more important than retaining some abstract concepts in hs-level STEM. If most of us don't use calculus in the long-run, difference in learning outcomes (if outcome is measured well after the fact) in that domain is negligible; we barely remember how to put it to practice. Use it or lose it. Basically everyone keeps writing and speaking their native language beyond school, that doesn't usually erode. If I pick up my guitar now after having it collect dust for several years, I can recall scales and a few songs, but what I can muster out of it is tantamount to doing basic arithmetic. Goodbye Paganini and Eruption solo. What are the concepts doing for me now, in isolation? If you only remember coles-notes versions of everything you're still basically impotent in those respective disciplines.
(a propos writing: many novelists will tell you that writing is a craft, and there's no magic behind it. If you hack away at it for hours a day, you improve)
I haven't looked at all of the comments, so someone may have already gotten here and I'm late to the party. But it seems to me that one solution to both the homework problem and the diminishing-connection-to-our-IRL-communities problem is to make homework an in-class team task (a type of flipped classroom) that has to be completed by everyone in the class or credit is not given to anyone. The students would have to be given support from their teacher in how to troubleshoot issues like a kid not being able to do it, so they would learn a lot about different capacities and the ability to support others on a team IRL. Yes, it requires a lot of teacher training, but it's what they are missing the rest of the day (on their phones) and enforcing it in the classroom may be the only way we heal that.
Tangentially, regardless of the inconclusive evidence (or trusting of the mediocre evidence?) my teacher training program emphasized that it *doesn't* help and urged us to give homework sparingly.
Even the algebra study is based off a very specific counterfactual of homework as it's generally done in algebra classes, where the teacher lectures the whole class and students only get practice doing it on their own. It would seem much more logical to completely invert that, where students watch a lecture on their own time with the ability to fast forward through or rewatch parts as they deem necessary then go through exercises during class time where they can get help from the teacher and classmates when they get confused.
Art of Problem Solving (https://artofproblemsolving.com/) changed my feelings about homework -- they run these amazing math (and two programming) classes where you are in class for only 1.5 hours a week, but mostly you learn through doing the excellent problem sets, which both build skills in the material and give practice in doing challenging problems, and are fun problems to boot. If all homework were like this, I'd be in favor of it. And it also clarified to me that in the best case, homework can act as a practical way to build skills, just as people have brought up music or sports above.
Though as it is, I'm glad my kids' school doesn't give homework so I can have them do AoPS and Beast Academy (for lower grades, run by the same people) instead.
This is actually something I've thought about quite a bit while I was teaching introductory chemistry and physics at a private high school (7 years before transitioning to software).
First, I have yet to see a *non* garbage educational study (coming from a hard science background). Small sample sizes, buckets of confounding variables, ad hoc "controls" or no controls at all, studies that either don't replicate or (most commonly) don't scale at all beyond the small focused lab schools, etc.
"Time spent" is a horrible measure of anything. First, because it's horribly unreliable. It was a running joke that students, teachers, and parents would all estimate completely different amounts of time for the same set of homework. Part of that was that students would include things like "I have the book open, but am snapchatting with my buddies". For tests, I generally used a 5-6x modifier--if I could do it in 10 minutes, I'd expect it would take the median student 50-60 minutes.
Beyond that, I actually ran an experiment (because I was lucky enough to have an administration that gave me carte blanche). For the last few years, I didn't assign "home"work. Instead, I did a few things:
1. Practice time and practice sets in class, with me walking around helping people. If you didn't finish, you'd have to do so at home. But they were scaled to take up the class time.
2. Those practice sets were *irregularly* graded. But rarely. Instead, I did a combination of two assessment methods between major summative assessments, both fairly low stakes (~5% of the total grade, with the median effect being ~1% either way).
2a. Pop quizzes on the previous-day's work. 3-4 questions, 10 minutes. Basically taken from the problem set the previous day with numbers changed. Graded right there in front of everyone, usually by a peer as we'd walk through the problems in detail.
2b. "Online Practice Sets", which involved a tool I wrote to generate a pocket static website that presented questions (multiple choice and fill in the blank, mostly) and then auto-graded them (including some allowed variance for numeric questions). They could do them as many times as they wanted (including later on to prepare for the tests), and the system would only report the highest score. The problems and answers were randomized (in order at least). If there was a pop quiz, it would often come from those problems.
I changed because I realized (both from surveying students and my own observations) that traditional homework ended up in one of two buckets--
1. Common enough to be useful...but then the grading load was too much so they didn't actually get feedback and it ended up being graded on completion. This was utter garbage for everyone--no one took them seriously, including myself.
2. Rare enough to have time to give meaningful feedback and be scored properly. These, in turn, ended up being basically just another summative assessment. And weren't frequent enough to actually provide any reinforcement.
So switching to a basically "no homework, but lots of practice embedded throughout" system was win-win. Can I say that it had substantial effects on performance? No, because we also were revamping the curriculum fairly constantly (one of the reasons I left was that we were just always chasing the new hot thing instead of actually measuring whether the changes were doing anything useful). But it was way more honest and the kids liked it more and were more engaged. Or had fewer people to blame when they weren't. And allowed me to target more practice for some things than others and let them redo their practice. Plus, the panic on their faces when they'd have a pop quiz (even when it was announced) was beautiful to my jaded, evil soul.
Say I wanted to improve some practical skill, e.g. batting in baseball (a relatively intricate motion required coordination, full disclosure I don't play baseball). I expect it would be hard to ask a question like if I swing faster will I bat better in a single experiment/study.
1) A sudden shock to the learned motion most likely will make things worse before they get better (at least, this is my personal experience).
2) To accomplish this goal I will need to adjust other elements of my swing, it is hard to isolate one element at a time...
To assess whether batting harder is better I would instead consider the mechanism (yes, hitting things harder make them go further) and some empiricism (yes, athlete that bat further hit harder).
This strikes me as similar to the case for homework and teaching in general, the reason that we believe that homework improves performance is that there is a clear mechanisms and successful teachers seem to have settled on a certain balance of homework. The type of study Scott seems to be looking for seems to be inherently fraught, like asking a someone to suddenly change their swing and concluding something from the experiment. Perhaps (speculating here) this is why there are not so many studies of this flavor.
Has anyone asked whether the student is motivated to learn? I suspect that homework might be of value to a student wanted to learn and didn't get the concept or have the vocabulary mastered yet.
When I was teaching myself foreign languages, I assigned myself brutal amounts of homework and forced myself to do it because I wanted to learn. I don't think I could have otherwise developed whatever capabilities I did in fact develop.
When I was an undermotivated student, which was most of the time in any sort of coursework, homework was just a hoop I had to jump through, and cats hate jumping through hoops.
"The utility of homework and its impact on academic achievement has been an ongoing debate for more than 100 years. To date, there is no rigorous experimental research to show whether, and the extent to which, variations in the amount of homework assigned can impact the academic performance of elementary school students. In this study, 440 second grade students were randomly distributed in 3 groups within the classes they attended. Each group received different amounts of homework in writing and math for 20 days. The results showed a significant immediate effect of homework quantity on writing competency (but not on math competency). The writing homework effects were sustained 4 months later, but only for the group that had allocated a moderate amount of homework to writing skills practice. This study shows that the additional opportunities for practice offered by homework can have differential short-term and medium-term effects on the academic achievement of elementary school students and supports the assignment of a moderate amount of writing homework at this age"
b. Commentary
I can understand not including this one in your review.
There's not much to like about the design of the study, or the figures within the writeup (both are overly complicated, particularly the figures).
Still I did their findings (and underpinning theory) plausible for 2nd grade kids, and so for all completists, note this RCT and its takeaways.
2. "The Role of Homework in Student Learning Outcomes: Evidence from a Field Experiment"
"In this article, the authors describe a field experiment in the classroom where principles of micro- economics students are randomly assigned into homework-required and not-required groups. The authors find that homework plays an important role in student learning, especially so for students who initially perform poorly in the course. Students in the homework-required group have higher retention rates, higher test scores (5 to 6 percent), more good grades (Bs), and lower failure rates. The authors also study the relationship between endogenous homework submission and test performance using instrumental variable estimation and find that homework submission has a large positive effect on test performance."
b. Commentary
The gains appear real, and while modest also meaningful, across outcomes.
It was also striking how much homework students in the “no-homework” group opted out of; making it a requirement changes behavior to a much larger extent than I would have expected in this setting (college).
3. "Online Mathematics Homework Increases Student Achievement" (Michael Pershan mentioned this in an earlier comment.)
"In a randomized field trial with 2,850 seventh-grade mathematics students, we evaluated whether an educational technology intervention increased mathematics learning. Assigning homework is common yet sometimes controversial. Building on prior research on formative assessment and adaptive teaching, we predicted that combining an online homework tool with teacher training could increase learning. The online tool ASSISTments (a) provides timely feedback and hints to students as they do homework and (b) gives teachers timely, organized information about students’ work. To test this prediction, we analyzed data from 43 schools that participated in a random assignment experiment in Maine, a state that provides every seventh-grade student with a laptop to take home. Results showed that the intervention significantly increased student scores on an end-of-the-year standardized mathematics assessment as compared with a control group that continued with existing homework."
b. Commentary
I can also understand not including this one in your review, as it’s NOT a "to homework, or not to homework, that is the question" study in the strictest sense. But an interesting comment on what *kind* of homework works.
One notable finding is that it helped low-achieving kids more (same as study 2). Effects were ~0.29 for kids below the median, ~0.12 for kids above it.
In contrast to study 1, and I know this is a matter of taste in some respects, I really liked the study. No deception or tricky maneuvering, as far as I can tell.
4. "Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India"
"We study the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program in middle-school grades in urban India using a lottery that provided winners free access to the program. Lottery winners scored 0.37σ higher in math and 0.23σ higher in Hindi over just a 4.5-month period. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.6σ and 0.39σ respectively. We find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but much greater relative gains for academically-weaker students. Our results suggest that well-designed technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education."
b. Commentary
Whether this is "homework" or "an after-school program" is a matter of debate. I think 85% former and 15% latter in my interpretation. The software just happened to be really good, targeted homework.
Case in point in this study: kids in the bottom tercile in the comparison group literally learned nothing at all between baseline and endline:
"Students in the treatment group see positive value-added in all terciles whereas we cannot reject the null of no academic progress for students in the bottom tercile in the control group.."
So homework, in this case, might be one (of many potential?) piece of low-hanging fruit that could get kids to learn more than they otherwise would in a low-productivity setting.
*
Summary
-These four studies, plus the algebra one Scott cites, tend to support that homework *can* work, under some conditions.
-The key variables, by study, appear to be (i) for the younger kids in Romania, giving them novel contexts to practice already-learned skills, (ii) for college kids at East Carolina State, making them do the homework (and make it relevant to success on exams), (iii) for the kids in Delhi giving them instruction at their level, or really any instruction at all, (iv) for middle school kids in Maine, giving them some “hints” with well-aligned practice problems so that they don’t get stuck.
Common theme in all these winners was that homework was either marked (by a computer or human). I suspect that matters quite a bit.
-Highest RoI, subject-wise, seems to be in math, though it might just be relatively overstudied (all 5 of the studies included math or math-adjacent stuff), and there were high returns to Hindi as well in the Mindspark study, and no impact at all on math in Study 1.
-Highest RoI, distribution-wise, seems to be with lower-performing pupils, though caveat emptor: my guess is that they are also unusually responsive to feedback; simply assigning low-performing kids homework and not correcting it may backfire.
I wonder if non-teachers are aware that there is a growing anti-homework movement that's equity motivated. You can check out Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman if you want to get those arguments in one place.
Lots of teachers are encouraged to both drop the % that HW makes up of the total grade and also award half credit even when students don't do the work. I'm of two minds of the approach. It clearly reduces failing grades, but I'm not sure if that is helping people learn more. You could make the argument that homework is more about compliance, but then it's not always clear what a grade is supposed to represent. Is a grade the record of your ability to meet a specific standard, a measurement of your growth in learning, or an assessment of the effort you undertook? If we had a perfect way of measuring those things, which would we choose?
I‘m a (new-ish) teacher and at university we heard that John Hattie was the go-to guy for statistical analysis which aspects/methods/… work and which don’t have an effect on furthering education. His meta-meta analysis „Visible learning“ combines 960 meta studies and encompassing 260 million students to check out everything from class size and teaching method to TV hours at home and nutrition.
The median effect over all of them is d=0.23. So basically most things have some kind of positive effect on learning. The goal for teachers then should be to find those things that are better that most and concentrate on those. So he suggests taking 0.23 as „helps just a little“ (and below that as „hardly helps“. Effects over 0.4 are labelled „works well“.
Homework is ranked 88th, d=0.33. The meta-analyses were
Anyway, my take-away is that I mostly don’t bother with homework. The kids who understand the subject in class waste time doing things they already know. The kids who don’t know how to do the task don’t get any help so they will hardly get better. More time spent doing the thing will increase capabilities a bit but I have to be conscious of my pupil’s private life as well. They need time to learn the piano or play soccer or be kids or whatever. There’s so much learning possible if I don’t waste their time.
That said (as a primary school teacher), they will have to learn to read and write. There’s no way around that, if you don’t practice reading at home it will take you soo long before you get your 10.000 hours or whatever in school. So I‘d argue if there is ever a place for homework then it’s daily reading and writing in first and second grade.
Well, that's a sad end to my smugness right here! I am (was) pretty much the only teacher I know who read Hattie and tried to at least keep some of his results in my mind at times. Everyone else just does whatever they feel is "right" - I went with "science", and lost (time and maybe intuition).
I will poke around your suggested bestevidence.org but many misunderstandings lie this way. I'm German and my German Hattie edition had a lengthy preface detailing that you can't just translate the words as educational concepts in both countries differ quite a bit. E.g. how to teach "reading first grade" may be quite different so there's a lot of additional research involved.
If you can handle Scott's blog you might be best served by chasing Hattie's studies upstream. There's a good deal of educational research coming out of Germany -- I've found Ulrich Trautwein's writing about homework to be particularly clear-headed: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UHnApKoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
One would have to start with a typology of homework. Some learning outcomes need skill drill. For others (too much) skill drill is harmful. Finding the right balance between skill drill and free exploration is crucial in so many areas of learning (whether sports, music, maths, etc). How to get this balance right is the hard question for a teacher.
And without putting this balance between skill drill and free exploration into focus there is, in my opinion, no hope to assess whether homework works.
Btw, some people seem to be able to learn a subject without skill drill. In my experience, this is only the case because they integrate skill drill into their free exploration. (I first noticed this when listening to a Dennis Bergkamp interview where he described how he learned to play football (soccer) as a kid.)
As someone who always hated homework, and spend countless train rides in the morning and countless breaks in between lessons to copy homework from others, I fully support your conclusion! Very grateful to those who always let me copy their finished work without ever complaining. Homework didn't count for our grades, but not doing homework would lead to different kind of punishment, including prominently to have to stay in school for some additional hour(s).
On a more theoretical note: Even besides the evident shortcomings of cited studies I think the question of 'does homework work' is grossly underspecified. As already mentioned in other comments, it's probably much more 'which type of homework' 'for whom' and 'under which conditions'. With 'which type of homework' not being algebra vs. French as a foreign language, but the specific type of exercices in each of those.
I've always sort of assumed that the value of homework came from two things: First, that school is over at 3pm or whatever, but the longer you spend thinking about something the more of it you retain (80,000 hours and whatnot); and second, that working on something closer to bedtime (than 3pm) makes it something that is more reinforced by whatever the mysterious reinforcement mechanism of sleep is.
I say "assumed". I have no more idea than anybody else. But it is enough to make me scowl when I hear about kids not doing homework any more, and not *just* because I've paid *my* dues.
The skill my kids seem to have learned by doing homework is how to work independently (compared to me who wasn't set homework for most of my school career). This has spilled over into them being able to do none school work with more focus and be much better at revising for exams etc. It's probably a useful life skill.
If you look at countries who have extraordinary amounts of homework, like South Korea, they seem to do astonishingly well from an academic achievement point of view. While this might indicate that homework is effective, it is a very high price to pay in terms of happiness and time spent learning on things mostly useless in real life.
Whenever I think about homework I think the one-size-fits-all approach to school is really the underlying problem. The super smart kids in the class that find the material super easy and boring are way more likely to do the homework. They want the good grade and homework is part of the grade. The kids that are struggling with the material and that could use extra help or tutoring are least likely to do the homework. The first group gets no benefit from the homework that they did and the second group that did not do the homework actually could have benefited from it.
There should be a skills based system where based on how you did on the test/quiz determines how much if any homework you get on the topic. If you just aced the test you don't need the homework. If you got a D there should definitely be some homework as you clearly do not know the material as well. Apparently, we don't do this because it would not be "fair".
Personally, I did all "homework" during the school day in other classes as I found school too easy and boring and the homework didn't even being to be challenging. This resulted in homework without the "home" portion.
in this case, it seems like we should default to homework works.
Science is conflicted because not enough good studies, but a priori homework should work (deliberate practice and whatnot) and common sense says homework should work. Maybe a good reason not to have a billion hours of homework, though.
I find the workload at a 40 hr job is less than the workload at an elite 11th-grade high school, which feels wrong.
Studies on learning suggest that repetition of material is valuable for learning.
As such, I feel that it is likely that any sort of repetition of material - be it in the form of reading a textbook then going thrugh the lecture and taking notes on the lecture, or actually doing homework problems based on the material covered in the lecture, or doing a project which relies on the skills you are supposedly learning, or watching videos about the subject matter - will reinforce learning.
Speaking as someone who enjoys writing fiction, repeatedly writing fiction (in the form of fanfiction) greatly improved my skill at writing fiction, and that I started out at a higher level than most people in the fanfiction community because I'd spent years roleplaying and reading books - and while neither of those things are precisely writing prose fiction, they rely on many of the same skills.
I think that there's often a "pool" of skills that surround various things. Writing prose fiction is not the same as reading prose fiction or roleplaying (be it freeform or RPGs), but there's a significant overlap in the skills here, and if you engage in gainful practice (i.e. pushing yourself to improve your skills by repeatedly doing these things) you improve your skills.
This is obvious with art as well; practicing art is how people get better at art. If you look at artists who practice for a long time, their skill levels tend to go up; in some cases, this can be especially dramatic if you catch people very early in their artistic careers. A good example of this would be Miss Mab; if you look at the very oldest comic she posted, back in high school ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_001.php ) and then compare it to what she does today ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_2084.php ) the difference is stark. Even if you look at a lesser time span within that, like five years between this ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Abel_03.php ) and this ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Ab_098.php ), you can see significant improvements.
However, at some point, unless you push yourself to do new things, these gains can become increasingly limited. For instance, this comic from 2013 ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_1389.php ) and this comic from 2019 ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_1896.php ) is a larger time gap, but the gains are clearly not as significant - she was already quite good at art in 2013, and while she did get better over time (particularly at backgrounds) the advances have not been as large.
As such, doing homework is valuable, but doing infinite amounts of homework isn't - there's declining returns, and you get larger returns by pushing yourself further along the road rather than endlessly repeating the skills you already have.
I think this is where people get unahppy about homework. The more skill you already have, the worse the gains will become by doing the same thing over and over.
I suspect this is why homework appers increasingly more valuable as students get older - in elementary school, a lot of the higher end students already baically know everything or most everything elementary school teaches them. As such, elementary school homework is a waste of time for them.
However, lower end students are not nearly as good at this stuff, and as such, will see significantly larger benefits because they don't already know this stuff.
A kid who enters elementary school reading the kinds of books you read in 6th grade or even high school is going to get almost nothing from elementary school English classes.
I also suspect this is why math homework seems so valuable by comparison - few parents teach their children much math independent of school, and particularly not higher levels of it, and people generally don't naturally do much repetition of math at that age, so math homework will seem very valuable. And once you hit algebra, I think that goes way beyond what 90%+ of parents will ever spend time drilling kids on independently.
Conversely, a lot of kids enjoy reading books, so a lot of other subjects are more likely to be covered. I enjoyed reading Zoobooks and various science books, so I had a huge level of knowledge matter on the subject. I even read some textbooks for fun because I was a horrible little monster like that.
This meant that I had a ridiculous advantage over everyone else in science class, even through high school and early college. I knew this stuff back and front and could spend very little time on work and get better grades because I had already put in the work through years and years of independent "study", so the homework was entirely pointless for me.
But if I tried the same thing with college calculus, I was doomed.
So, yes. I think that homework is valuable because it is forced repetition of learning ,but I think that "pre-existing knowledge" is a greatly underappreciated confounding variable.
I think you will see larger benefits of people doing homework in subject matters that they don't independent study than those that they do, and I think you will see larger benefits of homework the more advanced the subject matter is, as that means that fewer and fewer students will have natural background in it, and that you will see larger benefits on lower end students for lower-level materials than you will see for higher-level students on lower-end materials.
I just have an anecdote from doing this as a TA, not data, but in my experience flipped classrooms work great for motivated students; they can jump right in to problem sets or labwork, having completed some preliminary reading, and take advantage of 1-on-1 conversations as needed with the instructor. But unmotivated students will skip the preliminary reading and then get even further behind because the whole class period is supposed to be occupied by experiential learning; there's no time for lecture. And this was in a college class; I suspect it would be even worse in, say, junior high.
Agreed. It's something that works really well...for small, selected groups. Like every other educational fad, it doesn't scale. And it requires a very strongly-motivated, very good-at-creating-content teacher as well. And those don't scale either.
I had a colleague who tried it. Nice guy. But the students hated it, and him. So I never tried it.
I had to teach maths lectures this way (at the undergrad level) and hated it. However I think it can work in some circumstances, depending on 1) the personality of the teacher, 2) the subject taught (maths does not work very well with this format but maybe history would work great) and 3) the autonomy of the children/student
Overall I think it's the poster case for the main problem with evaluating education methods : something may be hugely positive for some combination of teacher and student and a complete bummer for some other combination.
I tried it once and I got the worst results + teacher evaluations of my entire career.
My main error was to underestimate the time and effort it takes to organize classroom activities Instead I put all the effort in the videos/home reading part. Half of the students, on the other hand, came to "class" unprepared hoping to wangle it...
Horrible, just horrible.
(The class was introductory mechanics for first year students at a European university)
One of the math teachers at my daughter’s middle school does this. My daughter says kids “hate her.” That is interesting that hate is the reaction in some of the other comments.
I've had one flipped class, and it was pretty decent. I think it has the potential to waste far less class time than typical education. Actually interacting with a teacher when you're struggling beats the heck out of watching them present a set of information. But it suffers HEAVILY from being unconventional. It relies on people to actually do their reading/watching ahead of time, and requires people be prepared for class. Since that's mostly never necessary in normal classes, compliance tends to be low.
My class had a graded pre-class quiz every day to help force the required transition. Super-easy multiple-choice quiz, just testing that you actually read the assigned text. That helped, and I think the class would have fallen apart without it.
I supoose that it isn’t actual research, but my department had an extra 10% of their classes pass precalc after swapping to the flipped model.
That said, I think part of this success is because a flipped model helps to make what would be an otherwise incompetent teacher be able to do a bit better
I've found that *any* change will be positive, even strongly negative changes, for a small amount of time.
But yes, if an actually competent teacher is the one preparing the materials, it takes some of the downsides of having an incompetent teacher away. But I'd rather just fire the incompetent.
That is interesting, hadn't heard of that before. My mom (former homeschool teacher now in public elementary) does something similar in that her time is spent on one on one interactions working problems and most students at any one time are on computers doing problems and receiving instructions.
I'm a teacher (a Latin teacher, as a matter of fact, so I quite enjoy the fact that we've had a post on vocab acquisition and a post on homework in consecutive days). I wouldn't say I do a "flipped" classroom; I do mostly upper-level classes and I'm not teaching lots of brand-new grammar material like someone teaching lower-level classes would. But I don't tend to assign much homework (apart from AP, where it's basically a necessity to plow through the syllabus). In class I want my students to read & translate Latin. What I want students doing away from the classroom is focusing on vocabulary (and some of the other basics as well, but mostly vocab). Most of them use Quizlet; I don't know if it's the best spaced-repetition software, but it seems to have the teen market cornered.
I think the ideal way of scaling the flipped classroom method is to have people watch something along the lines of Khan Academy videos. The teachers I know who have done a lot of flipped-classroom stuff have usually ended up putting in a crazy amount of time recording videos. If you have a huge variety of well-made videos with a good teacher, you don't need to do everything yourself.
And as has already been mentioned, the flipped classroom still requires students to do stuff outside of class. If they don't watch the video about how to figure out the equation of a circle by completing the square, they're not going to be able to do it in class the next day.
As for homework itself, I think it works--sometimes. Its effectiveness will vary across different subjects and ages. I wouldn't want to be prevented from assigning it, and I wouldn't want to be forced to assign it every night either.
> The teachers I know who have done a lot of flipped-classroom stuff have usually ended up putting in a crazy amount of time recording videos. If you have a huge variety of well-made videos with a good teacher, you don't need to do everything yourself.
Some teachers in my country produced a lot of YouTube videos as a reaction to covid, during the months when kids stayed at home and learned online. Those teachers realized that making a video and then having a Zoom discussion about it is more efficient than trying to explain stuff on Zoom. The kids can watch the YouTube videos at a time convenient for them; they can pause them whenever needed; they can watch the videos twice. And if you teach multiple classes, you only need to make the video once. You could even reuse it the next year.
What I was thinking someone should do (but I was too lazy to do it myself) is to collect all those videos, group them by topic, and arrange them according to the school curriculum. So you would have a web page where you could click e.g. "Math, 3rd grade elementary school", see a list of topics, and then a list of YouTube videos for each topic. After two or three teachers made a good video on a topic, you do not need to make your own; so people would only have to make new videos if they believe that there is something wrong about the existing ones and they can do a better job.
I do a flipped class where I've made videos for all my lectures, with a time investment of about 1 hour for every 5 minutes of content. Class time is for kinetic demonstrations, projects, lab time, etc. Seems to work well. I went this route after I realized I'm a much more effective teacher 1 on 1 than 1 on 30, despite the efficiencies. Then covid happened, and I was pre-prepared for remote content delivery.
Sucked when I tried it in high school (just meant that class time was spent doing boring busywork instead of that busywork being homework). Worked a lot better in junior-level fluid mechanics in college, where the professor spent class time lecturing but expected us to watch videos about each derivation before class rather than doing it in lecture.
From what I've experieaced, hard part about a flipped class seems to be making class time valuable for every student if most of the content delivery is happening somewhere else. Also, if you get through a homework assignment in half/double the time it takes your peers, you're free to either go do something else or put in an extra couple of hours. That doesn't work as well if you're in a classroom and trying to work in parallel with everyone else.
NAEP data (National Assessment of Educational Progress) suggests that over the past 50 years we've seen no or very little progress for white males and females, more for Latinos and much more for blacks, especially females (40% improvement).
Just FYI there are concerns about how NAEP is not dealing with declining high school dropout rates: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2022/3/31/23005371/high-school-test-scores-underestimate-naep-dropout-nces
Interesting, thanks. In any case, the numbers broken down by race and gender show some (if very little for whites) improvement. The flatness of the aggregate is a classic Simpson Paradox. Every group is doing better but Latinos made up only 5% of the dataset in 1970 compared to close to 20% today, and since they are below average, although improving too, they've kept the average flat.
Of course the claim that there was no improvement could still be true if one only considered whites. Students most likely to drop out are non-whites, and results of whites have remained flat-ish over 50 years.
In other words, we spend a lot more money on K-12 education today (spending adjusted for inflation per student has tripled over 50 years); that spending has had near zero effect on whites; but it has possibly helped non-whites, especially African-American females. (It's also possible that it's not the spending that helped.)
Hmm, sounds like selection/confirmation bias to me. Lincoln is an outlier. I’m not Einstein or Shakespeare either, but somehow I still consider myself well educated. Do you have anything more substantial to back up this sentiment?
Where are you living where teachers have gobs of money to throw at problems? I have never met a teacher who hasn't had to buy their own pencils, let alone having actual support and resources
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/optimized/public/wp-content/uploads/Cato-tot-cost-scores-Coulson-Sept-2012-sm.gif?itok=NdJTUsYh
This trend has continued all the way up to 2022; it now costs something like 3 or 4 times as much to send a kid to public school as it does to send them to the Manhattan Preparatory Academy, or Willowbrook, or any other private-school-for-future-presidents. Tuition at Ravenscroft (an expensive elite private school with famous powerful alumni) is about $200,000 for a full thirteen year K-12 education for one person. Public school in the same area ends up costing about twice that.
From my privileged position as an evaluator/auditor of federal grants, I can say with some confidence that almost all of the added money above 1970 values has been spent on corruption, usually in the form of the principal hiring his brother-in-law to run an afterschool program using GEARUP money, or similar. Very very occasionally, we evaluate a program that was actually well-meaning (but which still had purely negative effects). Often these programs are accidentally hugely racist or classist. Ask any student what it's like to get referred to a dropout prevention program, you'll find that it has horribly negative consequences for their academic career, like a black mark on their permanent record that makes every future teacher automatically perceive them as a failure who needs compassionate remediation... yet many of the programs are designed in such a way to 'help' as many minorities as possible by placing them in such programs, even if they are currently a straight-A student who hasn't missed a day of school in their entire life and just finished their applications to Harvard and MIT.
I strongly suspect that if we actually gave all the added money to the teachers, it would be enormously good... but the way party politics intersects with education policy currently makes this impossible. Instead, every 2 years some bright young congressperson has the great idea for a new bill to finally fix the problems with education by increasing the annual budget by a few billion dollars, the money gets allocated, then the money mysteriously disappears into the black hole of bureaucratic corruption and do-nothing NGO nonprofits. Then 2 years later we get another pack of naive junior congresspeople and someone has the same bright idea all over again.
And all the while, teacher pay stagnates.
John, your comment certianly reifies my innate pessimsim, but beyond that I appreciate your insight as someone close to these problems. What published work would you recommend that documents the corrupt allocation process of educational monies?
Honestly there's nothing. The only proof I can show you is that if you try to figure out where the money is going, you won't be able to find out, because it's not documented. That should immediately raise a bunch of red flags, but it doesn't actually prove that 90% of the money is vanishing into NGO pockets as I suggest.
I've got a couple of evaluation reports I can show you, but they only document problems at individual schools
Edit: that said, I have tried to point this problem out to the lesswrong / effective altruism / rationalism crowd on many occasions over the last decade. Starting with the first Lesswrong post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EuMkZ67vDincGSkYp/problems-in-education
People almost universally thought I was making bullshit up, so I got my boss to let me treat this as a full project, and we got our writer involved, and pulled up the mendeley library with all of our citations, and wrote a real full-on paper describing what we'd seen: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DxFFeJoczRp2rPS2K/?commentId=oHHRcwxX5HAfcdG9t
The first post got 300+ comments, the second got seven. Once I could actually prove what I was saying, it was a bit like, nobody even knew what the fuck to do, the situation was so much worse than anybody had ever believed before that they just kind of ignored it. It was not a ringing endorsement of less wrong rationalism, I'll tell you that.
Then about 5 years later I tried with a different tack, then maybe if I could get some of this grant money in the hands of rationalists it would be better. I wrote https://johnwhale.tumblr.com/post/137912141447/grants-aka-using-government-money-to-do-good and it got widely spread, retweeted by Scott et all. I followed up with: https://johnwhale.tumblr.com/post/138534613532/funny-sad-grant-funded-projects-pt-1
After that, nothing.
Thanks for the reply! I'll certainly read everything you linked.
If your work is correct, it's horrifying that it's not getting more attention, but I can't say I'm surprised. In my own field (medical oncology) there are enormous methodological problems which lead to untold mountains of money being wasted on meaingless clinical trials, but when I point this issues out to colleagues, they just shug and say, "yes, that's probably true" and they follow it up with some empty saying like "some data is better than none" or "we have to work with the system we're in."
I've seen numerous data points on private school tuition at $40k plus per year. In comparison, I believe California (my state) spends $14.9k per year on public school. So it seems like the actual figures are largely the opposite of what you're claiming.
It depends on how you measure things. I taught at a ~$20k (tuition)/year private school in Florida, which officially spends ~$9k per pupil per year. But that's a combination of secondary school (much more expensive) and elementary (much less expensive) while we were only high school. Also, that usually only considers the direct state spending, and a lot of things get pushed into other budgets and so don't count (such as capital expenditures, which are a huge chunk of change and had to be accounted for in our budget but not in theirs, as they're funded separately largely via bonds). And the variance between locations in each state is huge--florida in 2021 varied between ~7.5k (rural Gadsden county) and 37.2k (the specialist Florida School of Deaf and Blind). Even without that outlier, it was 7.5k - 16k. And that's just operating budget, not capital budget.
I think you can make the numbers come out just about any way you want. But what you can't do is obscure the *trend* in spending--that's up. Way way up. But mostly for a couple things:
1. students with special needs/disabilities. When you need a 1:2 (at most) staff:student ratio with a bunch of specialists, that gets expensive, fast.
2. Admin overhead, especially compliance at the district level. This includes useless "technology" that never actually makes it down to the classroom level, as well as junkets, trainings, staff, etc.
Teachers and classrooms saw very little of this ballooning spending. And there's effectively 0 correlation between spending and outcomes beyond the extremes of the distribution. It's as if there's a certain minimum, below which you get bad results. But above that other factors dominate and more spending doesn't change much.
What private schools get is selectivity--being able to curate the student population. But that's a different issue.
I would like to point out that students with special needs or disabilities, as soon as school started getting more money for them they started applying the label to almost everybody. Here in North Carolina the state put a cap, no school can have more than 15% if their students labeled as disabled (I think the actual percent changed recently). I do know that every school in the state is right at the cap. They followed their incentives all the way down the gradient.
Yeah. And it's not just the school--the parents also play a major role and are reinforced in doing so by the school. And it's not just that (at private schools)--if your school starts getting a reputation as being "good for kids with <X>", the population starts shifting until you have more and more kids with <X>. Even if that wasn't your intent. Happened at the school I taught at, and not in a good way. <X> there was "substantial, but not crippling autism" (as in "verbal and can deal on their own, but extremely maladjusted and needing substantial support". Which we were *not* equipped to give them without compromising the education of everyone else.
It's a hard issue.
Oh, I wasn't even counting state spending. I was just counting Federal spending. That state spending is on top of the spending I'm talking about.
Which federal spending?
Department of education. Just look at the chart man, it explains itself pretty well.
I'm a elementary school board trustee in California. Which penny do you want to trace from when it enters my public school district to when it exits?
I don't know about other states, but in California, it's the publicly funded private schools, i.e. charter schools, that are the most cause for concern. No new for-profit charters are permitted, but existing ones are allowed to continue. Think about the incentives at a for-profit school. Are they aligned with the educational needs of students or of investors? Perhaps they are designed to produce high quality teachers?
As Greg G points out below, private school tuition is multiples higher than the per-pupil cost of public schools, at least in California. I should know the cost of educating children in my district because at every board meeting we approve every purchase order, i.e. before the money leaves the district in the form of a check. And we review and vote on a budget, then we approve three more budget documents: two interim budget variances, and one final independently audited financial statement. The basic requirement is that they all add up.
I don't know if anyone has made a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request to a district for the raw SACS data that is sent to the county and then on to the state. It's a summary of all the activity in every fund that districts manage. (All financial activity in public schools goes into or out of some fund, e.g. the Cafeteria Fund. The General Fund, not unexpectedly, is the most active.) The format of the SACS file is well-known and the tools used to view the data are widely available (MS Access). I also don't know if anyone has requested the raw financial records of a district as opposed to the detailed-but-not-raw SACS data.
So, if you want to track a particular penny from when it enters the district to when it leaves, the data and the tools are there.
Your first link is to the Cato Institute. I don't think the Cato Institute is interested in education. To a conservative, any successful public program is an anathema and must be destroyed because a successful public program invalidates a core belief: profit is all that matters. The Cato Institute's agenda is firmly to promote right wing conservatism. They are going to do everything in they can to show that public education is not worth the money spent on it. One of the things they do is to completely ignore the value of the outcome of public education, i.e. the nearly $28 trillion economy that is the United States where almost everyone was educated in public schools. They focus exclusively on the cost of education, and to make the numbers even scarier, the total cost of a K-12 education. The benefit side is ignored.
The Cato link you provide shows a graph of total cost of a K-12 education vs NAEP scores. What do you think NAEP measures? Certainly not educational outcomes because the U.S. has built the world's largest economy since WWII with NAEP scores that have essentially remained static over that period. So what is NAEP measuring? Nothing that I as a parent, teacher, or board member is interested in. Perhaps NAEP measures test-taking ability which I would expect to stay more or less constant over time.
All that being said, it is [unfortunately] not the case that public schools are examples of what can be done to provide a high quality education that matches the needs and aspirations of every child. Our district does particularly well, but I am not convinced that we do as well as first appears if income, health, employment, educational attainment and food/housing/personal security are taken into account. Could we all do better? Of course and so we try.
My district tries to meet every child's needs. For example, we spend five times as much on average on a child with special needs as we do on a child without special needs. We offer a summer program to children who need the extra help to get to grade level. We track the progress of every child in becoming proficient in every subcategory that we have determined to be an essential part of the Common Core. We practice differentiated instruction and we use project-based learning wherever we can. We have a robust program of professional development and we encourage teachers to share the tools and techniques that they have found improves educational outcomes.
After that extended pat on the back (we are totally wonderful), I need to mention that we are failing to provide about 15% of our student body with the education they need to achieve their college or career goals. Suggestions?
I do not understand what you're saying. I've read civil war letters [and we must remember the selection bias in which get read- it is mostly a handful of civil war letters that are read over and over]. They read like they were written in a particular style. That style has its charms, certainly, but it in no sense seems to me to be clearly superior to contemporary style.
Consider Sullivan Ballou's letter, which seems to be quoted everywhere, and take up 30%> of the mental space people assign to civil war letters:
"As for my little boys, they will grow as I have done, and never know a father's love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue-eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the dimmest memories of his childhood. Sarah, I have unlimited confidence in your maternal care, and your development of their characters. Tell my two mothers, I call God's blessing upon them. O Sarah, I wait for you there! Come to me, and lead thither my children."
Now I'm not denying it's good, but when we factor in the selection bias that goes into bringing it to us, it doesn't seem especially remarkable. It's profuse, affectionate, but wordy and melodramatic. I see better writing than this on Twitter everyday. Not reliably, or in every tweet, but I do see it, perhaps every 50th Tweet.
To prove I'm not bluffing about the selection bias, here's another civil war letter:
My Dear Wife,
I now take my pen in hand to let you know that I am well and hope these few lines will find you the same. I am well at present. I have got over the neuralgia in the head.
We had a great parade on last Thursday, the 19th. The governor of Rhode Island was here and presented the regiment with a nice silk flag called the regimental flag. There was also present the governors of Massachusetts & Connecticut with a large number of the members of the Assembly, as was also one of the old 76 soldiers who said that we were good soldiers, very good. And we also fired 8 of our largest cannon from our newly mounted fort, the work of our own hands. We had a very fine band of brass music from Massachusetts.There are now 8 full companies on the ground, commencing at “A” and going down to “H”. There is now in Providence another Co. by the name of “I”. It is full and about 80 in Co. “K”. The Company I belong to is “E”. We are about building barracks for 1200 men.
There is a young man coming home with me when I come--I don’t know when that will be--by the name of Mr. Johnson. Tell Mary(1) to have her cap set for him when I come home as he is the handsomest man on the ground.
I have got an office but I don’t like it though it is something similar to that like I had in church assistant secretary(2). We have meetings every night in the week.
I want you to have your daguerreotype and Mary’s and Sis all in once case if you can send it by the next letter; and if you don’t put them in one case, have them taken separate as I should like to have them to look at, being that I cannot see your face. Write to me twicea week and let me know how you are getting along and how produce is selling, as we do not get but a loaf of bread and a cup of coffee during the day.
We live in cloth houses and lay close to the ground but we are in hopes if we trust in God to be in the barracks. And then I am in hopes that I may gain my strength and through the divine providence of God and his mercy, I yet live and one day or another I expect to arrive at home through storms and hurricanes. I expect if I never meet you on this shore or never see your face anymore, I expect to meet you in heaven, God being my helper.
My dear little daughter, I want you to write your papa a letter as it would please her papa very much to have a letter from his dear little daughter. Papa sends her 5000 kisses. Papa thinks a good deal of her.
Tell Sarah to tellPresilla(sic) to forward this letter to William(3), in the name of the Lord, as he is all the time “grumbling.” I had forgot it almost to the last, I want you please to send me those flannel pads that I wear on my bosom to keep me from catching cold. Give my love to all enquiring friends, especially to Julia Mary(4) and mother and the baby. Tell Mary not to forget to write me a letter.
Dear Wife, I send you 10,000 kisses. No more at present but remain your true and affectionate and loving husband Simeon A. Tierce. The reason why we cannot get any furloughs is because there has [been] too many run away.
Poetry
The rose is red, the violets blue
sugar is sweet and so are you.
Since woman to man is so unjust
it is only you that I can trust.
And if in war by battle slain
my love for you shall never frain.
If you loved me as I love you
no knife would cut our love in two.
As blood and water will not blend
my heart is true unto the end.
So good bye dear, I now must close
in these few lines with love below.
Please to direct your letters to Camp Bailey, Dutchs Island, 14th Regmt, Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Colored Battalion, Co. E in the care of Lieutenant Harard for Simeon A. Tierce.
Lots of confounders there...if you used the same teaching method but you had 10% non-english speaking at home kids and/or immigrant etc. and then that numbers goes up 40% in your school..then the success rates will go down. When you look at more homogenous or non-immigrant heavy populations in some European countries vs others or the USA with higher rates of immigrants etc. you'll find most of your answer there.
Education is doing well enough and the rich kids in private schools are doing just as well as ever. We are seeing demographics and cultural shifts much more than any sweeping changes in education with the main difference being the removal of physical punishment.
Certainly not a knock on anyone's intelligence or capability, but an influx of poorer people who are also struggling to learn to speak the language and the culture...they're just not going to do as well on average and it can take 2-3 generations to linguistically and culturally acclimatise.
This is well known in immigrant families and educational studies. It just takes work, time, and generations even to overcome all the challenges faced by people in those circumstances. I know I'd struggle if I moved to France and didn't speak French and couldn't' use my education and the people there spat on me and refused to offer me jobs, anyone would struggle and that's what is largely happening in the USA.
While if you look at easier transitions such as the kids of an English or Irish medical doctor who moves to Canada or something where there isn't a huge transition cost or cultural challenge, then you wouldn't see that effect. While an impoverished person from Hondouras with no education moving to the USA and working menial jobs...their kids will struggle more and have less support at home to even learn English, much less do well in school.
The broader decline in speech patterns, formal speech, etiquette etc. are a separate matter and not part of schooling. People used to all wear hats and even poor men would wear a suit of some sort when leaving the house. Is that cultural shift also due to schooling? It would be silly to attribute everything to education, especially when people back in the 1960s received so much less of it with high school completion rates being lower than today.
Parents (probably moms) with more than a couple kids or other responsibilities may not have time to help their kids with homework. A parent needs to be involved to get the kid started doing his homework and maybe with any tough spots, so finishing is more likely.
I've been guilty of spending excessive time on one subject's homework in order to procrastinate on doing a different subject...
I don't quite get the alleged joke. Thinking back to my secondary school days, I think the subjects I spent the most time on homework were those I enjoyed *most and least*. Least, because it was excruciating to force myself to slog through the tasks; and most, because I genuinely enjoyed those subjects and put extra time and effort into trying to do the work particularly well.
Alfie Kohn is a longtime anti-test, anti-grades fanatic. Similar to the FairTest idiots.
I'm giving you a minor warning (25% of a ban) for this - it sounds too close like an Argument From My Opponent Believes Something (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/13/arguments-from-my-opponent-believes-something/), a personal attack, and the "idiots" comment is over a line.
Questions:
1) Do you keep a record of ban percentages so that you know when a user reaches 100% and gets banished to the outer darkness?
2) Do the percentages degrade over time, allowing a user to one day, far in the future, cleanse his shame and once again know peace?
Behold, the prophets have told that Scott shall one day ban his only begotten son, so that whosoever believes in him shall not be banned, but have everlasting accounts.
1. Yes
2. No, but I'll probably do something informally like that.
Scott refer to him as an example of the anti-homework camp, not some neutral arbiter.
For those unfamiliar with him, here he discusses something other than school:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/11/in_defense_of_s.html
Good link. Thanks.
There's homework, and there's homework. When I was in school most of it was busy work. In college though, most of my problem sets were actually a good way to practice things.
I wonder if parents could just say to their kid that they didn't have to do any elementary school homework. Would a kid who otherwise performs well get away with not doing any homework? It would probably depend on the school.
Right, the idea of comparing two hours of word matching compared to 20 minutes of something compelling in the same research under "time spent" seems futile.
It also depends on the kid, whether they'd be willing to go along with that.
Are projects homework? I remember spending quite a lot of time on things like the science fair and various presentations, dioramas and posters. These were probably not particularly edifying but I rather enjoyed them. I could spend infinity hours painting tiny houses for a 3D visual representation of the feudal system.
A friend recently was telling me a very interesting anecdote from the great depression, turns out he learned it when he was assigned to interview his neighbor for a class. I had a similar assignment, and never stopped to think about how valuable that sort of thing is. I would never have done that on my own.
School projects are often just a really great way for kids to spend their free time. Not always, but it happens. I'm generally pretty anti-school, and I tend to think of school as preparation for something (effective or not). Worth remembering that sometimes it's just a straightforward good use of your time.
School and homework have another effect. They use up your time in a positive way. Think of the trouble kids could get into without direction. Germany kept kids in college because they didn't have enough jobs for everyone. Better than loose on the streets.
IIRC, they did something similar in Kosovo in the 1980s.
I definitely agree that there are multiple types of homework and I would not expect them to have comparable effects. The trickiest subset is homework that's drilling known material to be automatic material - comparable to doing scales in music. It's boring as hell, and doesn't teach you anything new, but it is effective at making a particular task both faster and effortless, so it can have utility *if the task itself is worth the investment*
It wasn't customary for kids in my family to do HW (primary through to secondary), but I did learn a few French verbs at school. As a teacher>35 yrs (Eng.Lang/Lit, including 'special'(dyslexic/complex needs students) I was expected to set HW, and students mostly complied. There is lots of evidence, in my experience in the UK, of parents having a big hand in HW tasks, especially at Primary level, less so in the case of older 16 -18yr students. It seems deeply unhelpful to set lengthy, time-consuming HW tasks when there is no support (space,time,or interest) in the home. Schools and colleges demand that teachers set HW, whether individuals benefit in terms of acquiring knowledge, thinking skills, or learning how to learn, must depend on a multiplicity of conditions. Years ago, somewhere (?), I read that doing HW was a waste of time i.e. had not been shown to be effective. In the UK the education system is inadequate in many ways as it's a political football. If HW was proven to be useless the state school and many private schools here would do it anyway.
My elementary school didn't assign homework and I found it very difficult to develop the habit when I went to high school (England has a single seven-year secondary school rather than splitting secondary into middle or junior high and high school).
I wonder if there are elements of school education that are most useful because they develop habits of time allocation and learning skills rather than for the substance of what is learned?
Some would argue this is the main point.
My parents told my primary school they wouldn't get me to do the busywork homework, and I didn't have to do it. I did perform well otherwise. In high school, I was one of the worse people in my class for not getting work done on time, and I'm still not great at time management.
I'm tempted to just sit and do all my elementary school aged daughter's homework for her - or rather, sit with her giving her all the answers. I wonder though if that's the worst of all possible worlds. Time still wasted on lots of writing (for both of us) - challenging problems always results in immediate capitulation.
I think will adjust my prior away from painful homework interactions. Assume she's going to be able to learn something easily next year and move on rather than labouring something until its nailed.
That balance between avoiding the crap and encouraging/allowing autonomy.....That mad assumption that we all develop our interest and focus at the same time, in the same degree...
I currently teach primary maths to a delightful boy who seems to share my memory deficits and is not helped by his lovely parent who wants to answer every question, about anything, for him.
You know your child best - lots of forced writing? Noooo! Whatever a child does is enough; schools differ. 'Elementary school curriculum' - I think of play outdoors, groups of kids, fun, stories, experiments, dance, song, music, swimming, mostly child-led seems optimal; a bit of English 'n' Maths as can be made useful. My son went to the local Primary school, learnt guitar and other stuff. I don't remember him doing homework. Could have been neglect on my part.
I never did homework in elementary or high school. My parents were fine with that so long as I got good grades, and would back me up to the teachers.
If you already know the material, homework is useless and boring and a waste of time.
Did you ever start needing to do the homework (e.g., college)? Was that fine, or did you feel like you could have used better habits around getting it done?
I'm not Angus, but I had a similar "problem". I never did any homework, until the last minute, which essentially meant I was rushing homework during the breaks right before the session I was meant to turn it in started. I taught me to work well under pressure. And I was able to sail through my entire school career like this.
However, when I went to university I had to learn some very painful lessons about time management, which resulted in me finishing my degree several years (!) late. I could have completed my degree in 6-7 years, but took 10. For two of those I blame the institution I wrote my thesis at, the rest is on me.
Interesting. In most schools in the US that I am aware of, it's literally not possible to get good grades AND not do homework as the homework component may represent anywhere between 25 and 50% of your total grade for the course. Someone that got a perfect 100% score on every exam, test, and project that did not do any homework would likely end up with a C for the class and your transcripts would look like absolute garbage.
I remember when I was in middle/high school, I did most of my homework in study halls. Why not just make school longer, and add mandatory study halls, so kids aren't still doing algebra problems at 8:30 pm, 14 hours after the school day started?
Or just 'get rid of schools'! Kids are pretty good at learning when they're motivated to do so.
_Some_ algebra is pretty useful, but I'm _very_ sure basically 'zero' adults ever need or want to solve quadratic formulas, let alone anything more 'complex'.
I've (happily) done some mathematical research/literature-review as part of my jobs/career (mostly software) and I have a Mathematics BA, but almost everyone else seems pretty happy/content to just use a calculator/formula/software for anything beyond basic arithmetic.
thing is, "doing homework" is in itself a skill. i got pretty far without, as long as doing homework wasnt really necessary. then when the subjects got sufficiently complex i decided to maybe do some homework but struggled hard.
I think a lot of this has to do with "how much you already know", which is why elementary school homework seems so pointless for higher performing students.
By 3rd grade, I was reading high school level texts. The benefits I got from anything other than math assignments and French assignments in school was probably pretty close to 0.
Conversely, going out during summer learning activities on field trips to the local swamp and learning about the local wildlife and plants and animals, I learned a lot, because it was stuff that was literally in none of my books - they were more focused on macro scale things (evolution) and cool things (tigers, whales, etc.) than local flora and fauna.
If we did more tracking, I suspect people would have more appreciation for homework.
That being said, I also suspect that elementary school is not very useful in general compared to middle and high school, and that most elementary school teachers are not very good at their jobs or are following rules that existed since ancient times.
You know what was useful?
My 2nd grade classroom (in 1992!) had a bunch of computers in it, one per student. This was in a public school. We got to mess around on them, play games on them, use them for various minor tasks (I believe we used early word processors sometimes), etc. I am sure that a lot of kids had never used computers before then, and they learned the basics of using a desktop computer from that class.
Tracking works best in large schools, and primary schools tend to be much smaller because primary-aged kids are less independent and can't travel as far as secondary-aged kids. If you only have two classes in a given grade, then you can only split students into a top 50% and a bottom 50% which isn't all that great for assigning radically different school work: both classes will be predominantely students close to the median.
You need five tracks just to get a top (and bottom) class that averages a full standard deviation from the mean.
You are making two assumptions:
1) The student body follows a single bell-shaped curve (which is often untrue).
2) All classes must be the same size (you can have smaller classes for the gifted and severely disadvantaged students - in fact, most classes for severely disadvantaged students are already smaller by necessity).
Also, your math is a bit off.
With four classes, even with a standard distribution and identical class sizes of 25 students per class, if you were looking at, say, IQ, you would have two classes in the middle (90-100 and 100-110) and then two classes for the extremes (110+ and 90-); the median in the above and below average courses would be above115 and below 85 (16% of the population is above 115, 16% below 85, so as each class has 25% of your student body in it, the median would end up around 118 and 82 for the extreme classes, if I am doing my math correctly).
You would only need a student body of 500 students at a grade 1-5 school to track out the top 25% and bottom 25%. If you assume class sizes of 30, then you still only need 600 students.
If you wanted to make it so no one in the "gifted" class was below 1 SD above average, you'd have to have at least 6 classes, which would be a student body of 750 with class size of 25 and 900 for a class size of 30.
If you allow the classes to be of different sizes, and maximum class size of 30 and a minimum of 16, you can track out all the students 1 SD above average and 1 SD below average with only 100 students per grade level.
If you want to track out the 2 SD students, then you will either have to settle for very small class sizes or a large population - you'd be getting only 2.5 per 100 students, meaning you'd need 1,000 students per grade level to get 25.
On the other hand, when I went to elementary school, myself and the other most advanced student were given alternative work to do by the teacher while she was teaching the rest of the class lower level math at one school I went to (one of the things I recall is that we got to learn exponents and square roots while the rest of the class was still working on lower level multiplication and division; I recall we also got to do some applied math, which was saving the book club parents time and effort but hey), while at another school, there was a small "TAG" group which had its own meetings outside of the usual class during normal class times where we would be taken out during certain subjects and basically learn about other things with less supervision.
This sort of alternative arrangement is possible even without a huge class size.
You can also potentially pool the gifted students and the disadvantaged students across the school district into particular tracked schools.
Disadvantaged students need extra support anyway and this is probably more efficient and effective than spreading out these resources thinly across a lot of schools; if you put them all in one place, you can have more specialists there.
Let's just continue with something of unknown utility. Why not?
Schools went overboard on homework for common core. It sucks. Most of it is poorly designed. It seems more designed to indoctrinate students to be complaint than to learn.
As a parent dealing with schools for almost 20 years, learning doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Compliance is the lesson perhaps. And not a bad one for most kids who will be working on jobs where they will be told what to do most of the time. Some see this as onerous or take a conspiratorial attitude, but most schools formally or in recent history were quite up front that obedience is part of schooling.
That's what school uniforms do in most of the world and/or where they are used. That's what being 'on time' means and it is why missing too much class/school will fail a kid even if they can pass the exams. Compliance, reliability, consistency...these are the lessons kids learn for the life most will lead.
Is it shitty...sure...the world is shitty...but is it the wrong approach to take? A high school diploma if that's all one has shows a person is reliable and comes from a steady enough home or mindset to be a good worker. For those bound for intellectual greatness or whatever in University, then the high school diploma is left behind and doesn't matter after they get into university/finish it for an UG degree.
Much truth here.
There are better ways to do this then making everyone wage zombies while pretending to educate kids.
Isn't that a far broader argument about social/economic structures though? Most people will be wage zombies once they turn 16/18/21, so gearing education towards it seems logical. Pretending what you're really doing is turning them all into Voltaire may seem a bit ridiculous, but I don't see that a democracy could do anything else short of not educating people at all.
We can do like Germany and push people into trades and services. Let's stop pretending college is for everyone. Let's get kids to train to be carpenters, plumbers, nurses, dental hygienists, electricians, bookkeepers, fireman, programmers, etc. earlier.
We are not educating people, training them to think for themselves, anyway. Schools are against education, and more about socialization and programing.
"Schools are against education, and more about socialization and programing."
More than one teacher has said that to me. If John Taylor Gatto is to be believed, the last thing they want in a school is for the students to be educated, for the educated are intractable.
Exactly. The truly educated student has a mind that questions and inquires and refuses to accept the narrative. These students become "difficult" and "challenging" and the schools push the parents to medicate them. These are the students that score high on SATs with poor grades, the lost smart kids ignored by the meritocracy.
If this is true, why not let kids test out of "can be punctual and reliable"? Many high school kids have jobs. If they can provide a letter from their boss saying they're a good employee, maybe we should let them complete less homework as long as they can still pass the course. For that matter, is reliability and showing up on time really such a difficult thing to teach that it takes 12 years of a person's life? I suspect that, if anything, school is measuring reliability rather than teaching it. Just collect attendance and assign homework for a month or two and you'll have enough data to make a pretty good estimate of a person's potential as an employee.
This reminds me of the thought experiment where there's a tradition of people hitting themselves on the head with hammers all the time, and coming up with justifications after the fact for why that's a good idea, except that in this case we're hitting our children with hammers and saying things like, "in life most of these kids will lead, they'll bang their heads on things from time to time and it's important that they develop a thick skull early", or "of course being struck repeatedly on the noggin with a wooden mallet isn't an exact simulation of the modern workplace, but the ability to remain stoic and focused in the face of adversity is a trait that is highly valued by employers".
In the current system, lots of people accept that students who have jobs are more reliable than students who aren't. Partly, this is because someone "independent of" the students is vouching for them/prefers to keep employing the student instead of replacing them, partly it's because the students will probably become responsible if they can attach a time and effort cost to money, but also, partly it is because the student can demonstrably juggle the commitments of work and study. Therefore, the students get advantages in interviews and such.
I suspect that if homework exemptions for working became more common, all of those benefits would be lessened - some employers would pay less and accept a lower quality of worker, if the workers got a separate benefit from the job, and it would take less effort and show less responsibility to hold down such a job. These wouldn't be everywhere, but they'd reduce the status attached to having a job in high school. (Also, high school is when there is a benefit from homework.)
(See how cognitive dissonance/"sour grapes" sounds from someone who didn't have a job in high school?)
A lot of things in the modern industrialized human world are unnatural, so unnatural that it takes decades to socialize a human kitten into accepting them.
Obedience is anticorrelated with any job actually worth doing. In fact, junior employees usually have to _unlearn_ obedience-based habits to get anywhere, and these habits drive their mentors up the wall. Importantly, obedience-based education teaches you to _conceal your uncertainty and errors_ , which is the single most disastrous thing an employee can do.
A different thing is Heinleinian "be able to give orders, be able to follow orders" mindset - also known as teamwork, taught in schools not at all.
On the other hand, self-discipline is important in all aspects of life -- the ability to (sometimes) do the unexciting thing that's required of you rather than the fun thing you'd rather be doing right now.
I'm not sure whether homework teaches that effectively (I never learned it until I hit university) but I don't think you can write it off as "evil Prussians want to turn us into wage slaves"
Personal projects teach you that as well, beyond a certain point of complexity/skill everything contains drudge work. If anything we should put a heavy focus on building things and finishing them, which will inevitably teach self-discipline instead of bouncing off the hard parts.
How would you get everyone to do that, even the people who don't want to?
I’d venture that the obedience-value anticorrelation shows up significantly more in jobs that (in our society) require undergraduate education or higher than in jobs that don’t.
Those obedience-centered habits are more likely to be useful in e.g. waiting tables than in computer programming, though both jobs are (or at least can be) valuable.
How are obedience habits useful in waiting tables? You have a room full of guests and have to handle their requests, juggling a whole bunch of ongoing issues at the same time. A person strictly doing what they are told will be a pretty terrible waiter that lacks initiative and ability to handle unexpected situations.
Obedience habits are maybe useful at a 19th century assembly line, that's about it. Perhaps first line staff at a call center benefit from them, but that kind of job is miserable, based on humans pretending to be script-driven machines, and already being automated out of existence.
I suppose that a curriculum designed by Heinlein would run along the lines of:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Which would actually be a pretty fun education.
Apart from the "die gallantly" test, that would suck.
You can skip this test if you score A at "fight efficiently".
"Graduate with honors."
As a cat, it is odd for me to hear a dog downplaying the importance of obedience.
Our reputation for obedience is wildly exaggerated.
I've never heard that most of the world uses school uniforms for compliance. That's interesting. Where do you get that from?
Everyone I've talked to that has taught in schools with uniforms or has students in one in the US the professed reason behind uniforms is to remove clothing/class bullying and reduce sexuality.
Not saying the US is "most of the world" but it seems like those two problems are present elsewhere as well and wondering where the alternative explanation (compliance) is coming from.
I attended school in the UK in the late 90s through to the early 2010s. Uniform standards were enforced at all ages – teachers would tell you to tuck your shirt in, students were only allowed to remove their ties on hot days if the headmaster's office announced it, etc.
I understood it to be partly about teaching standards compliance, partly about being good advertising for the school, and partly a broken windows argument that being "dressed to learn" would promote the right mindset.
Anecdote. Many years ago, I met an university lecturer from Singapore who had been sent to Britain to look at how the education system encouraged rebellion, or at least free-thinking. The Singaporean government were concerned that their education system produced clever, obedient drones who failed to innovate at a rate necessary for their future economic success.
I have no idea what the outcome of this study tour was.
Interesting idea for a story: a 1984 / Brave New World / Public Schooling System designed to be repressive and banal not because it creates drones, but because it foments rebellion, and rebellious minds advance and benefit society much more than a bunch of well-adjusted happy people. Therefore justifying the suffering / broken students / poorly educated students the system creates.
When the rebels go off and advance society, the designers know their work is worth it. If any of them decide to start trying to bring down the system that caused them to suffer, they are shown behind the curtain and realize they love Big Teacher.
This is pretty much the plot of Stalky & Co, Rudyard Kipling's semi-fictionalised account of his school days.
My complaint/criticism is that 'school' probably isn't even that great even for teaching this stuff – and I'm happy to admit that this stuff IS useful.
Just let kids work a job!
Homework sucked all the joy out of my childhood and caused me to hate learning, so much that I totally failed at college, fast and hard.
Whatever the positive effects of homework may be, there has got to be a better alternative.
I don’t know you so I have no basis to contradict you, but how do you know you wouldn’t have hated learning, or failed at college, even without the homework?
I mean, I hated homework too, and didn’t have either of the adverse effects you reported. Without a larger sample, how can we tell if homework actually caused those effects?
* * *
A completely irrelevant anecdote, just so my comment is not too antagonistic: Somewhere around what we called 10th grade, i.e. the second year of high-school, my math teacher noticed a couple students hadn’t done their homework, and started going desk-by-desk to check everyone.
I hadn’t done my homework. When he reached my desk and found out, he looked a bit surprised. (I was a relatively good student.) I don’t remember if he asked anyone else, but if so the answer was probably in the usual dog-ate-my-homework category.
So he goes “Why didn’t you do the homework?” and I just say “Out of habit, Mr. Professor”. After a bit of speechlessness he say “what do you mean?” and I explain that I hadn‘t done my homework all year.
Good thing he was a decent person, nothing bad came out of it. I think the stopped checking the other desks at that point.
Next year he moved to Australia, but I’m pretty sure that was unrelated.
> Let's just continue with something of unknown utility. Why not?
When faced with a lack of compelling studies, the right thing to do seems to be to fall back on intuition. And intuition says that if you spend more time on something then you'll probably get better at it.
If you spend more time doing something that is counterproductive, then you should stop. Intuition is often wrong, unfortunately.
As a parent who has dealt lots of stupid homework assignments, that did not contribute to learning, I have seen the disservice this has done to children. One school went so far as to count all assignments, tests, and quizzes the same, so a busy work assignment counted the same as the final. Teachers didn't care if students learned, but only if the work was done, even for children with disabilities.
Thanks for this post! Short, crisp, interesting summary about something I've meant to research but never got around to.
the graph does look like returns diminish quickly though - you've already gotten nearly all of the benefit at 50% the amount.
Advance of 50->100 and 100->150 actually seems pretty linear. 0->50 probably has very quick growth from having any homework at all, and after that it's linear for some time...
I don't know how their metric works, but it looks kind of like standard deviations which I worry is already close to grading on a curve and makes it hard to say things like this. In general this is a hard problem: if controls gets 75% on the test, and the intervention group gets 100%, it it fair to say the intervention "improved performance by 33%"?
The purpose of homework isn’t learning. The purpose of homework is to sort those who will conscientiously put the new cover sheets on the TPS reports from those who won’t. It’s to filter for conscientious and agreeable personality traits as well as work ethic.
Yeah, as a musician, I’ve always been confused by the claim that homework is completely useless. If you only do math during the hour or less per day that constitutes math class, I would have thought it would go sort of like just showing up to orchestra rehearsals and never practicing the music beforehand. Which, unless the orchestra plays at a level far below your own, such that the music is too easy for you, is usually a very bad idea.
Orchestra and sports have something in common, which is that people only play one or the other if they have the talent to perform at their chosen level, so it's a really pointless comparison.
I'm not sure it's that pointless. Skill playing the violin is useful/necessary for performing as a violinist. Skill with middle-school maths is useful for all sorts of things, from shopping, budgeting, route planning, anything you might want to engineer, cooking, anything you might want to measure statistically. There's a *lot* of roles to play in adult life where it matters.
There's no evidence that homework guarantees mastery of middle school maths, nor that homework is necessary to achieve mastery of middle school maths.
I don't think the musician example works. The musician knows how to play all of the individual notes, knows how to read the music. The repetition is creating the muscle memory to do it effectively.
Homework isn't reinforcing muscle memory - if you know how to solve the problem, you are just demonstrating
1) You know how to solve the problem.
If you don't know how to do the problem then maybe:
2A) it forces you to figure it out?
2B) Guess?
2C) Skip it?
I doubt homework has much, if any effect. Any result that occurs happens all at step 2A or perhaps 2B if you have a parent that reviews your homework.
Writing is absolutely a skill that benefits from practice and feedback. With the exception of a writing class homework isn't about 'writing' per se.
I think mathematics homework in particular is an exercise in pattern matching. The way I recall the most useful homework was: each type of problem has 1-2 clearly worked out solutions, followed by 4-5 very similar practice problems and maybe 1 harder variant. Then, a section where all the "problem types" are mixed together and the student needs to figure out which technique to apply to each problem.
Learning the technique, then practicing recognizing the pattern is essentially creating muscle memory so that when similar problems pop up on the standardized test or whatever, the student immediately matches it to the correct technique and is able to execute it.
I think the key in maths homework is that recognising the pattern is hard. You do a handful of variants of the exercise because they all look slightly different so that it's not immediately obvious how the pattern applies, but because you're doing all the exercises at once you know which pattern to look for, and then you can learn to see the pattern even with less of a hint about which pattern to use. Maybe homework is less relevant in lower years because there are fewer patterns to recognise, you just need someone to explain things so you can understand them.
I’d say that math homework can do two different things (but usually the first thing).
First, it can build that muscle memory. I can factor a quadratic very quickly in my head, simply because I’ve done it so many times. Times tables, basic integration/derivatives, etc can all benefit from this sort of “muscle memory” approach. And it helps long term when you get to complex problems, since if it has 20 basic steps, you need to be able to do your basics quickly.
Secondly, it can help reinforce the sort of analytical thinking that’s useful in advanced math. But homeworks aimed at that are rare.
Problem solving has it's own form of muscle memory, even abstract mathematical problem solving. Look at something like Sudoku. You can learn the general solution to every single Sudoku in five minutes but that doesn't mean you're as good as you'll ever be at the puzzle You learn short cuts, patterns and more advanced or niche processes while practicing which make the puzzle easier and faster to solve.
I don't think that works either - homework would be like doing a different puzzle (perhaps related to prior) every day.
In high school, I took calculus, and it was clear to my teacher that I knew the material on a conceptual level. I often wouldn't remember the formulas while taking the test, but I would rederive them during the test as needed, and he knew that. But I wasn't finishing the test at all in the time I was given. This was partially because I was working slowly and carefully; I rarely made mistakes. But it was also because I knew the general idea of the subject matter, and I knew it well enough to rederive it, but I didn't know it so cold that I didn't even need to think about it. His goal wasn't just to get me to take the test faster so I could get a higher score, his goal was to get me to know the material really really well, so I didn't need to waste energy thinking about it, and then it would be easier to learn the next unit in the curriculum and handle more complex material.
The solution was lots of homework with lots of practice problems. After only one homework problem, yes, I had already demonstrated that I knew the material. But doing it over and over again helped cement it in my mind so that I could do it faster and with clearer thought than before. It really was the mental equivalent of reinforcing muscle memory.
I have no doubt that is true - but I also don't think your experience is generalizable to the overall population or related to whether or not homework 'works'.
No, I think it is generalizable based on my discussions with multiple math teachers. They are concerned with the "automaticity" of doing lower-level calculations, and if the kids don't get enough practice doing those so they can do them quickly and accurately, it's going to be very frustrating when they go to upper-level math and have to spend all their time remembering how to do the lower-level calculations.
It is actually very similar to practicing lower-level music muscle memory so that you don't have to think about it while playing, so that you can concentrate on the musicality and more "upper-level" considerations.
This is something actually in my area of expertise (I taught physical sciences at a relatively pricey private high school for 7 years). Math homework and drilling lots and lots of practice problems was actually crucial for everyone. Because by the time they got to chemistry or physics (even the baby intro versions that were all that were required), those who didn't have that automatic "muscle memory" were lost as soon as a number went up on the board/paper. Yes, they could eventually figure it out, but spending 2-3 minutes (no exaggeration) doing a simple "convert 1 m to mm" problem and not having any mathematical intuition when they'd plug it into a calculator and get something bizarre (because they put in garbage) meant that they'd mostly just get lost.
Drill-to-perfection is critical especially for arithmetic and basic skills. No, common core, it doesn't really matter if you know why 2 + 2 = 4 (which isn't actually something they teach anyway) or have 27 different ways of doing that operation. What matters is that you don't have to think about it--you see basic operations such as shifting a decimal place and it just happens transparently in your head with no mental overhead. So you can get on and do the real interesting part. And that only happens by repeated, frequent practice until it's not even a conscious process anymore.
And I saw it with my own physics homework--there was a literal "ah ha" moment when someone had practiced enough variations of the same problem. The light came on and then that kind of problem was easy from then on. And it generally took quite a few repetitions and almost-identical-but-not-quite variations. It was a phase transition between "this is impossible" (in teen-speak meaning "this requires effort") and "why was this so hard? This is trivial." Different people hit it at different points. But everyone who had the necessary foundation hit it some time.
From the point of view of someone who has spent more than 20 years teaching students unfamiliar concepts, I have to say that this comment strikes me as very, very, strange. The point here is that the claim is really a circular argument. “If you know how to solve the problem”, has no meaning before having practiced it, does it? How would someone “know” how to solve it then? Is the implication that the teacher shows students how to solve the problem in class, then the students practice it in class, say, a few times, and, at that point, they “know” how to solve the problem, and therefore all future practice is irrelevant? What school, class, curriculum, activity or skill does that resemble that exists in the real world? I can think of no non-trivial skill for which that is true. Nothing, from woodworking to math, vocabulary, learning a foreign language, etc. for which additional practice outside of the initial exposure to the concept would be needed before a learner would be able to describe themselves as “knowing” how to solve the problem without substantial practice. My son is quite gifted in math, and I teach honors students, and even for those types of students I have not found that I simply demonstrate a concept once and that zero additional practice is then needed. Certainly when kids learn fractions, decimals, complex grammar rules, how to craft an essay, etc. I have never observed that a single exposure is sufficient.
Thus, I agree with you: continuing to drill past the point of mastery is not good. But the only route to mastery is practice. Theory is that HW is an opportunity for practice. The counter argument is that many students do not do their HW, the parents do it, they don’t use it for practice because they do only a perfunctory job on it, etc. None of that changes the point, which is that the sine qua non of developing skill and expertise in a given subject still requires additional practice, and the musician analogy is pretty good.
By the way, there are numerous good papers in the literature on the development of expertise on how differently experts and novices look at problems, and just how much can be gained by additional reinforcement / development of expertise through practice. One seminal citation by Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon & colleagues: “Expert and Novice Performance in Solving Physics Problems”, Jill Larkin, John McDermott, Dorothea P. Simon and Herbert A. Simon, Science (1980) - sorry, paywalled, or I would paste a link.
> “If you know how to solve the problem”, has no meaning before having practiced it, does it? How would someone “know” how to solve it then?
Of course it has meaning. Having a skill is independent of having demonstrated that skill.
> Is the implication that the teacher shows students how to solve the problem in class, then the students practice it in class, say, a few times, and, at that point, they “know” how to solve the problem, and therefore all future practice is irrelevant?
Yes, that's the underlying question of 'Does Homework Work?' If it transparently obviously worked it would be easier to detect positive correlation between homework and results.
> Nothing, from woodworking to math, vocabulary, learning a foreign language, etc. for which additional practice outside of the initial exposure to the concept would be needed before a learner would be able to describe themselves as “knowing” how to solve the problem without substantial practice.
Practice without a feedback loop is worthless. Homework, largely, is a one-time demonstration - the answer is right or wrong and you move on. Underlying skills can get exercised more often - but simply going through the motions of homework isn't practicing any specific thing often enough to make 'muscle memory' a convincing argument.
On the other hand, in a homeschool environment and a "homeschool teacher teaches in a public school" environment, I have seen 5-15 minutes of one on one instruction, combined with 45 minutes of human-computer interaction and an infrequent group activity to work wonders.
It may not produce people who can do math at the London Symphony, but most people don't need that level of skill.
Took a sec to pick up the reference. You may be on to something there.
Whose purpose is this? The teacher's assigning the homework? I can't imagine any teacher I know saying that - it seems like they assign homework because they genuine believe it's an important part of learning, and do so despite that it makes more work for themselves.
I know the ACX answer to "whose purpose" for these kind of questions is usually "Moloch", but I don't know that that's true - are there actually meaningful Molochian forces pushing teachers to assign homework? It's not part of college admissions, it's not really part of the huge standardized test pushes, and, surprisingly enough, when I interviewed for a job, they didn't ask if I had done my homework. (Which is good, because I didn't)
(On the other hand, I do increasingly think a 4-year college degree is more about establishing work ethic than actually imparting specific knowledge: but you can see that in how it's an important filter in the job application process, in a way that homework - especially elementary/high school level - is not)
“ It's not part of college admissions”
What? GPA is usually about 1/3 homework these days, it’s a huge part of college admissions.
That's fairly unique to the USA, fwiw. Most of the world bases university admissions purely on end-of-high-school exams
Lots of countries have some continuous assessment element to those exams - usually project-type work rather than routine weekly homework, though.
America stands out as making IQ tests functionally illegal for employers.
Has it decreased to 1/3? When I was in high school it felt like every other class had 70% of the grade be homework...
The _assignment_ of homework is not necessary for college admissions. Yes, if you are assigned homework and don't do it and your GPA drops that's going to matter.
But we're talking about the reasoning why homework is assigned in the first place. If my teachers had all collectively decided to not assign homework because they stopped believing it was useful, it's not like I'd get to college admissions and be told "well, we see that your teacher never assigned you homework..."
So again, I don't think "college admissions" is the reason teachers are all assigning homework.
Are the teachers freely choosing to assign homework as a conclusion from their reasoning and observation that it works best, or are they required to, or do they just replicate the tradition of teaching that includes homework? And if they are required to, who is requiring them?
I think this is an underrated response. The reason most teachers assign homework is because it was assigned to them in school, their peers do it, the curriculum given by the admin provides it, and they may have heard in some lecture somewhere that it was useful.
And the reason it is in the curriculum is because most teachers expect it.
And the reason it is talked about in lectures is because the lecturers did it, and assigned it, and their peers assigned it, and they had their own (possibly confounded) opinion about it.
It's inertia with no rigor. Like many things.
Do teachers get a choice whether to set homework? I always assumed it would be a school policy, based on some education authority policy, that they had to do it. Even if it's not explicit, would a teacher get a load of flak for not setting homework?
I'm asking this, because not setting homework seems massively advantageous from a lazy teacher perspective. Unless they get paid overtime to mark it, but aren't they generally salaried?
Every district is different, but in many cases yes.
Now, get a reputation for being a bad teacher, or have enough students "fail to progress" and you get called into annoying meetings, which means sticking with what you know / what the community does is a safer bet. And also a lot of teachers want to have done a good job.
I have known some teachers give out a large stack of homework and then only grade a random portion of it. I have also known other teachers that share students complaining that teacher X puts out so much homework the students don't have time for THEIR homework.
My mother doesn't follow the curriculum very much for some of her subjects. If/when curriculum providers (private company) catch her, they mark her down to have the admin address the matter with her and other teachers. The admin dutifully admonishes the other teachers for not following the curriculum and when my mom brings it up the admin tells her it doesn't apply to her. Because she usually gets several years of progression with her students each year.
Heck, the school even mixes grade levels so they can get some students to work with her for a few months during the year in mixed-age groups. It's really stressful for her to keep changing students every few months, but it maximizes her impact to a wide variety of students (and the other teachers can't complain if a student that is on the record "theirs" suddenly shows improvement on a subject they didn't even teach them...)
You have to wonder about how many studies about X curriculum actually check to see if the successful (or failing) teachers actually use the curriculum as provided.
This seems silly. Is there actually a level of employment where people are chosen based on GPA and yet some of the people who are chosen are too incompetent to properly format and present a relevant report? This is certainly not the case in my (tech) industry.
“ This is certainly not the case in my (tech) industry.”
It certainly is in my (tech) industry. You’ve never had a new employee with a good educational background flame out?
Of course we see college hires that can't cut the mustard in the role they were hired into. We put them in marketing. ( \S sort-of)
But we never see grades when hiring (even college hires). They never asked for my grades either and only for proof that I had in fact graduated after offering me the job. Even if we did see grades, I do not think it would strongly impact who we hire.
Interesting most tech companies I’m familiar with ask for SAT and GPA some also require a college transcript.
We are not tech (kind of...) and recently we have been seeing GPAs on a lot of the applications we received for unknown reasons. And a lot of those GPAs are sub-3.5 so we ask ourselves why this person is volunteering this...
Does your hiring process involve 8 hour long technical interviews?
Absolutely for regular white collar office jobs for random college grads you absolutely get people who can’t work a computer or printer or think/spell there way out of a wet paper bag. Absolutely tons of people who get college degrees without basic skills. Especially in math or anything analytical.
Fuck practically 1/3 of my career is having a basic working knowledge of computers, being able to learn quickly, and middle school math. I provide pretty high level financial consulting and have used say calculus or above less than 5 times. It is almost all being great at arithmetic and analysis.
You might say “only accountants need to be able to handle a ledger”, except tons and tons of white collar workers have random little ledgers and tables and tracking spreadsheets they need to be competent with. Way too many are not.
> or think/spell there way out of a wet paper bag
🤭
Believe it or not typing on my phone does always lead to typo free text.
But I am not posting here on a job application!
Muphry's law never fails!
In college, maybe, but what's the point of filtering in 1st grade? Everyone is going to get passed on to 2nd grade whether they do the homework or not, and potential employers are never going to look at their grades from elementary school.
We would see better results from our educational system with more filtering. We spend a lot of resources pretending everyone can be an astronaut.
Kohn is not "[taking] the studies seriously anyway." He argues that the studies are, as you wrote, inconclusive at best and that one should recognize the demonstrable harms of homework and limit its use (seeing as it's not particularly compelling that it does much). It is easy to find compelling articles on the harms, including physical health, and it extends to even competitive environments where it actually negatively impacts learning (but helps with the educational rat race). e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220973.2012.745469
Kohn acts many times like there's strong evidence homework isn't useful. For example, in Rethinking Homework:
"The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied. "
If it were me, instead of "the results are stunning", I would have said "the results are meaningless and can't tell us anything". If he in fact doesn't believe the studies, then he's doing a particularly annoying version of the "no evidence" thing - see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
Unless you have other reason to think that Kohn is generally intellectually honest, that "particularly annoying version of the 'no evidence' thing" seems like a very plausible explanation for the quote provided.
Maybe I'm too cynical for my own good, though - sure, I save a lot of time by being dismissive but it's a lot harder for me to be corrected on assumptions I'm mistaken about.
> Kohn: "The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research"
Is there any compelling RCT-based evidence that spending more time sifting through the research makes you more knowledgable about it?
I think he does believe the studies.
" any meaningful measure of achievement. "
That's not the same as "any meaningful measure of improvement". He's saying that doing homework is not correlated with any objective measure of success--that is, it's not necessary for success and there's no guarantee it will help you achieve it.
If people can achieve at a higher level without doing homework than those who do homework, then there's no meaningful measure of achievement.
Surely *some people* can achieve at a higher level without doing homework than *certain other people*. For instance, if you took me at twelve years old and had me do my algebra homework and put Euler at twelve years old in the same algebra class and told him not to do the homework, I guarantee you he would out-achieve me. But the relevant question is whether homework helps ceteris paribus. (Which it seems like it probably should. How could practice not help?).
Ah, thanks for this.The only point I wanted to make was based on 'ceteris paribus' - I know no Latin! The fact that eg today in the UK children in poverty, with working parents, is around 72% matters when one considers the state of education. HW, set in the context of a particular education system, has inherent barriers. Many, many children do not even habituate a home environment where homework might comfortably happen.
What do you mean by child poverty in the UK being 72%? The first Google result is a group called Action for Children, and they say it was 31% in 2019-2020. Yes, that's two years ago, and it's missing the "with working parents" disclaimer, but surely they don't make that much of a difference?
Yes, this does allude to families with at least one working parent; we have increased use of foodbanks and benefits needed to top up their poor pay.I went to this link from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, admittedly 2019, my understanding is that it is now worse link: https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/its-wrong-so-many-working-families-are-trapped-poverty?gclid=CjwKCAjwiJqWBhBdEiwAtESPaBR7SoCW5eFmGIUN-y1-54gNsi9WyGe7f87s4_IIEGfA1iU0k-6D4hoCimwQAvD_BwE
The Child Poverty Action Group ( excellent history of involvement with CAB in UK and supporting people through government 'benefits' legislation
https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-figures
says this too "Work does not provide a guaranteed route out of poverty in the UK. 75 per cent of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works."
and "
There were 3.9 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2020-21.1 That's 27 per cent of children, or eight in a classroom of 30."
I think it seems too great a percentage to be true ie it is shocking - we are regularly informed by the Tory govt. that the best way out of poverty is 'work.' 'Working our way out of poverty' is not working.
"But the relevant question is whether homework helps ceteris paribus. "
My point is that this is not a relevant question. Homework is not essential to learning, nor does it guarantee learning. It might improve understanding slightly, but even that's not known.
Forcing kids to do homework when it doesn't improve and doesn't guarantee mastery is just nonsense. Just extend the time needed to learn *in class* for those who need it.
I would hazard a guess that homework vs proficiency would produce the exact same results in elementary school. If you throw more time at a skill the better you get, that seems pretty straight forward.
Practicing piano is another good example they should study. If you don’t practice every day, your progress would be limited. And the age works as well because the most amount of kids in piano lessons is likely elementary school. If they don’t have the drive to practice (such as myself) eventually they will quit.
The same goes for sports. Starting early and spending more time practicing will produce oversized results.
However if you graph enjoyment vs homework, I’m sure the graph would be inverted but that’s the whole point of parenting, isn’t it? To force your kids to learn skills they otherwise wouldn’t on their own?
One of my friends was essentially neglected as a child and spent most of the 80s and 90s watching TV. He’s in his 50s now and has no skills except for being a substitute teacher. I love him to death but I would never let him teach my child anything. He’s basically the poster child for forcing your kids to do homework.
One huge question is how much of elementary school is actually helpful for children later in life and how much is just busy work so that the schools can function as daycare. Teaching reading and writing is definitely important while memorizing state capitals is probably less so. Plus, many of the skills taught in elementary school can likely be learned more quickly later in life. So if the homework is helping you to practice a useless skill, it's useless.
Beyond that though, not all skills are like piano or sports. There's some maximum possible amount of arithmetic that an average eight year old can learn, and it's very possible that the amount that elementary schools assign is more than that. So that homework would be a complete waste of time.
There's a good middle ground above your friend and below "all elementary schoolers do school work 24/7". Evidently no one knows where it is, but I suspect it's somewhere below the current level that most elementary schoolers are assigned.
A significant amount of what kids learn in early school is socialisation, cooperation, attention, learning-to-learn, etc. You wouldn't to wait to later life to get onto this, though it's probably less important if you're getting a good version at home and elsewhere.
I agree that using homework to take the place of good teaching is the wrong approach. It should be used to reinforce taught material. I don’t think kids should be inundated with homework but I do think that homework is important. Putting in the time to solidify what they learned in important otherwise they will forget.
My kid is in that camp, he goes to a private school with a no homework policy and while it’s great for us parents I worry that he’s not getting anything he’s learning reinforced. He’s advanced in math so he has a minimal amount of homework for that every day but not in a way that I think is productive but i guess we will see how things turn out.
Kids are normally in school for about 6 hours a day, right? that would seem to suggest that approx 1-2 hour per weekday of homework, total, is "ok" and anything more would be overtime, going by standard full time hours. I think a lot if the issue is that homework can be very "spiky" - if all your teachers assign a lot the same week, it doesn't really help that the previous week was easy.
> I'm quite confident that the most successful students in my school were those who most consistently worked the hardest at their homework.
Me too, although I'm also quite confident that the students who worked especially hard weren't the ones who achieved the greatest success in later life. My observation is that high-school super-swots tend to start struggling when life becomes a little less structured. Doing exactly what you're told very conscientiously is a great strategy in high school, but an okay-at-best one in real life.
Successful meaning best grades or most knowledgeable? Kids with best grades usually get them by doing homework. Most knowledgeable? Not really.
And in the homeschool world (selection effects apply) many people do far less schoolwork and homework than schooling, sometimes even only one or two hours a day or less.
Sure, you can say "but those are students who would excel in any environment", but the traditional school crowd has the same problem. You can't tell if a kid succeeded or failed because of homework or teacher or curriculum design or because of who they are.
I think a lot of what you learn in early school years is about giving you a framework to fit other facts into.
Memorising capital cities has gone out of fashion as a way of learning geography has gone out of fashion, but it's not totally useless. A kid who has memorised every national capital in the world has at least _heard_ of every country in the world now. Knowing that a country's capital is called Georgetown or Santo Domingo lets you guess a bit about those countries' histories. You learn a bit about the languages of the world when you learn cities like Mbabana and Ljubljana. And you have a little box labelled "Sierra Leone" in your head so that when you hear another fact about Sierra Leone you can file it away alongside Freetown.
Maybe all that still doesn't justify memorising national capitals. But still, primary school education is largely just about applying layers of intellectual undercoat; at some point you have to learn things like "There was a Roman empire" and "water is a liquid" and "other countries exist" and so forth.
An MD of my acquaintance tells me that undergrad biology is mostly memorization.
This is absolutely true, but it's a feedback loop rather than a waterfall process - a conceptual framework gives you something to hang the facts off, which makes it easier to think about the concepts, which gives you more places to hang facts off... I've spent a lot of time learning facts using spaced repetition, and I've learned the hard way that cards for which I have no use or context quickly become leeches. Wozniak's first rule of effective spaced repetition is Do Not Learn What You Do Not Understand (https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules).
I think you have this backwards. I was made to memorise national capitals at school (and my bête noir, English county capitals), and sure, I could remember the famous ones like Berlin and Beijing but not the more obscure ones like Majuro or Maputo. What made a difference, years later, was watching Geography Now on YouTube, which does a 10-30 minute video on every country in the world (they're currently up to Trinidad and Tobago). Once I know a bit more about the country, I have something to hang the bare facts of its location, capital and flag on, not the other way round.
Agree. And not only that, elementary-aged students are frequently (judging from my own interaction with them at least) *hungry* for facts about things. It's the kid who can tell you everything about dinosaurs or trucks or whatever. They're at an age where most of them are sponges for facts.
You can't critically think about things where you don't know the foundation. And having context knowledge (which comes from repeated exposure, mostly) is critical to even *understanding what's being talked about*. I had students who would deadlock on problems because they didn't understand basic words even when those words were entirely filler. They could do the problem if it was phrased differently (throwing a football vs firing a gun, same ballistics problem, just different context) so it wasn't incapacity with the subject matter. But it was basic "I don't know anything about the real world" lack of context. And if you don't learn it when it's easiest, it's way harder to cram in later.
Learning to "see through" the irrelevant words to the common maths underneath is a *huge* part of learning maths, especially at school level. Was the problem that they didn't understand that bullets behave like very fast footballs (lack of object-level knowledge), or that they didn't have that habit of generalisation? The latter is a definite (and learnable) skill.
IIRC, the actual problem was something about dropping something from a plane (vs throwing it from the top of a building) and the word that caused utter blockage was some (irrelevant) part of a plane. I often said that the hardest part of physics (and chemistry) *wasn't* the actual math or science. It was the reading. Because most of the time, that was the core blocker. If you boiled down the problem for them, they could (mostly) do it. Or at least start. But they were either such slow readers or had so tiny a vocabulary that they'd lock up just trying to parse the english words of the questions themselves.
But both of those problems (object-level knowledge) and the inability to generalize were quite common. Especially the latter. It was as if some kids just had boxes for things. THIS happens in math class, THAT happens in science, etc. Or even worse--when I was a grad student teaching at college (pre-med Physics I, aka basic algebra-based mechanics), I did a problem as an example (hitting a baseball over a fence) and told them "this will be on the test." It was, except I changed the words to "football" and "goal". But the underlying problem was identical. Many people who could do the first problem absolutely failed to even start the second. Because they'd memorized the problem statement verbatim and so their pattern matching just failed if you changed even one small, irrelevant detail.
So you really need both parts. And the ability to abstract (generalization, but more) seems to be really really hard for some people. Those who had it found physics really easy. Those who didn't, floundered. In high school, it seemed to just "turn on" at some point for many kids. They'd be incapable as sophomores in Chemistry, but by the time they took Physics the next year, their brains had turned on and it was, if not easy, at least tolerable.
> THIS happens in math class, THAT happens in science, etc.
I have very very little autobiographical memory, I can barely remember what I did last week, but here’s one thing stuck with me:
The main subjects we had when we began school were “writing” — where we started with stuff like straight lines, slanted lines, loops and such, and the advanced to letters and short words – and “math” — which mostly meant learning the digits, then one-digit addition and so on. I imagine that’s how it goes everywhere, but I don’t really know, so take it as context.
Anyway, one of the very few memories I still have from a very young age is when, somewhere in second or third grade, the *math* teacher started writing *words* on the blackboard for the first time. (It was probably some problem statement like “I have X apples, etc”.) I can still remember the shock, and turning to my desk-mate and asking in bewilderment “There’s writing in math class?!”
If you are going to learn a foreign language, I know of no substitute for memorizing vocabulary, memorizing grammar rules, memorizing the exceptions.
If you are learning Latin, and you strike up a conversation with an Ancient Roman, you can't be constantly thumbing through lists of words because you can't remember the word for "fish sauce".
Vocabulary, yes. Grammar...sort of. I learned Spanish in school for 5 years (and didn't take it seriously) and then Russian "on the streets" (limited formal study, especially around the alphabet, but mostly just talking to people). And my Russian was (comparing peaks) WAY better than my Spanish ever was. In fact, I'd say I spoke better Russian after 2 months in-area than I ever did Spanish, despite living (as a child) in Spanish-speaking areas. Why? Constant immersion and needing to use it to communicate.
But yes, there's a lot of memory work involved in doing just about anything worth doing. Some doesn't have to be list-based memorization (which I hate doing)--learning a new programming language (syntax, standard library, common library routines, etc) is mostly about doing and context, but it's all memory work. You can't get away from it.
1) Memorization of simple facts about the world is underrated. Where is Brazil? What continent is it on? Where is the Amazon? Why is the Amazon important or interesting? These types of general knowledge facts require a basic knowledge base about the world, and arguing that people can simply Google every fact or question will not work.
2) There is only “sort of” a maximum amount of arithmetic that an average 8 year old can learn. American children are quite behind the rest of the world in math, on average. It is simply not possible that American kids are genetically inferior to the rest of the world in mathematical ability. Thus, (a) our kids could be much more facile with arithmetic, and earlier (in my son’s relatively wealthy, suburban classroom, there were still children in the 5th grade who were not 100% on their times tables!), and (b) we could move much faster in math for many children, if not the average. (c) homework is quite likely to help with almost all the tasks that develop quick facility — problems like times tables. In some sense, we know that this is true, because cultures that drill a lot of problems get very good at these types of activities (Asian countries, for example), and they develop these skills quite broadly, as well.
The Amazon is in Seattle and it delivers crap I don't need directly from the internet to my front door :)
(I was in an "advanced placement" program in elementary school and they didn't even try to teach us multiplication/division until we were in ~4th grade. Then again, the insistence that arithmetic is the first and most important kind of math is weird? We could be throwing calculus and logic at kids much younger and leaving the times tables until they're old enough to understand how they're useful.)
My kid is advanced in math. I introduced him to basic concepts of calculus like limits and derivatives and relationships beteeen distance, speed and acceleration. he finds them interesting but without a strong fundamentals in algebra you can’t put them together.
Do I disagree that you can push those fundamentals off and introduce higher concepts usefully without them. You can only scratch the surface and then you’re stuck without deeper fundamentals.
I guess I feel like arithmetic is also just scratching the surface, except it does it in a boring and unnecessarily painful way (especially the rote memorization of tables part). Understanding concepts like rate of change even without the algebra loops in well with kid-level science projects and, like you said, they're *interesting*. Basically the entire reason I like math now and liked it as a kid is that it leads to interesting places. Plus, I feel like even a 10-minute introduction to calculus would help kids understand why they're being asked to memorize a billion facts about parabolas.
Then again, I'm not a teacher and I don't have a huge amount of experience with kids. I could totally be wrong! Most of this comes from my own experience learning math. (Which reminds me, another thing we could be doing a lot more is math competition style logic problems. I was never particularly good at them, but I have fond memories of math club and they're a good challenge for advanced students.)
Oh, and if you haven't shown your kid Vi Hart's "doodling in math class" series you totally should - she's awesome, and any kid who can get the basics of calculus can follow her math videos. I think I was introduced to them at 11ish?
Sure, Algebra comes before the advanced stuff, but algebra has very little dependence on arithmetic. One is in trouble if they can't do times tables accurately at all, but drilling for speed seems largely pointless.
I disagree pretty strongly about the basics being delayable. Last year I taught precalculus and watched many students struggle with being hamstrung by being unable to do basic manipulations of fractions and distribution
EDIT: Part of the problem is that there are actually only so many different kinds of word problems that you can ask (and hope that the students will be able to answer). If your students couldn’t even do basic things like multiply, there would be even less
This. Or even basic things like recognizing that 2*10 = 20. I had students pull out their calculator to divide small numbers ending in 0 (like 100) by 10. And not being able to do it. Or who insisted that (1/2 + 1/2) == (1/4). As premeds in college. And if the calculator gave them something weird (because they forgot a parentheses, for instance), they'd not recognize it as weird at all. Had some tell me that the drift speed of electrons in a wire under current (usually ~1 cm/s or so) was either ~10^-45 m/s or ~10^20 m/s. And had no clue why either of those was nonsense. Because they had no number sense and were blindly writing down what their calculator said.
Basic arithmetic serves to give you a number sense. It also lets you see patterns because you can group and ungroup things without mental effort.
People who are good at math frequently favor math that delves into “deeper explanations” and “why”? This is, in my view, totally misguided. Every functioning adult in a developed nation needs to be able to perform certain mathematical tasks, which include taking percentages, working with fractions, reading graphs, etc. in order to fully participate in a democratic society, but also to even understand basic consumer finances, business, insurance, etc. They do not need to understand “why” any of these techniques work — they need to be able to reliably produce the right answer to “what is 6*7?”, “an item is $60 and is 33% off, how much will it cost?”, “a recipe calls for 2/3 of a cup of flour. You are doubling the recipe. How much flour should be used in doubled version?” My students (in college) routinely misunderstand percentages, compounding, etc. Many students in many High Schools in America have trouble with questions like the ones above, and they are necessary for everyone.
Would it be useful to some students (likely the most interested/advanced) to have some exposure to interesting concepts from advanced mathematics at younger ages to see where things were going? I’m open to that idea. But I think this overstates how much intrinsic interest there is in these concepts. Well-chosen word problems in general make the problems relevant. All word problems are more difficult than “bare” problems, however, and thus there is a tradeoff while students are learning. One of the skills that we would most like students to develop in math is the ability to translate words into equations.
Yes. This weekend, Nikki Haley put up a tweet saying that inflation was 67.2% this year:
"The graphic said the price of hot dogs had increased by 15.6%, soda by 13.2%, condiments by 11.9%, ice cream by 9.6%, bread by 8.7% and watermelon by 8.2%.
After these six items, the graphic summed everything up by saying that the total increase was 67.2%."
Yes: she added the percentage increase of each item to get the overall inflation rate. And, yes, the tweet was soon deleted because it was so incredibly wrong. But I'm torn between thinking that her staff actually made this mistake and thinking that the staff thought that enough voters would be swayed by it that they didn't care.
I think the pandemic has given us a very good example of why every citizen needs to understand what a derivative is in order to participate in society. I've watched many people have unbelievably hard times grasping ideas like "the number of covid cases is going up, but it's going up more slowly than it was in the past and that means something about the world".
As for the "why", I don't think we need to, like, *test* kids on why things work. But kids love knowing how things work! They're little scientists who love to pick apart systems and solve puzzles. All I want is for kids to grow up with an understanding that there *is* a reason why math works and for some of that reasoning to be available if they're interested in exploring it.
> People who are good at math frequently favor math that delves into “deeper explanations” and “why”?
After you have mastered the basics, it becomes interesting to talk about more abstract stuff. That doesn't mean that teaching the abstract stuff before the basics is a good idea! It's the other way round; having mastered the basics allows you to discuss the abstract stuff meaningfully.
Trying to teach the abstract stuff first would encourage kids to "memorize the teacher's password", because that's pretty much the only thing they can do with the abstract stuff at the moment.
Now, before someone generalizes this too far, it makes sense to explain some "why" right after the basics were explained. For example, if I teach kids addition, and they notice that e.g. 7+5 gives the same result as 5+7, we can discuss this interesting fact. (Discuss it using the kids' vocabulary; avoid words like "commutative".) But we should discuss this after they noticed the fact, not before; and definitely not before they learn addition.
My point was that we do far too much of this right now in America. Kids learn 3 ways to multiply 3 x 3 digit numbers, they learn about commutivity as you said (even without the word), etc. This is all actually irrelevant to becoming a functioning, productive adult, and is actually completely uninteresting to 99.9% of students (and parents) who simply want to know how to quickly and accurately get the correct answer to problems that they will encounter in everyday life. We should make math, in particular, more interesting by first drilling basic concepts to mastery, then embedding them into more interesting word problems. Advanced students only can learn theory and abstraction. All students can learn theory that is necessary for the next necessary concepts (e.g., cannot ignore distributive property if we want to teach algebra). There is way, way too much focus right now on “why” and not enough on getting the right answers.
Same thing, by the way, in writing. Teachers no longer reliably teach the “5 paragraph expository essay”, on the grounds that it is “too formulaic” or “too limiting”, etc. Know what? 95%+ of my students would have their writing improved if they wrote using a formula. Their problem is that they haven’t been taught basics of grammar, style, organization, etc. It is the same problem. Too much complexity. Introduction culminating in a thesis sentence. Supported by exactly 3 points, covered in 3 paragraphs. Conclusion paragraph. Teach kids to write that way. The 5% top writers will learn to deviate from that, and they will exceed the constraints of the system. For the rest, practice, feedback, constraints, and more practice is good.
Not *optimal* — to be clear. For optimal, send your kids to a $30-40,000 / year private school (or even better, an even more expensive boarding school like Exeter or Andover), provide private tutoring, or be fortunate enough to have the educational attainment to be able to pass on a legacy to them through by having one or both parents tutor the kids themselves without the need additional money.
I'm still not 100% on my times tables, and I have a PhD in maths.
I find this inspiring! I don't feel so bad as I stumble with maths:)
Well, memory...
Same, I never learned my times tables. I learned the fives and the tens and then add or subtract to get to the number I want. Memorization is not the solution for everyone.
A math major who can't perform basic mathematics without a calculator? Never heard of one of these.
He didn't say he can't perform basic mathematics. He said, he might be a bit slower than someone knowing them by heart on some instances. Which isn't a big deal because real mathematics don't really deal with numbers all that much. Time tables aren't mathematics, they are simple calculus; exactly the kind of problem computers/calculators are far superior to us.
Heck, I don't get my time tables straight without using some offsets; and I was doing three digit by four digit number multiplications in my head as a kid when I was bored on a long drive. I can still do it in mere seconds. And I passed fermi approximation tests with flying colors when the (German) army was evaluating my logical thinking skills.
Having a good feel for mathematics has little to do with being able to learn lots of trivial calculus fast. The reason I still didn't learn the complete set of timetables is that I'm a lot more efficient using all the little shortcuts I've accumulated to do calculus in my head. If needed, I can multiply two ten digit numbers in my head accurately. It's a useless skill though, as it will take me in the order of several minutes to do so; and take only seconds to type into a calculator.
That being said: making kids practice calculus a lot in elementary school is a good thing. One doesn't get comfortable with numbers without a lot of practice ... and COVID has taught us that we can't have a substantial amount of citizens who can't even calculate percentages, let alone understand probabilities without major drawbacks for society...
> He didn't say he can't perform basic mathematics. He said, he might be a bit slower than someone knowing them by heart on some instances. Which isn't a big deal because real mathematics don't really deal with numbers all that much. Time tables aren't mathematics, they are simple calculus; exactly the kind of problem computers/calculators are far superior to us.
It's a joke. I am also a math major who has failed to solve 1+1=2 in a timely manner (the next class period after solving an integral that nobody else in my class did).
Oooooorrrrrr........
The biological child of people who weren't very attentive, motivated parents doesn't have genetics that promote being highly attentive and motivated toward challenging tasks?
In fact he was an adopted child, and early on identified as “gifted” in elementary school. So this is truly a case of nurture over nature. We saw how neglected he was during school, he was the epitome of “latch key kid”.
How old is your child? If he's in high school, and if you're really worried about how much he's learning, and in particular if your child also wants to learn more, you could send him to a tutor. You'd have to make sure to find a good one, who will ensure the work is rewarding. This won't work if your son doesn't also want it - if your son resents it, he will put in less effort at school and learn less than if you hadn't tried. I would suggest asking your son if he wants a tutor in one or two subjects of his choice, if your aim is to give your son proficiency in a subject that he will find valuable.
If there are skills you want your son to learn, I would be surprised if school subjects were the best way to teach them. If you want to teach him a work ethic, encourage him to take a position of responsibility in a club, or to start his own club, or to volunteer somewhere that the volunteers get some independence. If you want him to learn to communicate, suggest he does debating or Toastmasters. If you want him to learn logic and reasoning, start a project with him.
Another potential confounder is that incompetent teachers almost certainly will either assign far too much or far too little homework. My own homework requirements were much more reasonable than those of my friend's kids, for example.
Speaking personally, I found it useful in some subjects, not useful in others. It depends on what you are given and how much of it there is to do. I think it made a lot more sense in the context of classes where they said "OK, we have this much work to do, and it's due tomorrow." If you finished in class, you finished in class - nothing wrong with that.
I remember a lot of homework through junior high that consisted of "colour this map; ensure the entire Pacific is blue crayon"
in junior high?!? that type of "homework" is important to get very young kids to practice their fine motor skills - colouring within the lines is a skill, and being able to hold one's hand steady is generalisable and actually important to day to day life - but to a teenager?!?
From a quick glance at the Nawaz and Welbourne study, it seems that they didn't look at performance in classes other than the algebra class.
I take the default model to be that with no required homework, students will nevertheless spend some time at home trying to keep up with the material in all of their classes. When a large amount of homework is required for one class, they will do more work for that class, and do better in that class, but will do less work for other classes (there's only so much time in a day), and do worse in those classes, for zero (or negative) net benefit. If you don't measure performance in other classes, you have no evidence against this default model.
Even if the total time spent at home on school work goes up as a result of requiring homework, and overall performance in all classes improves, it would not, of course, follow that this was a net gain. Kids have other important uses of their time, which may well include work on projects unrelated to the classes they are taking, but which would be considered "academic" work if it happened to have been assigned in class (eg, reading novels).
That's an interesting point, but where is this "default model" coming from? You're claiming K-12 students will voluntarily spend significant time reviewing material (other than cramming for tests)?? I maaaaybe knew people in college who would have done that, but everyone I knew in college was a total nerd, myself included.
I'm taking it to be the model that they have to refute if they want to show that homework is beneficial - not the model that is most likely to actually be true, a priori.
They instead seem to be assuming that students don't do anything useful at home other than required homework, and then try to show a benefit if you make that assumption.
It’s so sad that we have almost no good data on this, despite the massive amount of time spent on it. My prior is that if it’s a skill (math, writing, analyzing arguments, probably reading), then everything else being equal time spent practicing it makes you better. The biggest confound is that a lot of homework is busywork, at least in elementary school.
It seems like edtech should help us get more data points like the algebra study more easily. Hope there’s more data out there that we just don’t know about yet.
Wait, this is really all the literature??? We have education departments at every university and this seems like a really easy thing to do randomized studies on.
I might be missing something - let me know if you find anything better!
Have you seen [1]? They differentiate elementary school, high school and middle school and also look at the students homework quality (rated by teachers) as possible moderator.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1747938X16300628?via%3Dihub
You'll have more success IMO looking for randomized studies of particular homework programs, especially digital ones, such as in this study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858416673968
I was personally surprised that things worked out so well in this study because I found the program they tested to be buggy and annoying. But I guess it was better than the alternative in this study.
Education departments are not, AFAIK, known for producing great (or even good) research.
Well, good news! These studies are typically not performed by education departments. It's typically done by your local psychology department.
I think the reason these studies are of low quality is (a) bla bla bla everything is terrible in social sciences but also (b) it's actually quite hard to measure this stuff. Every researcher agrees that it's difficult to isolate the effect of homework in a dataset. It's hard to know what is happening at home. Changes in homework policy also change what happens in the classroom. The home environment matters for all this. There are non-learning variables involved here, including motivational ones and family ones. Also, homework can have negative effects (especially in the younger years) that counteract any positive ones.
I don't think our reaction should be "oh this is so easy to measure, edu departments are dropping the ball." I think what we should takeaway is "seemingly simple educational methods are hard to measure."
> it's difficult to isolate the effect of homework in a dataset. It's hard to [...]
I guess it’s true that given a dataset, it’s hard to isolate the effect of stuff in it if the dataset wasn’t assembled with the purpose of isolating that specific effect.
But randomization is pretty well known a the solution to “how to make a dataset to isolate an effect”. And sure, you can’t double-blind homework, but Scott had trouble finding even one ambiguously-randomized study. And “education” has a ridiculously reliable stream of research subjects, everyone is more-or-less forced to do it for decades, you have a very regular crop of new subjects yearly, and the state has a lot of control on it. Sure there are confounders and other difficulties, but what research subject doesn’t?
It’s like complaining that “it’s hard to use agriculture to feed everyone, because there are pests and such that eat your crop”, when in fact nobody ever attempted to use a plow or sow anything, let alone investigate if something like pesticides might exist (except that one guy seems to have tried to score the earth with a stick, but nobody’s sure if he did it on the entire field or something).
I agree with all of this, I just interpreted the earlier comment to which I replied as being about research performed by education departments themselves, which they DO do _somewhat_ (if even more terribly than basically every other social science subject/area).
I've had a teacher friend tell me that homework in elementary school is useless. But as someone who spends an hour a night helping a kindergartener and first grader with homework, I'll be annoyed if it doesn't help.
I don't doubt that the material is better ingrained in their minds having done homework. However, whether that has lasting importance is another question. They'll eventually learn reading, writing, and arithmetic with or without homework.
Your friend is right and you should absolutely not spend an hour a night helping your kids with homework. Let them skip most of it.
One-on-one helping a child with homework is completely different to assigning homework and forgetting about it. If the homework is something really unimportant, maybe skipping it is fine (your child will be fine if they don't have enough practice gluing paper), but if you're explaining concepts to your child and they're internalising them, then ipso facto they're learning skills that will help them in school the next day.
Either they are capable of understanding it or they aren't. If they aren't, explaining it is a waste of time and a stressor. If they are, they will do just as well in the long term.
And 'help them in school the next day'? Good lord.
Have you ever tried to explain something to a child trying to do homework, in a one-on-one setting? Most students have more than enough raw intellect to understand most of their syllabus. It’s just that their worksheets are presented in a confusing way, and once someone explains what it means, they can do it. Or it’s scary, and they don’t realise that if they just do it, it’s easy. Or it’s something like reading, which is just a matter of practice but which lots of students don’t do for fun, so they benefit from someone sitting there and watching them do it. It’s not all students and all subjects, but if you start in primary school it’s a lot of students.
And yes, in maths at least, basically everything builds on something else, so there’s a lot of overlap between questions on successive days.
"Have you ever tried to explain something to a child trying to do homework, in a one-on-one setting?"
I spent 6 years as a tutor and test prep instructor and I've been a teacher in three subjects for 13 years so um, yeah. I've spent thousands of hours more time on this than any non-teacher you have in mind.
If I were doing this I might is a hot control or comparison with tutoring. Most tutoring and time spent with a tutor is essentially 'doing homework' and/or working through sets of problems. Especially if one were to look at tutoring centres vs scores...this could be a good approximation of how much 'practice makes perfect'. Though you'd be hard pressed to not be swamped with bias fo who goes to tutoring. But with a bit of hand waving statistics one could compare similar SES kids who get tutoring vs those who don't to see if practices helps.
Another way, which I'm surprised to see is missing, is to look at homework completion rates and scores. Few teachers bother to do this consistently, but there are some who collect and mark all homework as part of a homework score. This happens a lot more in Maths or Science classes than in something like english or history but can be found all over if homework is a formal part of their summative grade.
I found it was a good opener and I'd have a 'do now' problem at the start of class and/or I'd have them do a quick peer marking to swap their homework and mark each other based on answers I'd put on the board (with some QC from me). Then I'd collect that to have them do the marking for me and get the valuable experience of engaging in marking. This sort of actual homework submission is a decent proxy for 'practice' and better than time spent. If a kid spends 5 minutes per problem or 1 minute per problem because they are smarter/already know it etc. who cares? The main thing is the number of practice problems they completed, in my view.
And they would be a good method to compare if completing x% of practice sets with x% accuracy helps or not using their marked homework submissions. So yea I'd think to look at homework completion rates of a given band of high/middle/low achievers and their homework completion rates to show effort and the scores they get in that homework to show mastery.
e.g. If two students gets a 60/100 on their prelim test at the start of the school year, then one does 80% of their homework with 90% accuracy and the other does only 20% of their homework with 90% accuracy....what will their final exam results be? Will that extra practice by the 80% homework effort kid result in a higher score than the other kid who clearly didn't practice as much?
Time spent is always going to be fraught with incredible inaccuracies akin to people self reporting their dietary/caloric intakes...only worse since it relies on children to report timespans.
Another point too...longer school days....what do students do with longer school days? They practice more and are given more time to read or do what would otherwise be homework.
Most studies show longer school days are better for test scores...is this not a good proxy to answer your question as well? Not on 'homework' as a concept of doing work at home, but in terms of if practice makes perfect / if repetition helps learning.
With a tutor you have a person who can correct your mistakes and give you pointers when you are stuck.
If you dump a bunch of homework on a child, either they can do it (in which case it's not very useful) or they can't (in which it is not useful at all). It implicitly relies on having someone to help out when the child is stuck, so it's essentially outsourcing education to parents.
True enough.
Tangentially related anecdote:
In first grade, my mother helped me with my homework, which was mostly reading oriented. One day, my teacher made fun of a student saying their mother probably helped them with their homework (which, assuming my memory is accurate, and it might not be, was a horrible thing for that teacher to do). After that, I decided to do my homework myself. I did a poorer job, but at least knew it was my own work.
Whether I actually learned anything and whether the homework was actually helpful, hurtful, or neutral are different questions.
> either they can do it (in which case it's not very useful) or they can't (in which it is not useful at all)
That’s silly, there are lots of things between those two extremes.
They might be able to do *some* of it, and not other parts. This is useful because they (and, hopefully, their teacher) can learn which part they should explain again.
They might be able to do “all” of it but with mistakes in *some* parts, which is useful because (see above). Also it’s likely they’ll do *fewer* mistakes after practicing.
They might be able to do all of it, but parts of it they might do easily and parts of it they might need to struggle with and maybe look at their notes or books, or even ask their friends, which is useful both because (see above) and because struggling and looking at the material *can* teach them both that struggling or cooperation can help you succeed *and* help them learn the parts that weren’t easy at first.
They might also be able to do it all, but slower or with more effort than others, and after practicing they will (almost certainly) do it faster and with less effort than before. Speed is not always essential, but it’s not great if it takes you five minutes to figure out how to split 15 bucks to two people and you’re tired afterwards, even if you *can* do it eventually.
Now, I didn’t like homework either, and it’s almost certain that it’s less helpful for some people and some situations than other things, and it’s obvious that you can have too much of it, or that *what* the homework is matters and you can easily assign stupid homework. But just saying that it’s always useless and it obviously can’t do anything is silly.
The teacher will not return to a previous problem because some kids couldn't follow the other day. It's their problem (= their parents/tutors problem). If your teachers cared about situations like this, your education was in top 5% worldwide.
Most importantly, the _kids_ won't admit they had problems because they don't care that much and they don't want to draw attention to their incompetence.
Who will check their mistakes, if the problem book often doesn't even have answers, or the answers are provided without any reasoning how they were arrived at?
Do you expect a moderately engaged child to ask friends or dig through notes for 1 out of 4 of homework assignments they have to do today? Because I'd just say "fuck it" and write whatever. A child that would do it is already a straight A student.
I agree with the importance of repetition and building the mental equivalent of muscle memory - but repetition can stabilize skills that you already have. If you barely understand what's going on during the lesson - and that's easily half of any given class - then homework is completely useless without a tutor or a parent to guide you.
Those all seem like problems with your particular learning environment, not homework in particular.
If teachers don’t check homework, it works worse. But if teachers don’t check that kids understood the problems they do in class, that also works worse. If they don’t check that kids understood the explanations, that also works worse. That doesn’t mean “teachers are useless”, it just means these particular teachers are crappy.
If kids won’t admit they couldn’t do some part of the homework, they also won’t admit they didn’t understand the explanation in class, or in the book, or whatever. That doesn’t mean “checking for understanding is useless”, it just means you’re not doing it.
If homework books don’t have answers, or reasoning for those answers, then maybe the teaching books also don’t have explanations, just lists of facts? Maybe even the facts are wrong? Or just aren’t any books? That absolutely does happen in practice, at least in some places. That doesn’t mean “books don’t work for teaching”, it just means you have bad books.
I personally did dig through notes to figure out and remember how to do homework, not always but sometimes. And we did with some frequency ask each other before class stuff like “how did you do X” or “what answer did you give to Y”. Those who did it were *not* straight-A students, and I *certainly* wasn’t. Although we did usually ask the straight-A students, or at least those with better grades on the subjects in question, and they helped. And in the younger grades all but the worst of my teachers checked the homework, or at least asked something like “did you have trouble with any part of the homework”, and did go back and explain parts that we missed, at least from time to time. Maybe my education was in the 5% worldwide, but if so that just means that homework is useful at least if you do education well enough to be in the top 5%.
If you barely understand what's going on during the lesson, I’d say that the lesson itself is nearly useless. Of course homework won’t help in that case. It’d be like sending kids to baseball practice without explaining what the bats are for, they’d probably kill each other.
(That said, I’m interpreting your “barely” as mostly “don’t”. If you *just* understand something, just a bit but you do understand it, then that seems like the moment where practice would be most effective, and well-chosen homework would be very useful. Of course, if you don’t choose the homework well it won’t work, but that’s true for anything.)
Maybe no longer, but in my days, homework was sometimes used as punishment or mis-behavior.
Oh, the 500 word essay due by tomorrow… yeah.
It wasn't generally, but in 5th grade, we had quarterly movie parties that you didn't get to attend, and had to do worksheets instead, if you had too many "demerits". (I usually ended up doing worksheets - on the one hand, I didn't get to see Atlantis... but on the other hand I learned Roman Numerals from one of those worksheets)
Math teacher here. Homework is unquestionably good for math proficiency for many students if it is the right kind and there is the right amount of it, but the problem is that some students might need 10 problems while others might need 30 so there is a danger of assigning too much for some and too little for others. My proposal is to offer a large number of homework problems, not count homework performance for the students’ grades, but guarantee that X% of the problems on the test will literally be from the homework, where the ideal value of X may vary depending on the class and subject.
I don't know what age you teach, but I find digital programs like DeltaMath perfect for homework in high school. (I typically do two DeltaMath assignments per week.) Kids can continue practicing as much as they want, it costs me very little in terms of prep time to put together a new assignment, and there are worked examples as feedback for every problem.
Hey, I know Cooper! He was my dad's thesis advisor back in the day. Very cool to see him cited in the wild
Seems obvious that practicing anything makes you better at it. That homework may be so poorly designed that doing it does not lead to improvement is possible but seems a different issue -- e.g. quality of teachers, of educational materials.
Personal anecdata: I did very well in almost every class that assigned homework (I have always been diligent about doing what was assigned). I did quite poorly in almost every class where homework was not assigned. This pattern repeated from middle school, through high school, undergrad and later grad school.
I know others whose results were completely uncorrelated with the amount of homework assigned and/or performed.
My guess is that the distribution is so wide, individual differences are drowned out by the inter-person variations. Or worse, the distribution might be multi-modal.
My results were pretty much the opposite. I did the minimum amount of homework I could get away with but always did quite well on tests regardless. So the more heavily weighted homework was in a class's final grade, the worse I did.
I agree completely with your guess.
Homework is good if/when it gives children a chance to practice concepts they have not mastered. For a study to show homework to be helpful, it would need to take into account when students master material. I have four very different kids, and can not make grand sweeping statements about homework in general, but it has always been useful for each kid to practice skills until mastered.
I also recently reviewed homework research and summed up what I found here: https://michaelpershan.com/homework.html
I agree that the literature is a mess, and its messiness is frequently mentioned by researchers. I think I ended up feeling happier about the non-experimental studies than you did -- check out those Trautwein papers, I think they're starting to figure out where to look for this stuff.
Here was my conclusion: "For the youngest kids, homework matters a lot to parents but probably has less of an impact on achievement. Parents are often helpful, but sometimes it can turn into a negative experience at home. To handle that, teachers can assign higher quality assignments that won’t trigger negative interactions. Sounds tough, but OK.
For adolescents, classes that assign homework frequently are associated with more learning. But not classes that ask for more time on homework. And not classes that assign more homework that students think is more challenging. But yes classes where students think the homework is interesting or well-selected. And students reporting they put more effort into homework is associated with learning.
It sounds like teachers need to thread the needle for teens. They need to frequently assign homework that is purposeful – it can’t be busy work – but it shouldn’t be too hard. And there’s a possibility that homework isn’t really as much about practice as it is about taking the class seriously, feeling in control, taking responsibility for their own learning."
Basically: homework will be a net gain if kids actually do it. But when you're dealing with adolescents, realistically there are a lot of ways for them to get away with not actually doing it. (A lot.) Completion rates in most places aren't terrific. So the first question is, how do you get kids to do it and do it seriously? And the second is, what are the benefits of that sort of practice? I think research (along with common sense) supports the idea that there are on average benefits to kids when they do it.
For what it's worth, I found the style of that a little confusing - it tripped me up that both questions and answers were in bold.
Totally fair.
I thought it was fine.
For early elementary reading and math, Slavin & Madden at Johns Hopkins developed “Success for All” and.. they say there is research… maybe it’s hiding. Also it is more than a homework program, it’s class work interlocking with homework in a specific way and classrooms divided by level rather than grade. So it is not directly comparable to “homework only” but it might be something to look at.
Also, the Kumon system.
Even if we were to accept that "homework," as some kind of undifferentiated treatment variable, has some net positive benefit, treating homework as an undifferentiated variable seems pretty useless from a pedagogical perspective. What kind of homework? For what kids? Going to what schools? Under whar kinds of conditions? As compared to what other type of intervention variable?
To build on this a bit further - I would guess that the efficacy of homework would be associated with the pedagogical paradigm of the classroom environment. Schools that focus on memorization and rote skills and didactic teaching might have a better fit with homework than schools that focus more on meta-cognitive skills and student-centered, project oriented curricula.
Between the ages of about 8-12 I had assigned homework that amounted to about an hour a week. I found it too easy and boring, just like most other schoolwork. But at that age I was messy, disorganised, terrible at time management, and good at coming up with excuses to get out of things I did not want to do. Because these things were challenges for me, it was good for me to have to a) remember to take it home, b) keep the pages clean and unwrinkled, c) initiate and complete a task I found boring and pointless, d) do this on a deadline, and e) remember to return it. My parents and teacher let me choose my own strategies to manage this, and then asked me to reflect on whether they worked - and this actually helped considerably with my organisational and task management skills, moreso than imposition of these strategies would have done. I also find it interesting that I can pinpoint things that are still issues for me (task initiation, leaving things to the last minute, losing items) back as far as early primary school.
The prompt for reflection is, IMO, the most important component of what you describe.
From my memories of school, the quality and usefulness of homework varied wildly, even within the same subject ("math") and even with the same professor. My naive guess would be that repetition is differently-useful for different lessons in a way that resists sweeping generalizations, to say nothing of different students learning differently.
That said, most of my homework before the university level was crap.
On the plateau model: mathematics tends to be taught as a series of plateaus (plateaux?). You are introduced to a concept like "multiplication" or "sine function" or "Lebesgue integration" and then you work through a zillion examples until it's been thoroughly beaten into your head; you reach the plateau where you finally understand what a sine function is. Then you can move on to the next bit of mathematics, which assumes you understand the previous bit.
Unfortunately the number of examples you're obliged to work through is some constant, insufficient for the dumb kids and excessive for the smart kids. So the smart kids are bored doing the same thing over and over again while the dumb kids never quite reach the plateau and get left behind.
Some other subjects are unlike this. You don't need to understand the history of Ancient Greece before you can understand the history of Ancient Rome. Furthermore, while you can reach the "sine function" plateau pretty easily, no high school student will reach the "Ancient Greek History" plateau. So you can spend an unlimited number of hours studying ancient history, if you like, understanding it more and more deeply, although possibly not in any way that can show up on a high school exam.
As (somewhat of) a 'mathematician', I am very confident in asserting that almost no one, even theoretical physicists, 'understands' mathematics anyways!
And I'm somewhat 'pissed' that 'school' almost ruined history for me. I LOVE history now – now that I can just learn what I want when I want instead of being forced to, e.g. memorize dates and the names of rulers/generals/whatevers.
My primary experience of homework is that it contributes to my performance in classes if it's one of two categories:
1. homework that strongly resembles material on the test
2. homework that covers information that won't come up in class
Type 1 homework is a waste of time for every purpose except improving my GPA.
Type 2 homework is actively useful (obviously, because I wouldn't have learned that information otherwise). This has been true for my entire life - I remember independent learning assignments as early as first or second grade, and I've always found them more useful than lecture-based instruction. My capacity for self-teaching has improved since I was six, and I can go longer without support/feedback now, but the basic principle is still the same. This is probably less useful if you have unmedicated ADHD or otehrwise aren't much of an independent learner.
(Unfortunately, type 2 homework tends to correlate with useless busywork during class time. The most notable example I've run into was high school AP bio, which was a "flipped class". 100% of my time outside of class - mostly reading the textbook - was useful; 90% of my time in class was spent doing repetitive worksheets or listening to the teacher repeat the textbook in smaller words. Then again, I probably only did 30% of the assigned homework. It was a weird year.)
I guess there's a third category, which is homework with the goal of improving fluency/speed at some task. Teachers love to give this kind of homework, but they're often remarkably bad at designing it. IMO, this sort of homework should include lots of very short problems, instant feedback, and enough surprises that making an excel spreadsheet/python program that solves the problem for you is more time and effort than doing it by hand. Also, my experience this literally only works for symbol manipulation problems (eg the kind of math that engineers do/basic proofs/sudoku). I have experienced many painful homework assignments that attempt to turn interesting real-world problems into fluency drills - this is both painful and probably actively detrimental to learning.
But if Type 1 homework improves your GPA sufficiently that you're able to access a competitive program or receive free money that covers some or all of your tuition...surely the fact that that's "all" the Type 1 homework is good for is no knock against it.
Those are all 0-sum gains. Type 1 homework gets set because it benefits that teacher and that class relative to everyone else, but if everyone sets an hour a day of it, all the students pay an hour of their time and everyone's relative ranking is unchanged. All of those programs and scholarships are in practice based on rankings (even the ones with absolute grade thresholds will quickly adjust those if needed, because the constraint is a ~fixed pool of money)
Sure, but just because you're involved in a zero-sum competition, it doesn't mean that a certain kind of practice for that practice is "useless busywork".
If you spend an hour practicing for a math test and become better-prepared for that test, and the results of that test are going to determine your opportunities in life, your time hasn't been wasted just because all of your peers also practiced for that math test.
Goodhart's law. Students optimizing for 4.0s are no longer optimizing for thinking or learning. Teachers optimizing for good grades on their tests are no longer trying to teach students how to think. Institutions optimizing for accepting students with good grades are no longer optimizing for accepting students who can learn and perform.
So as Thor says it's 0-sum, but also it's 0-sum in a way that rewards memorization, neuroticism, and guessing the teacher's password. IMO, that actively causes a certain class of students to lose out (smart and thoughtful, but not willing or able to do the required rote memorization).
I would be surprised to learn that the students who optimize for perfect grades end up learning *less* than the rest of the class. I think there's a bit of a counterculture myth that the gifted-program, ADHD-juggling "chaotic good" student is somehow doing a superior intellectual thing by blowing off his homework and making academic trench runs on instinct (speaking as a former member of that tribe, to be clear).
Like, sure, the ability to bang out scales and boring technical studies on your instrument doesn't mean you have any artistic talent, but the top ranks of professional musicians are disproprortionately (entirely?) people who woodshedded their instrument until their fingers bled, and who either know their scales and studies perfectly or would not find their creativity in any way hampered by a request to hammer out a scale on an instructor's demand.
Maybe this wasn't clear, and I'm sorry about that. The sort of type 1 homework I'm imagining *literally does not contain useful knowledge*.
A particularly egregious example is a chemistry class I took a few years ago: I was assigned to spend time working on a website called ALEKS that was supposed to help me practice concepts. The way they did this was very simple and cheap to code: they would write three word problems for each topic with slots for quantities (eg if X moles of gas is heated from Y to Z degrees celsius, what is the percent change in volume?), then generate random numbers to fill in those slots. They would then serve you these questions multiple times until you got approximately five in a row correct. They would then assess your understanding of the topic... by giving you the exact same questions again with different random numbers.
As a student, this system is very clearly not incentivizing you to understand the ideal gas law. It does not care whether you understand the ideal gas law. All ALEKS wants is for you to come up with the right number by applying the exact same steps to the exact same problem every time.
So yes, at the end of the class I learned something, and I probably learned it better than most of my peers. But the thing I learned was not the ideal gas law, and it was not "how to solve problems", and it definitely wasn't how to understand the principles of chemistry, it was "how to make ALEKS think I know things as fast as possible so it will go away".
Moving back to the way this can make it harder for smart students to succeed, type 1 homework occurs when a teacher first decides what's going to be on the test, then tries to teach students how to take that test. It's the equivalent of a music teacher deciding that they're going to test their students' performance of a sonata by having them play one scale, then asking them to drill just that scale over and over. By the end of the class the students are probably really good at that scale, and sometimes that's genuinely useful, but it's doing them a disservice to then walk out and claim that students who got a 4.0 in "playing D major" are actually playing a sonata.
And say you're a college admissions officer or scholarship application reviewer for a music program. You get to look at students' grades, but you don't get to listen to them actually play music. If there's a lot of type 1 homework going into those grades, you have a problem - you don't know which students got good grades because they're good at music and also drilled in scales, and which ones only drilled in scales. The problem isn't that the best musicians are pushed out of the top, it's that your test no longer has the *sensitivity* to distinguish them from the people who are only good at drills.
Agreed: the horror of guessing the 'agreed' answers in GCSE and A'level English exams in the UK. At one time, 1980 I recall, English Lit. concerned the exploration of one's own ideas in relation to a text/the writing of one's own text. Now the demands are very, very specific thereby stultifying individual writing development.
Is the batch of no homework students pulling down the average that much in the final study cited? I'll gladly take the side of "some math homework is useful, and more is technically better on average, but less still represents better than average progress" if it isn't. Less is definitely more of my time back.
Challenge: imagining arbitrary resources were available, but no more cooperation from teachers, students and parents than you'd normally expect, how would you design a study to effectively look at this? How would you control for teaching styles/techniques/skill? Circumstances in student homes? Quality of homework curriculum? Alignment of homework type with subject matter (Algebra isn't Geography isn't writing)? How do you isolate variables we can't agree how to measure?
We struggle to assess teacher quality in general, or genuine variation in student ability. In that context, figuring out how effective homework is seems like determining how good a chisel is without knowing the skill of the sculptor or the quality of the marble.
The post already mentions all of these considerations, but let me come out with an anecdote.
I was a somewhat gifted student, finishing comprehensive school (9th grade) with the highest possible grades (outside of P.E. and art classes, anyhow) even though the last time I did any work whatsoever beyond showing up was during the first grade - before I figured out I didn't need to do any. I continued on this route in high school and while I maintained top grades in some subjects, my grades in mathematics, physics and chemistry tanked (more specifically, calculus was my breaking point and upon being introduced to the topic, I received a failed grade), and I dropped out of school. I've since continued studying in university and I'm receiving good grades, but this time I'm doing the bare minimum and subjectively, I would expect to fail most courses if I didn't do that much.
What I gather from my experience is the following: Homework is useful, but only up to a point dependent on the individual and the topic. For me, at least as far as the granularity of school grading system goes, there was no use up until high school, but at high school level failure to do any work was sufficient to drop the math grades from excellent to failed. Presumably, other students might find homework to be the difference between success and failure at an earlier or later stage than I did. But perhaps more crucially, it has the additional effect of building up work ethic: to this day I find myself unable to cope with a workload of doing more than half of the number of courses expected of students, and I can only assume this is because I never did any work prior to university. This alone seems like a good justification to have mandatory homework, although it would be better still if homework wasn't seen by some students as arbitrary punishments handed out in child prisons, but gifted students could skip grades to the point where doing homework is actually required of them.
As an addendum anecdote: for me, in maths and physics, the point at which merely turning up stopped being sufficient and homework beyond the assessed assignments became necessary was grad school.
(P.s. In school I struggled with essay writing and did end up practicing a lot for the final exam, but that was to get the grades for a scholarship and I might have been fine to pass without that work? my issue with essays is more psychological than a matter of understanding the material)
The way the problem is posed (like so many of these sorts of reviews) is problematic.
What matters is not just how well homework does (or does not work) cross some aggregate of all children, but what works optimally, ideally for each child and, when that is not practical, for whatever subgroups are easily isolatable.
I would say, for example, that my experience (unlike Scott's) is that I learned a lot from homework, more so than I would have from whatever the alternative on offer is (either "just listen in class" or "read the chapters of the textbook"). Some of that may be my idiosyncratic personality and "learning style", some may be my school, but *I* would be very reluctant to throw out homework until I'm presented with what looks (to me) like a better alternative.
Certainly some (not all, not most, but some) of that homework was a waste of time insofar as I learned things I didn't much care about at the time and have forgotten. But that's a different claim from the efficacy of homework; and I'm not sure how we resolve it given that kids (even at college age!) often are really not sure what they will ultimately find interesting and helpful (let alone secondary social goals like insisting on the teaching of the "second" language in a bilingual society).
To add to what I said, in addition to the "do different people learn differently" axis, there is also the "different subjects" axis.
I think few (especially serious practitioners) would deny that you learn math, physics and programming by doing. Lectures are helpful, reading is helpful, but nothing can replace doing in the sense of one damn problem after another.
I think most people who have studied a second language would say the same thing.
Writers seems to say the same thing, that you learn writing BY writing, not by reading, not matter how much you enjoy that.
So ultimately what's left?
Are we arguing that homework for history (which, at least in my case, was mainly writing essays) is a waste of time that does not help you learn or think about the material? Seems a stretch.
Or are we arguing for more choice over what subjects fourteen year olds should study? Maybe so, maybe not, but that's a different argument.
Or are we arguing for no homework until 14, with the expectation that kids who have never done this before (and based on claims that it's not useful for 8 yr olds) will now easily adapt to the rigors and demands of homework? Sounds like crazy talk to me.
It's one thing to argue that we have too much credentialization and "book-learning" forced on much of the population for whom it's inappropriate. I'd agree with that. But
(a) I think everything about homework, both the content and the self-discipline, are required for those who do want to go into academic/professional type jobs and
(b) deciding at a young age who should go down which path is hardly trivial. Again, regardless of whether it was, in some sense, optimal, this has been derided in so many countries, whether the cutoff primarily affected a particular ethnicity (eg Australia or Native Americans) or a particular class (eg UK Tripartite system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_System_of_education_in_England,_Wales_and_Northern_Ireland ).
Realistically, I don't give a damn how you structure it in terms of color-blind race-blind gender-blind income-blind testing at various ages, different groups will be routed to the different streams, this will be considered unacceptable, and the fighting over it will never end. Which is exactly why we are where we are today, with the default assumption being that every kid has the potential to become a professional, and as such needs the training and self-discipline required from an early age to develop the skills and habits of such a job/lifestyle.
It's also a problem that's a little bit like classical NIMBYism - nobody's happy for *their* kid to be the one labelled as a janitor aged 11, even if they'd previously have accepted it as a sensible system. They'll always be in the majority, so the people who don't like the system will win out.
It's interesting that everyone is uncertain how well academic homework works, including myself, but I don't think anybody doubts that if one afternoon you showed a group of ten-year-olds how to throw a baseball for 40 minutes, and that night one of them went home and practiced throwing a baseball for two hours, the next day that one kid would be the most likely to have improved at throwing a baseball.
Homework *sucks*, and I personally find the prospect of inflicting it on my future children abhorrent (they have one youth, and *that's* what they're going to spend it doing?), but on a purely competitive level, those who put in the hours at any given activity are in general those you can count on to rise to the top performance-wise.
Sometimes the point of repetition in the form of homework is not to be able to answer the question at all, but to be able to answer the question quickly and easily without having to think about it. It's more like training than education; the point is to develop unconscious competence so that you can just do the task automatically. I've been a great math student, but I tend to do mental arithmetic relatively slowly; I always came up with tricks to compensate for a lack of immediate recall, so I never got to the point where I could multiply any two single-digit numbers instantly. For example, if you ask me to multiply 8 by 7, I might not remember immediately that the answer is 56, so I'll remember that 7*7 is 49 and add 7 to that to get 56. In second grade I discovered that I could calculate 13 - 7 by calculating 10 - (7 - 3) instead of by knowing that the answer was 6. When school math did become more complicated than arithmetic, being clever with numbers and manipulations was a big help, but at the level in which memorization is the fastest algorithm I didn't quite keep up.
Haha I love this post. "There's 1 fact, and that's the way it is. Goodbye now."
I think it also depends on what you are targeting. Homework is good for practicing a particular action so it becomes easier, and memorizing things. I'm less convinced that it is useful for understanding concepts.
50 years ago, the ability to memorize facts and be good at executing certain repetitive action was useful in some cases (math, writing) but I would argue it is far less useful now. I think in modern society, computers/internet/automation have removed a lot of the value in memorization and mastery over repetitive tasks. The way I'm able to be a high functioning member of society is specifically by *not* memorizing things (wastes time and mental resources) or being good at repetitive tasks and instead I'm good at looking stuff up on the internet and knowing how to ask WolframAlpha good questions.
If we want children to be good at taking closed book tests, which is completely non-analogous to the modern real world, then sure, homework may help. This feels like Goodhart's Law in action though as test taking just doesn't represent reality at all.
Did they include hours watching TV while doing homework? Homework took me a long time because I did it while watching my favorite after-school TV shows.
I'm going to conjecture that homework in elementrary school has some value if it's set to "overlearn" - what non-educationalists call "practice until you can do it in your sleep" or something - basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic (particularly number bonds, times tables etc.).
When you're trying to do 3 x 14 or something like that, not having to "context switch" to work out 3 x 4 really helps, and this is consistent with cognitive load theory in psychology, which as far as I know does have good studies behind it. How do you get 3 x 4 without having to stop and think? Lots and lots of practice. Homework is one way to find extra time outside classroom hours to do that practice.
A school with no homework but a longer school day would probably do exactly the same, there's no reason why the practice has to be done at home. But it does have to be done.
From my own school experience, homework was a mixture of practicing things we'd already done in class, reading new things in preparation for next class, and busywork. The latter of course doesn't have much learning value.
Back in the dear departed days of psychedelic experiment, there was a phrase to describe the most important predictors of the experience of a proposed 'trip': Set, and setting. Set, the person's emotions and attitudes to such a possible experience. Setting, the surroundings - kind of surroundings, comfort, trust in anyone there to support you. 'Bad trips' (unpleasant or disturbing ones) could be largely avoided by personal confidence, and pleasant surroundings with trusted friends.
I suggest this is a useful way of thinking of investigating the experience ('outcome') of homework. It becomes evident that in particular 'setting' is crucial - a noisy, chaotic small apartment is not conducive to calm 'homeworking' - no matter how long spent on it. I'll bet one factor not even thought of by the investigators was hunger. I'll bet not one of them had ever feared for security of food, or indeed been hungry beyond a half hour beyond usual mealtime.
In other words, cliched experimental designs give cliched results - useless for educational technique guidance.
Thank you! I base my remarks (fortunately) not on my own experience as a kid, but on that of many families I've known - some, my own younger cousins. Plus, work as a counselor in some of the more 'challenging' parts of LA, quite a while back.
I think that unfortunately, a great deal of educational investigation is atrociously badly designed statistically, leading to useless - and hence misleading - conclusions.
So significant, I think.
I believe that absolute support, encouragement and acknowledgement of a child's potential can help them to blossom. (I recognise that sounds like it comes straight from my CV 30+ yrs ago, oh.) There are many examples of young people's experience akin to Michael's in terms of labelling, unhelpful testing and ignoring his actual potential when his fundamental needs are outside of formal education.
The causes culminating in a failure to meet so many children's basic needs are many. Children do not suffer because there's a dearth of evidence regarding basic prerequisites for a decent life. As for labelling IQ and one's abilities, in spite of ubiquitous practices, much is known about individual needs and propensities for learning stuff: maybe context is everything.
One high school I taught at gave me 'the unteachables' as I was the part-time, single-parent, outsider to the department. My classes were shoved outside of the school building into prefabs.
My GCSE pupils failed to reach 'passes' across the board in other exam subject areas but managed to get grades of 'D'/'C' and even one 'B' in English. (C, B and 'A' being the esteemed grades/acceptable towards further education). Each year the Head Teacher would remark that I had 'broken the mould' and I was highly disliked by the Heads of Dept precisely because - even though a small percentage of the work was moderated in school, around 70% was external examination - my students were considered the hopeless cases and were out-performing 'more able' students in their own classes. Also, I am strongly child-centred which is not universally true of teachers; I can be annoying:)
A guy called Ajahn Brahm (Theravada Buddhist based in Perth, Aus.) often repeats his tale of organising an anonymously marked Math exam in a London high school (he taught for a year and thought better of it!), whereupon he 'secretly' [only he and the Head Teacher held the data] streamed the children based on the results of this one examination. Over the course of the school year Brahm/whatever his pre Buddhist monk name was, proceeded to give positive attention and praise to the student who achieved the lowest examination mark. Within one year, this kid who was given attention and support, free from other teacher prejudice (they had not seen last year's results), scored at the top of the class of his peers.
The above examples sound simplistic, and yet caring about, and holding students in great esteem, plus appropriate pedagogy, seem to me to be a basis for fostering learning possibilities. We are emotions/feelings and thinkings,, all requiring care.
(My own son taught himself to read when very little, as his exhausted teacher-mother neglected to encourage his 'education' preferring to read fiction at weekends.
Not sure about that. Michael Oher's parents basically paid for him to take a bunch of online courses to get his GPA up, and there's no evidence his IQ jumped. That claim comes from Michael Lewis's book.
What probably did jump was his willingness to take an IQ test, but he almost certainly isn't in the triple digits.
Well, I looked closer. Michael Lewis said he picked up "30 points" on an IQ test, which is where I got that number, and I'd assumed he'd started at 60 or 70 because he was so dysfunctional.
But in fact, he scored an 80 IQ, which is quite good for a black kid who'd been so severely abandoned for most of his life.--just under the black average. He almost certainly didn't have much experience with the test. And then later he scored just over 100. That suggests he had a much higher than average IQ for a black kid.
So it's unlikely that his IQ actually increased in capacity, but rather that due to the stultifying environment he was raised in he had no school time to learn.
Concurring
yes
Doesn't this just go back to the more general question of whether poverty begets stupidity or stupidity begets poverty?
Yes
If I understand the study, "the students with more homework" did *not* do better in an absolute sense. They improved their baseline scores more.
The public policy issues with homework are almost never studied. Instead, people diddle with this nonsense as if it matters, and oh, lord, the elementary school parents talking about it! Jesus, people. Homework at that level is irrelevant, because nothing in elementary school matters, gradewise.
But the public policy issues with homework dwarf the piddling possible improvement it may or may not reveal. Some of you have mentioned this. At the high school level, the only relevant issue with homework is that it substitutes compliance for ability. It's very common for kids with high abilities to get lower grades than kids with lower abilities (and also similar abilities, which is just as idiotic).
Grades in America are a fraud, and we are now in a world where these fraudulent grades are the only legal tender for college. It's revolting. Meanwhile, people spend time and energy wondering whether a kid who counts on his fingers will get one more problem right out of fifty if he spends 30 minutes a night laboriously practicing.
Crazy. Michael, I thought your summary was fine and very clear.
Parents of elementary school children: homework is irrelevant and you shouldn't waste a single second worrying about it. If your kid doesn't understand classwork, find a shrink to see what LD he or she has.
Parents of high school kids: do whatever you can, including bribery, to get your kid to do homework. Do not make it a moral issue or a learning issue. Make it clear that it's bullshit, asinine hoops they need to jump through to keep their grades up.
If, on the other hand, your kid copies homework just to get it done, judge them severely and wonder where the hell you went wrong. The first kid is far superior.
On the third hand, if you have a kid who just does the homework even though he or she knows it's bullshit and genuinely enjoys ticking off tasks, well, they're weird but it makes life easier for you.
I don't give homework. I turn anything important into classwork. I write it about it a lot, but here's The Rules that Matter:
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/homework-the-rules-that-matter
(don't know if the formatting will work)
I. Teachers assign homework or they don't assign homework.
A. If they assign homework,
then they grade homework or they don't grade homework.
1. If they grade homework,
homework is essential to understanding or it's not.
a) If homework is directly essential to understanding,
then the homework grade is the same as the assessment grade.
b) If homework is not essential to understanding,
then the homework grade is corrupting the assessment grade.
(1) If the homework grade is corrupting the assessment grade, then the school's administration will prevent this or accept this.
(a) If the school's administration prevents grade corruption then the
public will scoff.
(b) If the schools administration accepts grade corruptions, the district will
prevent this or accept it.
(i) If the district prevents grade corruption, see I.A.1-b-(1)-(a) (ii) If the district accepts grade corruption, this is a typical school. 2. If they don't grade homework, then students won't do homework.
B. If they don't assign homework, the public will scoff, and policy makers will scowl, but that's why god created tenure.
Well, if you want my personal thoughts:
I've always hated homework and frequently didn't do it when it was assigned. The particular details of when I would or wouldn't do it are complex.
In high school I ended up doing all the assigned math homework anyway, and in college I did much less than that. And it seems pretty clear to me that this directly impacted how much material I ended up retaining; the quality of my learning is much lower for the college material.
So I would say that yes, practice matters in math. On the other hand, I would estimate the amount of homework that's necessary to fully learn and retain "9th grade algebra" at zero. It's not at all complex and doing work further along in the curriculum will provide more than enough drill in the basics of algebra.[1]
Moving back to the topic of the post more generally, I would bring up the result that student performance in math generally tracks "exposure to math in school" pretty closely, whereas performance in other subjects (and most notably reading) does not. I find the argument persuasive that this is mostly due to the fact that students rarely do more math than they are assigned in school, whereas many students do a lot more reading than they are assigned in school.
[1] Another thing that seems obvious to me is that different people will require different amounts of practice to learn and to retain the same material.
I think that homework is important, because to me it's practice; you wouldn't say to a kid "did you learn that music piece/recipe/sport?" and have them say "Oh yeah, we did it in class" and then "well have you played the piece/cooked the recipe/played the sport?" "No need, we did it in class, I remember it!"
We see the value of practicing/trying out practical skills, I don't think mental ones are much different. For primary school, leave homework until they're older (7+) and only a little, because at that age it's (a) getting them into the habit of having a routine and doing it and (b) physical practice like writing so they get the skills.
I don't know how much homework secondary students get in America (or indeed what it's like in modern Ireland); in my time coming up to the Leaving Certificate (final year national exam for ages 17-18 school leavers) we were recommended by our teachers to do an hour per subject study every night. You could be doing 6-8 subjects, so I don't know how many people did spend 6-8 hours every night studying. But you do need *some* time studying and not just relying on "we did it in class and I remember it".
I agree that "amount of time spent on homework" does *not* correlate with "results on tests" except very crudely; good students may spend more time on homework because they are studying, and good students will probably do better on tests. But you have, as pointed out, smart students who skip or spend little time on homework, who will do well on tests anyway, and poor students who spend a lot of time on homework because it's hard for them and will do not so well.
> For primary school, leave homework until they're older (7+)
What does “primary school” mean in Ireland? For us in Romania school started (and AFAIK still does) at 7, *rarely* at 6 for children born in the autumn, early after the start of the school year. Younger than that we called it... well, not kindergarten because we don’t speak English but that’s what the word means.
(Irrelevantly, it’s interesting that our word is etymologically similar. In Romanian we say “grădiniță”, which is a diminutive of the word that means “garden”. So literally it means something like “wee garden”, but in some sense it’s close to “garden for small people”.)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vNBxmcHpnozjrJnJP/no-one-knows-what-science-doesn-t-know (sorry, I couldn't resist)
(Just for clarification, I am German so that is the "your native language"-subject.)
I spent less time on homework in German (the subject, I mean) than in math but the reason was not that the German homework was less, it was actually more. I just didn't do it because it felt like it was too much and very not fun to me while math was always fun (either it was easy or it was like solving riddles designed to be easily solvable). I think another reason was that you get a lot of "I finished part of it" rewards in your head, since Math homework was usually a bunch of different tasks while German homework was usually one big essay kind of thing. I did English and French homework more regularly too and that was usually a bunch of little tasks and not one big essay.
Those students who did more algebra homework probably had less time to study other subjects. A good study would adjust all homework.
I’m a professor, and I research (among other things) learning and the development of expertise. I think that much of the (very interesting) discussion seems to ignore or downplay comments about the quality of studies in this area. The lack of good studies on HW specifically should motivate us to rely more on theory and on related literature (and improve studies).
We have lots of studies that are more theory driven, and we do have first principles. When we ask a question like “is homework effective?” What is the assumption about when students will practice the concepts that they have been exposed to in class, if not via HW? Just theoretically, if we had a complete dataset on the exact amount of time that every student spent doing HW, is anyone hypothesizing that in elementary mathematics (say), there is no relationship between the amount of time students spend practicing a task such as adding fractions with unlike denominators and (a) their accuracy on a test of that material, and (b) their facility / speed given a consistent level of accuracy (i.e., expertise) with which they would be able to execute concepts such as these? (Controlling for other relevant factors such as ability.) In other words, is the conclusion of the “anti-HW”/“HW is useless” crowd that, given a perfect dataset with full controls (or random assignment and perfect measurement in terms of time and attention), deliberate practice on tasks like learning times tables, adding fractions, working with percentages, word problems, etc. would have *zero relationship* with expertise as measured by tests?!?
If that were true, it would be very surprising, to say the least. In laboratory experiments where people are required to learn things, practice (and attention - “deliberate practice”) and time on task are strong predictors of learning. I used mathematics as an example, but if the concept were “knowledge of history”, or “knowledge of geography”, it does not seem possible that this relationship would be zero. Learning to write well involves writing, then seeing feedback on that writing (and preferably, a chance to fix whatever errors were made, without punitive grading), etc. All of these practice opportunities cannot be fit into a class day without sacrificing instructional time.
What many commenters seem to be getting at is that much elementary school HW is a waste of time in comparison to the hypothetical HW that I have postulated (one person mentioned coloring assignments, but there are so many “silly” things, many of which are really “parent assignments”). I do agree with other commenters that some of those comments are too strong, because it implies that academic skills are the only skills that elementary school is cultivating, which is untrue.
As a final point, the academic literature in Education does not tend to be the strongest in terms of statistical or analytical rigor. As just one example, the analyses in most of the HW literature fail to account for attenuation of the focal variable due to the (gigantic) measurement error with which HW time is measured (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_dilution if this is unfamiliar to you). This is one of many similar issues that plague this kind of work, and which may or may not be affecting our conclusions.
Given the high levels of disengagement among secondary schools (Gallup survey cited below shows only 1/3 of high school students are engaged), I think of most of secondary school as "learning theater." Thus while I'm certain that deliberate practice works, and that students who engage in homework with an intention to improve their skills do improve their skills, most students (if they do homework at all) do it in the most perfunctory manner. They are not trying to learn - they are going through a tedious, meaningless ritual to try to get their parents and teachers to quit annoying them so they can get on with things they want to do (social media, gaming, watching videos, etc.)
For most students, the goal of school is to learn as little as possible while getting adequate grades to satisfy their parents or other goals (e.g. getting bonuses from their parents, maintaining eligibility for sports, not dropping out, etc.) School is only valuable for the social life it provides. Classes are an boring, annoying time between opportunities to hang out with their friends. Maybe a time to catch a nap after having stayed up most of the night online.
Gallup:
"Almost half of students who responded to the survey are engaged with school (47%), with approximately one-fourth "not engaged" (29%) and the remainder "actively disengaged" (24%).
A closer look at the data by grade level reveals a disturbing trend. Engagement is strong at the end of elementary school, with nearly three-quarters of fifth-graders (74%) reporting high levels of engagement. But similar surveys have shown a gradual and steady decline in engagement from fifth grade through about 10th grade, with approximately half of students in middle school reporting high levels of engagement and about one-third of high school students reporting the same."
https://www.gallup.com/education/244022/school-engagement-talk.aspx
Not going to argue with that. However, (a) we have a moral obligation to provide the opportunity to learn for those who wish to take advantage of it (can lead a horse to water…), (b) it isn’t clear that there are zero returns to what you are describing as “perfunctory” completion — that’s an empirical question, (c) the data you present on engagement runs counter to the data on homework/etc. Based on what you wrote, one would expect that HW would be basically useless as children get older and enter HS, whereas the data show that, if anything, HW becomes more useful as kids get older.
I think that the more general point is this: Scott’s post focused on “homework”. The broader point here is that “well-spent time on task”, meaning some degree of attentiveness given to a particular task where it is being practiced, is about the only mechanism we know of by which learning occurs. Yes, smarter people / children will need less time on a given task to pick it up, and prior knowledge permits faster integration of cognate knowledge, etc. so individual-level controls are necessary. Overall practice predicts performance. Longer school days, longer school years, etc. all predict greater achievement. Long summers cause a great deal of forgetting. These are uncontroversial findings. Homework will help to the extent that many things come together: the HW is relevant to the topic, students do the work, there is feedback on their performance, and there is some motivation (external or internal) to improve. To the extent that your data are correct, it sounds like a good argument for moving to a more European-style system in which more children enter vo-tech type HS programs and are sorted much earlier. To do that, they need to master basic skills much earlier than is typical in the USA as well.
"there is no relationship between the amount of time students spend practicing a task such as adding fractions with unlike denominators and (a) their accuracy on a test of that material, and (b) their facility / speed given a consistent level of accuracy (i.e., expertise) with which they would be able to execute concepts such as these? (Controlling for other relevant factors such as ability.)"
If you control for ability, there's no point. If homework doesn't make people who do it objectively better than those who don't, then there's not much point to it.
Scott, your post is about about the need for meaningful, systematic data and the woeful, pervasive lack of that data. Therefore, I'm going offer an anecdote from my own personal experience, which of course will totally, definitely resolve the issue once and for all (for reference, I was born in the early 1970s and had the standard range of k-12 public schooling, along with college and grad school):
1. In elementary school, most homework seems to have been busywork to do so the teacher could say they assigned homework.
2. Exception to #1: Beginning around 5th or 6th grade (maybe as early as 4th grade?), we were assigned short stories to read and book reports, etc. There wasn't enough time in the class day to read in class, so we had to read those at home.
3. Another exception to #1: Well, it's only a partial exception. Even when it was busywork, it taught me a measure of self-responsibility which ultimately was, for me, empowering. I learned to schedule and to plan. I probably overlearned those skills and became a little obsessive about it. Or a lot obsessive. It also made it harder for me in college and, especially grad school, when I had to learn to put things aside for a while and focus on other things because there was too much to do all in one night.
4. In middle school and high school, homework was sometimes busywork, but just as often necessary to learn what I was assigned. With some subjects (history, French, English lit), I really looked forward to it. With other subjects (math, physics, chemistry), I struggled through the homework and didn't learn anything.....until I had a trig and calculus teacher, in my junior year in high school who had a different approach. She assigned the problems first and had us teach ourselves how to do them. The next day, we went over the problems and what we didn't understand from the textbook. I, for one, loved this approach, because it taught me to take control over my own learning and not depend on the teacher's lectures. (Of course, that approach didn't work for everyone.)
5. In college and grad school, homework was most of what I had to do when it came to learning. The lectures helped. I wouldn't've been able to get by by teaching myself and reading. But (ugh!) graduate seminars (where we all talked as if we knew what we were talking about, having pretended to read the first paragraph of the introductions of any given book) did very little and it was the homework. And, as I said above, the "responsibility" and work ethic I learned from my early years of homework made it difficult to triage.
Not that anyone really cares or needs to know, but my "sense of responsibility" came about because I saw homework as something I needed to get done before going on to my real life. Whenever I got home from school, I made sure to do my homework first. That usually wasn't because I loved homework, but because I saw it as a chore, all the better to finish quickly so I wouldn't have to worry about it.
Also, I said that college and grad school is where that obsession showed its dark (or at least inefficient) side. But in retrospect, the drawbacks were already apparent after I started working during the last two years of high school. It was harder to find time to do the homework. I will say, though, that working taught me to appreciate school more. Not in the sense of, "if I get an education, I won't have to have jobs like this." But rather, in the sense of, "at work, I have to stand all the time and be 'on' when I talk to customers while at school, I am the customer and I get to sit down and be served by my teachers."
Before I read this post, I pre-registered my thoughts about homework. Updated thoughts are at the bottom.
How important is homework?
I am sure tat if you look at large aggregate data, it will show low effectivness for homework with respect to learning an future earnings.
So where should you look?
First a definition.
Homework is type of practice of the concepts, processes, and skills one learned through instruction. It’s self-guided exploration in the zone of proximal development.
Second, some comparisons.
Singapore, Finland, South Korea all have homework; they are the three of the best education systems in the world, maybe they know something you don’t.
Third, the best interventions we know of in schooling are ability grouping and direct instruction. Both of these interventions would change the nature of homework. Turning inconsequential “practice” flailing about completing worksheets with deliberate practice that is up to the level of the student.
Fourth, I run two schools which only give homework two days a week and have three days a week of in-person instruction. We consistently achieve above average on standardized tests and one consistently rank in the top 20 of schools. So, I both am prone to belief that practice is important, and that the quantity of time spent in school is gratuitous.
Given these facts, I have the following hypotheses:
1. Homework will be as effective as one’s practice regimen.
2. Homework will be effective if it employs the right quantity of a student’s understanding.
3. Homework is necessary, because learning happens in the space between one’s ears. If one is not doing something with the brain, it is not learning.
Maybe these are uncontroversial and nearly tautologically true?
---
Update:
Scott brings up a question I haven't thought much about. How does homework's importance change with time? At the same time time, he admits that's practicing algebra problems probably makes one better at algebra. To the question about hand, I don't think the answer changes much. When I watch the curriculum closely, I notice that fourth grade homework is especially focused on memorization and dozens of 'microskills' like placement of punctuation, building up 3 digit multiplication, and the "states and capitals" world context stuff.
While we don't know the value of homework in the RCT Sense of 'know', I will still put my confidence levels in the value of homework as high as my confidence levels in the value of unguided deliberate practice.
"Singapore, Finland, South Korea all have homework; they are the three of the best education systems in the world, maybe they know something you don’t."
Oh, lord. First, Finland isn't doing nearly as well as it used to, once they had to start worrying about immigrant performance. Singapore and South Korea track ruthlessly and oh, hey! Asians!
I found this article about homework help (when parents help their students), which gives some additional reason to think that consistent homework help does increase student achievement between 1st and 3rd grade.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038040719867598
About halfway through my engineering degree in college, I realized that if I wanted to get good grades, I either needed to attend class or do the homework. This realization served me well till I graduated.
Regardless if having homework for elementary schoolers is conducive of their learning, it does seem useful to have it at all if doing homework is useful for high schoolers, right? I had barely any homework in elementary/middle school and remember having a culture shock early in high school when I realized I couldn't finish all my work in ten minutes anymore.
I don't think if necessarily follows that if homework is useful for high school students, then younger students should be given more homework to prepare them. Maybe some at the end of middle school to help them transition, perhaps, and/or a few seminars in high school home room to help them figure out time management, homework strategies, and such.
But if homework isn't productive for younger kids, surely there are better things for them to be doing with their finite amount of time. E.g., playing sports or doing dance or some other physical activity, to develop physical health and kinesthetic intelligence and teamwork.
I know it's only anecdotal evidence, but when studying partial differential equations in college, it was not enough for me to attend class and do the assignments; i had to spend significant extra effort doing all the problems at the back of each chapter to really learn the material well enough to pass the course. I was motivated to do that and ended up with a B in a class I was initially failing. So at least in this one case, 'homework' made a big difference.
For how important education is, I find it amazing that we don't seem to have more research on this.
I am a fan of this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Public school teacher here. I’ve observed the current trend to be moving away from assigning homework. In my master’s program for teaching, we were told homework was not equitable because not all students have the privilege of free time or the proper environment at home. Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of that. Many of my high school students are not motivated by failing grades. Like others have said, if they don’t want to do it, they won’t. Granted, some subjects do require more practice and time, so I don’t see a way out of some homework. Like others, I developed my own intrinsic motivation to learn in university. In education research, the studies are quite pitiful. Over time, I’ve just settled on the belief that you can’t force anyone to care about anything- especially youth existing in the current state of public education.
If that were 10% of the kids, maybe. When it's 90% of the kids, it's not a problem you get to shrug off.
"so I don’t see a way out of some homework. "
Give them the time to do it in class.
Who says you have to keep kids in class longer or extend the school year? Good lord. Just teach less. And yes, some kids finish early, and you give them more work.
We've just established that homework at best helps tangentially with learning. Just because you teach stuff doesn't mean kids learn it. So teaching less and giving them more time to absorb it is better than pretending to teach it and pretending they learn it at home.
How is it punishing best performers to give them more work? I'm teaching them more.
This would work best if "more work" is not just more of the same, but an advanced version of it, or the same thing in a different context or from a different perspective.
(Giving the best performers more of the same would be a punishment, because presumably they already understand the stuff -- that's why they have finished first.)
> We've just established that homework at best helps tangentially with learning.
Wait, what? I thought we just established that nobody knows how well homework works?! And that the only people who maybe kind-of sort-of might have done a study that in theory might be evidence think it helps a lot?
Well, the term homework implies it’s done at home, correct? I teach English, so it’s rare that I ever assign work outside of class. My students really appreciate that, and I’ve accepted it as the lesser of two evils. Either we spend a whole 3 weeks reading Gatsby in class or only 20% of them read the book at home. I do the best I can with a 53 minute class period.
No, you're doing it exactly right--don't give homework!
That said -- if the kids mostly do it, I don't see any reason not to assign homework.
I wonder if the main benefit of homework for elementary school students isn't directly academic, so much as developing good habits.
Which would allow them to actually benefit more from homework later.
But good luck disentangling all the variables.
I doubt that there are trustworthy data sets that accurately track student homework loads over that span of time.
Mostly in response to some other users:
1 - Even if younger students don't benefit as much from HW, you'd be hard-pressed to start instilling the habit starting in their teens. That's a losing battle for parents, it's like asking your kid to do chores starting at age 14. Extensive amounts are probably redundant, but I'd foresee a benefit to their assignment in the long-run.
2 - Some have shared anecdotes that they performed well in school despite ignoring HW wherever they could. This doesn't account for study time ahead of tests and exams, which, for classes like math, amounts to the exact same thing as HW. I've seldom encountered people make the claim that they excelled in school despite doing no HW *and* not studying. Those that have likely possess superior focus and memory skills.
Understanding the concepts is one thing, but retention (let alone of the details) can be fickle, and benefits enormously from repetition. It's an important foundation for understanding and applying more advanced concepts in layers. I think it's a mistake to blow up the importance of long-term retention such that performance in tests is then thought inconsequential. The skill instilled from study or hw is probably more important than retaining some abstract concepts in hs-level STEM. If most of us don't use calculus in the long-run, difference in learning outcomes (if outcome is measured well after the fact) in that domain is negligible; we barely remember how to put it to practice. Use it or lose it. Basically everyone keeps writing and speaking their native language beyond school, that doesn't usually erode. If I pick up my guitar now after having it collect dust for several years, I can recall scales and a few songs, but what I can muster out of it is tantamount to doing basic arithmetic. Goodbye Paganini and Eruption solo. What are the concepts doing for me now, in isolation? If you only remember coles-notes versions of everything you're still basically impotent in those respective disciplines.
(a propos writing: many novelists will tell you that writing is a craft, and there's no magic behind it. If you hack away at it for hours a day, you improve)
I haven't looked at all of the comments, so someone may have already gotten here and I'm late to the party. But it seems to me that one solution to both the homework problem and the diminishing-connection-to-our-IRL-communities problem is to make homework an in-class team task (a type of flipped classroom) that has to be completed by everyone in the class or credit is not given to anyone. The students would have to be given support from their teacher in how to troubleshoot issues like a kid not being able to do it, so they would learn a lot about different capacities and the ability to support others on a team IRL. Yes, it requires a lot of teacher training, but it's what they are missing the rest of the day (on their phones) and enforcing it in the classroom may be the only way we heal that.
That's called "classwork".
Exactly!
Fascinating question.
Homework consists of certain activities. Are those activities better performed (better learning) with:
A) No teacher available?
B) With a teacher available?
I can't think of any advantage to A) other than not needing to pay the teacher.
Why wo
Also without other students around - not sure which way this would move it, but it's probably a factor one way or the other.
Yes, that would be a factor.
If the goal is to filter students, not to make them "smarter" or "more educated," then more homework helps select for independent learning
This appears to assume the the objective of schooling is student learning.
Tangentially, regardless of the inconclusive evidence (or trusting of the mediocre evidence?) my teacher training program emphasized that it *doesn't* help and urged us to give homework sparingly.
Even the algebra study is based off a very specific counterfactual of homework as it's generally done in algebra classes, where the teacher lectures the whole class and students only get practice doing it on their own. It would seem much more logical to completely invert that, where students watch a lecture on their own time with the ability to fast forward through or rewatch parts as they deem necessary then go through exercises during class time where they can get help from the teacher and classmates when they get confused.
Except most students won't bother. Which is also their approach to doing homework.
Art of Problem Solving (https://artofproblemsolving.com/) changed my feelings about homework -- they run these amazing math (and two programming) classes where you are in class for only 1.5 hours a week, but mostly you learn through doing the excellent problem sets, which both build skills in the material and give practice in doing challenging problems, and are fun problems to boot. If all homework were like this, I'd be in favor of it. And it also clarified to me that in the best case, homework can act as a practical way to build skills, just as people have brought up music or sports above.
Though as it is, I'm glad my kids' school doesn't give homework so I can have them do AoPS and Beast Academy (for lower grades, run by the same people) instead.
This is actually something I've thought about quite a bit while I was teaching introductory chemistry and physics at a private high school (7 years before transitioning to software).
First, I have yet to see a *non* garbage educational study (coming from a hard science background). Small sample sizes, buckets of confounding variables, ad hoc "controls" or no controls at all, studies that either don't replicate or (most commonly) don't scale at all beyond the small focused lab schools, etc.
"Time spent" is a horrible measure of anything. First, because it's horribly unreliable. It was a running joke that students, teachers, and parents would all estimate completely different amounts of time for the same set of homework. Part of that was that students would include things like "I have the book open, but am snapchatting with my buddies". For tests, I generally used a 5-6x modifier--if I could do it in 10 minutes, I'd expect it would take the median student 50-60 minutes.
Beyond that, I actually ran an experiment (because I was lucky enough to have an administration that gave me carte blanche). For the last few years, I didn't assign "home"work. Instead, I did a few things:
1. Practice time and practice sets in class, with me walking around helping people. If you didn't finish, you'd have to do so at home. But they were scaled to take up the class time.
2. Those practice sets were *irregularly* graded. But rarely. Instead, I did a combination of two assessment methods between major summative assessments, both fairly low stakes (~5% of the total grade, with the median effect being ~1% either way).
2a. Pop quizzes on the previous-day's work. 3-4 questions, 10 minutes. Basically taken from the problem set the previous day with numbers changed. Graded right there in front of everyone, usually by a peer as we'd walk through the problems in detail.
2b. "Online Practice Sets", which involved a tool I wrote to generate a pocket static website that presented questions (multiple choice and fill in the blank, mostly) and then auto-graded them (including some allowed variance for numeric questions). They could do them as many times as they wanted (including later on to prepare for the tests), and the system would only report the highest score. The problems and answers were randomized (in order at least). If there was a pop quiz, it would often come from those problems.
I changed because I realized (both from surveying students and my own observations) that traditional homework ended up in one of two buckets--
1. Common enough to be useful...but then the grading load was too much so they didn't actually get feedback and it ended up being graded on completion. This was utter garbage for everyone--no one took them seriously, including myself.
2. Rare enough to have time to give meaningful feedback and be scored properly. These, in turn, ended up being basically just another summative assessment. And weren't frequent enough to actually provide any reinforcement.
So switching to a basically "no homework, but lots of practice embedded throughout" system was win-win. Can I say that it had substantial effects on performance? No, because we also were revamping the curriculum fairly constantly (one of the reasons I left was that we were just always chasing the new hot thing instead of actually measuring whether the changes were doing anything useful). But it was way more honest and the kids liked it more and were more engaged. Or had fewer people to blame when they weren't. And allowed me to target more practice for some things than others and let them redo their practice. Plus, the panic on their faces when they'd have a pop quiz (even when it was announced) was beautiful to my jaded, evil soul.
Bear with me here...
Say I wanted to improve some practical skill, e.g. batting in baseball (a relatively intricate motion required coordination, full disclosure I don't play baseball). I expect it would be hard to ask a question like if I swing faster will I bat better in a single experiment/study.
1) A sudden shock to the learned motion most likely will make things worse before they get better (at least, this is my personal experience).
2) To accomplish this goal I will need to adjust other elements of my swing, it is hard to isolate one element at a time...
To assess whether batting harder is better I would instead consider the mechanism (yes, hitting things harder make them go further) and some empiricism (yes, athlete that bat further hit harder).
This strikes me as similar to the case for homework and teaching in general, the reason that we believe that homework improves performance is that there is a clear mechanisms and successful teachers seem to have settled on a certain balance of homework. The type of study Scott seems to be looking for seems to be inherently fraught, like asking a someone to suddenly change their swing and concluding something from the experiment. Perhaps (speculating here) this is why there are not so many studies of this flavor.
Has anyone asked whether the student is motivated to learn? I suspect that homework might be of value to a student wanted to learn and didn't get the concept or have the vocabulary mastered yet.
When I was teaching myself foreign languages, I assigned myself brutal amounts of homework and forced myself to do it because I wanted to learn. I don't think I could have otherwise developed whatever capabilities I did in fact develop.
When I was an undermotivated student, which was most of the time in any sort of coursework, homework was just a hoop I had to jump through, and cats hate jumping through hoops.
Thanks Scott, great post. Here are a few other RCTs that might add some additional nuance on the question:
1. "Variations of homework amount assigned in elementary school can impact academic achievement"
Link:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220973.2020.1861422
a. Abstract:
"The utility of homework and its impact on academic achievement has been an ongoing debate for more than 100 years. To date, there is no rigorous experimental research to show whether, and the extent to which, variations in the amount of homework assigned can impact the academic performance of elementary school students. In this study, 440 second grade students were randomly distributed in 3 groups within the classes they attended. Each group received different amounts of homework in writing and math for 20 days. The results showed a significant immediate effect of homework quantity on writing competency (but not on math competency). The writing homework effects were sustained 4 months later, but only for the group that had allocated a moderate amount of homework to writing skills practice. This study shows that the additional opportunities for practice offered by homework can have differential short-term and medium-term effects on the academic achievement of elementary school students and supports the assignment of a moderate amount of writing homework at this age"
b. Commentary
I can understand not including this one in your review.
There's not much to like about the design of the study, or the figures within the writeup (both are overly complicated, particularly the figures).
Still I did their findings (and underpinning theory) plausible for 2nd grade kids, and so for all completists, note this RCT and its takeaways.
2. "The Role of Homework in Student Learning Outcomes: Evidence from a Field Experiment"
Link:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1592889
a. Abstract:
"In this article, the authors describe a field experiment in the classroom where principles of micro- economics students are randomly assigned into homework-required and not-required groups. The authors find that homework plays an important role in student learning, especially so for students who initially perform poorly in the course. Students in the homework-required group have higher retention rates, higher test scores (5 to 6 percent), more good grades (Bs), and lower failure rates. The authors also study the relationship between endogenous homework submission and test performance using instrumental variable estimation and find that homework submission has a large positive effect on test performance."
b. Commentary
The gains appear real, and while modest also meaningful, across outcomes.
It was also striking how much homework students in the “no-homework” group opted out of; making it a requirement changes behavior to a much larger extent than I would have expected in this setting (college).
3. "Online Mathematics Homework Increases Student Achievement" (Michael Pershan mentioned this in an earlier comment.)
Link:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2332858416673968
a. Abstract:
"In a randomized field trial with 2,850 seventh-grade mathematics students, we evaluated whether an educational technology intervention increased mathematics learning. Assigning homework is common yet sometimes controversial. Building on prior research on formative assessment and adaptive teaching, we predicted that combining an online homework tool with teacher training could increase learning. The online tool ASSISTments (a) provides timely feedback and hints to students as they do homework and (b) gives teachers timely, organized information about students’ work. To test this prediction, we analyzed data from 43 schools that participated in a random assignment experiment in Maine, a state that provides every seventh-grade student with a laptop to take home. Results showed that the intervention significantly increased student scores on an end-of-the-year standardized mathematics assessment as compared with a control group that continued with existing homework."
b. Commentary
I can also understand not including this one in your review, as it’s NOT a "to homework, or not to homework, that is the question" study in the strictest sense. But an interesting comment on what *kind* of homework works.
One notable finding is that it helped low-achieving kids more (same as study 2). Effects were ~0.29 for kids below the median, ~0.12 for kids above it.
In contrast to study 1, and I know this is a matter of taste in some respects, I really liked the study. No deception or tricky maneuvering, as far as I can tell.
4. "Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India"
Link:
https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~kamurali/papers/Working%20Papers/Disrupting%20Education%20(Current%20WP).pdf
a. Abstract:
"We study the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program in middle-school grades in urban India using a lottery that provided winners free access to the program. Lottery winners scored 0.37σ higher in math and 0.23σ higher in Hindi over just a 4.5-month period. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.6σ and 0.39σ respectively. We find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but much greater relative gains for academically-weaker students. Our results suggest that well-designed technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education."
b. Commentary
Whether this is "homework" or "an after-school program" is a matter of debate. I think 85% former and 15% latter in my interpretation. The software just happened to be really good, targeted homework.
I also think the broader context of education in low and middle income countries might be useful here. Schools, by and large, are staggeringly unproductive in generating learning relative to those in high-income countries. (More: https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/global-education-crisis-even-more-severe-previously-estimated)
Case in point in this study: kids in the bottom tercile in the comparison group literally learned nothing at all between baseline and endline:
"Students in the treatment group see positive value-added in all terciles whereas we cannot reject the null of no academic progress for students in the bottom tercile in the control group.."
So homework, in this case, might be one (of many potential?) piece of low-hanging fruit that could get kids to learn more than they otherwise would in a low-productivity setting.
*
Summary
-These four studies, plus the algebra one Scott cites, tend to support that homework *can* work, under some conditions.
-The key variables, by study, appear to be (i) for the younger kids in Romania, giving them novel contexts to practice already-learned skills, (ii) for college kids at East Carolina State, making them do the homework (and make it relevant to success on exams), (iii) for the kids in Delhi giving them instruction at their level, or really any instruction at all, (iv) for middle school kids in Maine, giving them some “hints” with well-aligned practice problems so that they don’t get stuck.
Common theme in all these winners was that homework was either marked (by a computer or human). I suspect that matters quite a bit.
-Highest RoI, subject-wise, seems to be in math, though it might just be relatively overstudied (all 5 of the studies included math or math-adjacent stuff), and there were high returns to Hindi as well in the Mindspark study, and no impact at all on math in Study 1.
-Highest RoI, distribution-wise, seems to be with lower-performing pupils, though caveat emptor: my guess is that they are also unusually responsive to feedback; simply assigning low-performing kids homework and not correcting it may backfire.
I wonder if non-teachers are aware that there is a growing anti-homework movement that's equity motivated. You can check out Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman if you want to get those arguments in one place.
Lots of teachers are encouraged to both drop the % that HW makes up of the total grade and also award half credit even when students don't do the work. I'm of two minds of the approach. It clearly reduces failing grades, but I'm not sure if that is helping people learn more. You could make the argument that homework is more about compliance, but then it's not always clear what a grade is supposed to represent. Is a grade the record of your ability to meet a specific standard, a measurement of your growth in learning, or an assessment of the effort you undertook? If we had a perfect way of measuring those things, which would we choose?
I‘m a (new-ish) teacher and at university we heard that John Hattie was the go-to guy for statistical analysis which aspects/methods/… work and which don’t have an effect on furthering education. His meta-meta analysis „Visible learning“ combines 960 meta studies and encompassing 260 million students to check out everything from class size and teaching method to TV hours at home and nutrition.
The median effect over all of them is d=0.23. So basically most things have some kind of positive effect on learning. The goal for teachers then should be to find those things that are better that most and concentrate on those. So he suggests taking 0.23 as „helps just a little“ (and below that as „hardly helps“. Effects over 0.4 are labelled „works well“.
Homework is ranked 88th, d=0.33. The meta-analyses were
- Pascal, Weinstein & Walberg, 1984 (15 studies, d=0.36)
- Cooper, 1989 (20 studies, d=0.21)
- DeBaz, 1994 (77 studies, d=0.39)
- Cooper, 1994 (17 studies, d=0.21)
- Cooper, Robinson & Patall, 2006 (32 studies, d=0.48)
Anyway, my take-away is that I mostly don’t bother with homework. The kids who understand the subject in class waste time doing things they already know. The kids who don’t know how to do the task don’t get any help so they will hardly get better. More time spent doing the thing will increase capabilities a bit but I have to be conscious of my pupil’s private life as well. They need time to learn the piano or play soccer or be kids or whatever. There’s so much learning possible if I don’t waste their time.
That said (as a primary school teacher), they will have to learn to read and write. There’s no way around that, if you don’t practice reading at home it will take you soo long before you get your 10.000 hours or whatever in school. So I‘d argue if there is ever a place for homework then it’s daily reading and writing in first and second grade.
Hattie should not be your go-to guy. His method of dumping all studies into a giant meta-analytic grinder is suspect: https://robertslavinsblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/21/john-hattie-is-wrong/
Well, that's a sad end to my smugness right here! I am (was) pretty much the only teacher I know who read Hattie and tried to at least keep some of his results in my mind at times. Everyone else just does whatever they feel is "right" - I went with "science", and lost (time and maybe intuition).
I will poke around your suggested bestevidence.org but many misunderstandings lie this way. I'm German and my German Hattie edition had a lengthy preface detailing that you can't just translate the words as educational concepts in both countries differ quite a bit. E.g. how to teach "reading first grade" may be quite different so there's a lot of additional research involved.
Anyway, thanks for setting me straight, Michael.
If you can handle Scott's blog you might be best served by chasing Hattie's studies upstream. There's a good deal of educational research coming out of Germany -- I've found Ulrich Trautwein's writing about homework to be particularly clear-headed: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UHnApKoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
One would have to start with a typology of homework. Some learning outcomes need skill drill. For others (too much) skill drill is harmful. Finding the right balance between skill drill and free exploration is crucial in so many areas of learning (whether sports, music, maths, etc). How to get this balance right is the hard question for a teacher.
And without putting this balance between skill drill and free exploration into focus there is, in my opinion, no hope to assess whether homework works.
Btw, some people seem to be able to learn a subject without skill drill. In my experience, this is only the case because they integrate skill drill into their free exploration. (I first noticed this when listening to a Dennis Bergkamp interview where he described how he learned to play football (soccer) as a kid.)
Btw^2, if you want to enjoy the sublime skills of Bergkamp see eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvREhmTptSc
As someone who always hated homework, and spend countless train rides in the morning and countless breaks in between lessons to copy homework from others, I fully support your conclusion! Very grateful to those who always let me copy their finished work without ever complaining. Homework didn't count for our grades, but not doing homework would lead to different kind of punishment, including prominently to have to stay in school for some additional hour(s).
On a more theoretical note: Even besides the evident shortcomings of cited studies I think the question of 'does homework work' is grossly underspecified. As already mentioned in other comments, it's probably much more 'which type of homework' 'for whom' and 'under which conditions'. With 'which type of homework' not being algebra vs. French as a foreign language, but the specific type of exercices in each of those.
I've always sort of assumed that the value of homework came from two things: First, that school is over at 3pm or whatever, but the longer you spend thinking about something the more of it you retain (80,000 hours and whatnot); and second, that working on something closer to bedtime (than 3pm) makes it something that is more reinforced by whatever the mysterious reinforcement mechanism of sleep is.
I say "assumed". I have no more idea than anybody else. But it is enough to make me scowl when I hear about kids not doing homework any more, and not *just* because I've paid *my* dues.
The skill my kids seem to have learned by doing homework is how to work independently (compared to me who wasn't set homework for most of my school career). This has spilled over into them being able to do none school work with more focus and be much better at revising for exams etc. It's probably a useful life skill.
If you look at countries who have extraordinary amounts of homework, like South Korea, they seem to do astonishingly well from an academic achievement point of view. While this might indicate that homework is effective, it is a very high price to pay in terms of happiness and time spent learning on things mostly useless in real life.
Whenever I think about homework I think the one-size-fits-all approach to school is really the underlying problem. The super smart kids in the class that find the material super easy and boring are way more likely to do the homework. They want the good grade and homework is part of the grade. The kids that are struggling with the material and that could use extra help or tutoring are least likely to do the homework. The first group gets no benefit from the homework that they did and the second group that did not do the homework actually could have benefited from it.
There should be a skills based system where based on how you did on the test/quiz determines how much if any homework you get on the topic. If you just aced the test you don't need the homework. If you got a D there should definitely be some homework as you clearly do not know the material as well. Apparently, we don't do this because it would not be "fair".
Personally, I did all "homework" during the school day in other classes as I found school too easy and boring and the homework didn't even being to be challenging. This resulted in homework without the "home" portion.
in this case, it seems like we should default to homework works.
Science is conflicted because not enough good studies, but a priori homework should work (deliberate practice and whatnot) and common sense says homework should work. Maybe a good reason not to have a billion hours of homework, though.
I find the workload at a 40 hr job is less than the workload at an elite 11th-grade high school, which feels wrong.
Studies on learning suggest that repetition of material is valuable for learning.
As such, I feel that it is likely that any sort of repetition of material - be it in the form of reading a textbook then going thrugh the lecture and taking notes on the lecture, or actually doing homework problems based on the material covered in the lecture, or doing a project which relies on the skills you are supposedly learning, or watching videos about the subject matter - will reinforce learning.
Speaking as someone who enjoys writing fiction, repeatedly writing fiction (in the form of fanfiction) greatly improved my skill at writing fiction, and that I started out at a higher level than most people in the fanfiction community because I'd spent years roleplaying and reading books - and while neither of those things are precisely writing prose fiction, they rely on many of the same skills.
I think that there's often a "pool" of skills that surround various things. Writing prose fiction is not the same as reading prose fiction or roleplaying (be it freeform or RPGs), but there's a significant overlap in the skills here, and if you engage in gainful practice (i.e. pushing yourself to improve your skills by repeatedly doing these things) you improve your skills.
This is obvious with art as well; practicing art is how people get better at art. If you look at artists who practice for a long time, their skill levels tend to go up; in some cases, this can be especially dramatic if you catch people very early in their artistic careers. A good example of this would be Miss Mab; if you look at the very oldest comic she posted, back in high school ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_001.php ) and then compare it to what she does today ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_2084.php ) the difference is stark. Even if you look at a lesser time span within that, like five years between this ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Abel_03.php ) and this ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Ab_098.php ), you can see significant improvements.
However, at some point, unless you push yourself to do new things, these gains can become increasingly limited. For instance, this comic from 2013 ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_1389.php ) and this comic from 2019 ( http://www.missmab.com/Comics/Vol_1896.php ) is a larger time gap, but the gains are clearly not as significant - she was already quite good at art in 2013, and while she did get better over time (particularly at backgrounds) the advances have not been as large.
As such, doing homework is valuable, but doing infinite amounts of homework isn't - there's declining returns, and you get larger returns by pushing yourself further along the road rather than endlessly repeating the skills you already have.
I think this is where people get unahppy about homework. The more skill you already have, the worse the gains will become by doing the same thing over and over.
I suspect this is why homework appers increasingly more valuable as students get older - in elementary school, a lot of the higher end students already baically know everything or most everything elementary school teaches them. As such, elementary school homework is a waste of time for them.
However, lower end students are not nearly as good at this stuff, and as such, will see significantly larger benefits because they don't already know this stuff.
A kid who enters elementary school reading the kinds of books you read in 6th grade or even high school is going to get almost nothing from elementary school English classes.
I also suspect this is why math homework seems so valuable by comparison - few parents teach their children much math independent of school, and particularly not higher levels of it, and people generally don't naturally do much repetition of math at that age, so math homework will seem very valuable. And once you hit algebra, I think that goes way beyond what 90%+ of parents will ever spend time drilling kids on independently.
Conversely, a lot of kids enjoy reading books, so a lot of other subjects are more likely to be covered. I enjoyed reading Zoobooks and various science books, so I had a huge level of knowledge matter on the subject. I even read some textbooks for fun because I was a horrible little monster like that.
This meant that I had a ridiculous advantage over everyone else in science class, even through high school and early college. I knew this stuff back and front and could spend very little time on work and get better grades because I had already put in the work through years and years of independent "study", so the homework was entirely pointless for me.
But if I tried the same thing with college calculus, I was doomed.
So, yes. I think that homework is valuable because it is forced repetition of learning ,but I think that "pre-existing knowledge" is a greatly underappreciated confounding variable.
I think you will see larger benefits of people doing homework in subject matters that they don't independent study than those that they do, and I think you will see larger benefits of homework the more advanced the subject matter is, as that means that fewer and fewer students will have natural background in it, and that you will see larger benefits on lower end students for lower-level materials than you will see for higher-level students on lower-end materials.