Effectiveness of Homework: Research and Blog

The topics of homework and its effectiveness are things that have been nagging me all year as I have struggled to find a way to get some useful and independent effort out of my students. Being somebody who always had to sit down and do everything myself in order to learn it, I have come to associate doing homework with doing real learning. I regularly slept through classes either because I knew I'd only get it if I did it on my own or because I had gone over the material already and was completely bored. It is because of the way my own personal experience with homework seems to be so out of whack with how homework functions in my school and for my students that I decided to jump onto the anti-homework wagon with three books by authors who strongly oppose homework.

These three books are The Homework Myth , by Alfie Kohn, The End of Homework, by Etta Kralovec and John Buell, and the The Case Against Homework, by Sara Bennet and Nancy Kalish. No, it did not actually read each book word for word. Rather, I found myself only drawn enough into one to feel the need to read it cover to cover. That book is Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth.

Regarding the first two books, their focus is primarily on the effects of homework on families and on its effectiveness for younger students. In the case of Kratlovek and Buell, a great deal of time is spent discussing the way homework loads only widen the achievement gap between the privileged and underprivileged. In short, increasing loads of homework are taking time away from students at night when they should be spending quality time with their families and pusuing other actvities for their rounder development. Such are the woes of more intact families. On the other hand for students without family support or homes that allow any homework to be done, homework only serves to frustrate such students more. While Kratlovek and Buell spent a great deal of time on the social justice aspects of homework and the social evils that make homework a useless effort for many students, Bennet and Kalish add to these view their own advice to parents in evaluating how to help their kids make the vest use of their time at home.

What sold me on reading the Kohn book all the way through was first reading his article "Abusing Research", which is available at his website www.alfiekohn/reaching/research.html. Actually, after reading his full book all the way through, I would recommend that anyone interested go to his website and read his paper first. Besides being a nice article to use to enter into a study of the effectiveness of homework, I bring up this article because it showcase's Dr. Kohn's ability to discriminate between correlation and causality or, in a similar vein, between results and conclusions. The importance of Dr. Kohn's ability here is that he is very adept at pointing out the flaws in research intended to by used either for or against homework.

In his articles and his book Kohn's careful look at studies "proving" the usefulness of homework yields no positive correlations between learning and homework. In fact the most obvious correlations found in recent international sutdies have been negative correlations. The one exception to this is a weaky positive correlation at the high school level, but even it is not separable from other factors like student performance on class work. The lack of correlational data is bad enough, but Dr. Kohn points out very bluntly that correlation does not mean causal. Thus one really should not claim that they can say doing homework leads to better learning if it is even hard to show that doing homework can be associated with good learning. Along similar lines Dr. Kohn points out that it is hard to even define data to collect to support the ideas that doing homework leads to siginificant development of nonacademic benefits like self-discipline and time management.

After weighing the lack of supportive data against the loss of time to be a kid, Dr. Kohn turns from looking at homework as improving learning to trying to understand why we continue to assign so much homework. In doing so he formulates six reasons why we still cling to the notion of homework being so crucial to education. The first two of these are a sort of logical laziness in that we still believe there are data out there showing homework works. The second is really more that we just don't question it's usefulness enough. That homework is necessary is considered the norm, and we rarely make overt efforts to ask tough questions regarding why we are making kids do it. According to Kohn, even ideas such as "reinforcement" and "practice" are not really good enough reasons for assigning most homework, especially when on considers that these ideas come from a history of behaviorism better applied to teaching animals or athletes rather than students in need of higher level thinking.

Kohn's third reason for the persistence of homework is that there is much we have yet to learn about learning. One of the more common misconceptions about the learning process is that more time spent on a subject equals more learning. This stems from the idea that "people need time to learn things", which does not necessarily mean that forcing students to spend a certain time doing something will lead to them learning.

Kohn's fourth and fifth reasons have to do with our assumptions of what's really important or what we should teach students to expect in life. The first of these is that the movement toward tougher standards makes homework an attractive option because of the way it can be quantified, in terms of time spent on task, and the way it fits in with the idea of being tougher in order to meet tougher standards. The second assumption is that we need to get students used to doing homework and work at home for the rest of their school and working career.

Kohn's final reason for the persistence of homework is a basic of students' use of their time. In other words we assume that they will not make good use of their time unless we show them what to do with it.

Kohn closes with some suggestions for addressing the issue of homework and its ineffectiveness. Admittedly, he does not spend much time on this, but one of the more interesting suggestions is not get rid of homework altogether but rather to change the default assumption to be that there will not be homework. He also recommends making homework a more personalized, differentiated activity with more input from the students being required in designing the assignements. Another interesting idea is to stop grading or checking off homework assignments. If students do not see the value in doing a certain assignment, then using grades really only turns the situation into one of enforced compliance. Dr. Kohn would prefer that homework become something that is shared rather than graded, that homework become a chance for students to attempt more challenging exercises or problem without being punished for making mistakes.

I agree with most of what Dr. Kohn and the other authors have said, but one of the issues that could use more development would be the topic of how to differentiate between different types of homework. This is less the case with Kohn than the others, but rote memorization and repetitive problems tend to be held up as straw men for the sake of the arguments being made. It would probably interesting to discuss what kinds of homework we have each been assigning and to what success. Similarly, useful conversation to have in our class would be to discuss what role we consider homework playing in our classes.

Personally, I still believe that homework needs to play a significant role in my classes, but finding a way to make it work has been a huge challenge. In a nutshell, I am trying to find a way to have my students do some independent work, to try something on their own without having their hand held the whole time or each step done for them multiple times in advance. I also struggle against a pervasive attitude that homework is a way that students can make sure they pass a class regardless of their mastery of any particular aspect of physics or chemistry. Lately, getting rid of homework in my class is something I would love to do... I just need to find some realistic way to do that. For one thing, I like the idea two of the authors put forth (I forget which) by pointing out that maybe homework should consist of work that can only be done at home. hm.