More homework is being assigned by teachers and demanded by parents, but has Harris Cooper, professor at Duke University, points out in a Washington Post article elementary school students get no real academic benefit from homework.
And high school students are likely wasting their time because Harris’s research shows that there is no academic benefit after two-hours a night (and one 1/2 hours for middle schoolers).
And what’s perhaps more important, he said, is that most teachers get little or no training on how to create homework assignments that advance learning.
In the 1930’s the American Child Health Association labeled homework and child labor as leading killers of children who contracted tuberculosis and heart disease.
Alfie Kohn’s new book, The Homework Myth, points to family conflict and stress as a reason for eliminating homework and draws on Cooper’s research to argue for developing students’ minds and bodies after school by doing something other than the boring, tedious assignments that are typically assigned.
Here’s my basic rule: if it can be done in school then do it there. Homework ought be reserved for assignments that engage students in activities that are distinct from the typical school assignments.
But, we also desperately need to transform the typical school assignments from individually completed, convergent thinking tasks into what Elizabeth Cohen, in her book Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom has labeled as “multi-task activities,” which foster the development of complex or higher order thinking and equal access to instruction through cooperative group work.
Follow
