Rethinking Homework~ The Research Behind the Myth

Rethinking Homework

By Alfie Kohn

After spending most of the day in school, children are typically given additional assignments to be completed at home.  This is a rather curious fact when you stop to think about it, but not as curious as the fact that few people ever stop to think about it. 

It becomes even more curious, for that matter, in light of three other facts:

1.  The negative effects of homework are well known.  They include children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities, and possible loss of interest in learning.  Many parents lament the impact of homework on their relationship with their children; they may also resent having to play the role of enforcer and worry that they will be criticized either for not being involved enough with the homework or for becoming too involved.

2.  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.  Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.

3.  More homework is being piled on children despite the absence of its value.  Over the last quarter-century the burden has increased most for the youngest children, for whom the evidence of positive effects isn’t just dubious; it’s nonexistent. 

It’s not as though most teachers decide now and then that a certain lesson really ought to continue after school is over because meaningful learning is so likely to result from such an assignment that it warrants the intrusion on family time.   Homework in most schools isn’t limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important.  Rather, the point of departure seems to be:  “We’ve decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week).  Later on we’ll figure out what to make them do.”

I’ve heard from countless people across the country about the frustration they feel over homework.  Parents who watch a torrent of busywork spill out of their children’s backpacks wish they could help teachers understand how the cons overwhelmingly outweigh the pros.  And teachers who have long harbored doubts about the value of homework feel pressured by those parents who mistakenly believe that a lack of afterschool assignments reflects an insufficient commitment to academic achievement.  Such parents seem to reason that as long as their kids have lots of stuff to do every night, never mind what it is, then learning must be taking place.

What parents and teachers need is support from administrators who are willing to challenge the conventional wisdom.  They need principals who question the slogans that pass for arguments:  that homework creates a link between school and family (as if there weren’t more constructive ways to make that connection!), or that it “reinforces” what students were taught in class (a word that denotes the repetition of rote behaviors, not the development of understanding), or that it teaches children self-discipline and responsibility (a claim for which absolutely no evidence exists).

Above all, principals need to help their faculties see that the most important criterion for judging decisions about homework (or other policies, for that matter) is the impact they’re likely to have on students’ attitudes about what they’re doing.  “Most of what homework is doing is driving kids away from learning,” says education professor Harvey Daniels.  Let’s face it:  Most children dread homework, or at best see it as something to be gotten through.  Thus, even if it did provide other benefits, they would have to be weighed against its likely effect on kids’ love of learning.

Click here to read the entire article.

Delaying Gratification~ As Important as IQ

The following article from Bloomberg Business Week (Link to Business Week Article) gives us an insight to the famous marshmallow test and suggests that supporting children in having success later in life not only depends on delayed gratification, but persuading them that there is something worth waiting for when they grow up.

Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test is one of the best-known studies in the history of psychology. In the 1960s, Mischel, then a professor at Stanford, took nursery-school students, put them in a room one-by-one, and gave them a treat (they could choose a cookie, a pretzel stick, or a marshmallow) and the following deal: They could eat the treat right away, or wait 15 minutes until the experimenter returned. If they waited, they would get an extra treat. Tracking the kids over time, Mischel found that the ability to hold out in this seemingly trivial exercise had real and profound consequences. As they matured and became adults, the kids who had shown the ability to wait got better grades, were healthier, enjoyed greater professional success, and proved better at staying in relationships—even decades after they took the test. They were, in short, better at life.

Mischel’s work has been enormously influential, making its way into popular culture (most recently in this year’s romantic comedy The Five-Year Engagement) in a way that few academic studies have. It has changed the way educators and psychologists think about success: The lesson is that it’s not just intelligence that matters, but self-control and patience and being able to tame one’s impulses—from the desire to eat the marshmallow to the desire to blow off an exam or have an affair.

A new study (PDF), however, suggests that we may be taking, at best, an incomplete lesson from Mischel’s work. Celeste Kidd, a cognitive science graduate student at the University of Rochester, is the lead author on the paper. When she was younger, Kidd spent some time working in shelters for homeless families. She began to wonder how growing up in such a setting, full of change and uncertainty, might shape the way kids responded to the sort of situation Mischel’s study presented. “Working there gave me some strong intuitions about what kids who were in that situation would do, given the marshmallow task,” she says. “I’m fairly sure those kids would eat the marshmallow right away.” Not because they were weak-willed, but because very little in their upbringing had given them much reason to believe that adults would do what they said they would. What was missing from Mischel’s famous experiment, Kidd argues, was trust.

Kidd’s own version of the marshmallow study was designed to test the effect of trust. First, the three- to five-year-olds in the study were primed to think of the researchers as either reliable or unreliable. In the first part of the study, the researchers handed over a piece of paper and a jar of used crayons, then told a child to either use those crayons or wait for a better set of art supplies. In the second part of the study, the experimenter gave the child a small sticker and told the young subject to either use that one or wait for bigger, better stickers. For half the kids, the experimenter kept the bargain, returning with a loaded tray of markers, crayons, and colored pencils, then several big stickers. For the other half, the experimenter returned a few minutes later to say, apologetically, that there weren’t in fact any better art supplies or any better stickers.

After this, the kids were given the marshmallow test. The results were dramatic: Nine out of the 14 kids in the reliable condition held out 15 minutes for a second marshmallow, while only one of the 14 in the unreliable condition did. If kids were unsure they were going to get a second marshmallow, they didn’t bother to wait.

As it turns out, Mischel himself has looked at the role trust and confidence play in a person’s ability to delay gratification. Reached while traveling in Europe and asked about the new study, he responded with an e-mail linking to three of his early papers. One of them, from 1961, looked at whether coming from a fatherless household affected a child’s willingness to wait for a reward.

But the descriptions of Mischel’s work have focused mainly on determination and grit, and many of the charter schools and educational researchers that have taken the marshmallow results to heart tend to see self-control as a unitary quality that can explain both our childhood decisions and our adult outcomes. In Kidd’s study, the willingness to wait is more of a situational trait. Rather than being engaged in a desperate struggle against their own appetites, the young subjects of her study were carefully calculating the likelihood that they would actually get a second marshmallow. Her work suggests that getting kids to be better at waiting—in the lab and in life—is a matter of persuading them that there’s something worth waiting for.

How's This for a Change... The $4 Million Teacher

The $4 Million Teacher~ 
Adapted from Amanda Ripley's forthcoming book, "The Smartest Kids in the World-and How They Got That Way, " Copyright © 2013

Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.

Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students' online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).

"The harder I work, the more I make," he says matter of factly. "I like that."

I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.

Tutoring services are growing all over the globe, from Ireland to Hong Kong and even in suburban strip malls in California and New Jersey. Sometimes called shadow education systems, they mirror the mainstream system, offering after-hours classes in every subject—for a fee. But nowhere have they achieved the market penetration and sophistication of hagwons in South Korea, where private tutors now outnumber schoolteachers.

Read the entire article here:  The $4 Million Teacher

Education Opens Doors, Creativity Opens Windows...

An Editorial...

Education opens doors, creativity opens windows. Both are needed to be successful in the 21st century.

Education, however, doesn't necessarily mean you must have an advanced degree. Education means you graduate from high school fully prepared and qualified to attend an institution of higher learning. The doors are open for that choice. Though, moving on to higher education also means there are potentially more doors that open.

In light of the ramification of education, it is of the utmost importance that the knowledge and skills learned in high school prepare students to thrive in the real world by knowing how to write well, speak articulately, solve problems both individually and in groups, and analyze and critically interact with situations encountered daily.

But, that's only part of the equation to success in the 21st century...

Pair that knowledge with creativity. Not necessarily the ability to draw well or play an instrument delightfully, but the ability to think outside of the box. The ability to make connects between things that no one has thought of before. The ability to zig when everyone else is zagging. Creativity creates opportunities and opens windows.

For our most needy students, education these days falls short in both of these areas. One can look at data from colleges and universities and see that many minority students who do manage to graduate, and not drop out like many Latinos tend to do, need to take remedial writing courses in college. Many college students are also not very proficient in giving presentations or using their analytic and critical thinking skills. Why should they be good at these skills when most of their schooling has revolved around the memorization of facts and learning test taking strategies?

In terms of creativity, in most cases, it's pretty much eradicated beginning the first day of kindergarten. Students are taught to conform. Furthermore, students are labeled as difficult or challenging if they don't fit into neat scholar "boxes" and follow expectations right away.

It almost seems as though some teachers are trying to create drones in schools. But in their defense, that's how they were taught in school and if it worked for them, why shouldn't it work for their students?

Well, we could go on and on about that last question, but here's another question to ponder...

What can WE do to help prepare students to be successful in the 21st century?

How can we help them turn their dreams into successful tomorrows?

Here's an idea...how about we start by implementing this 21st century way of thinking ourselves and use both our education and creativity to come up with some solutions...

In other words, Be the change you want to see...

Si se puede...