This is one issue that I'm passionate about. Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school; and only valuable in high school and beyond.
> and objective performance assessments
I think some of these radical experiments are crazy. But, there's valid reasons to consider e.g. not grading missing absent assignments as a zero. A few of them:
A) If our goal is for grades to reflect demonstrated student mastery --- a missing assignment doesn't indicate that proportion of mastery "missing." Especially if it has been demonstrated satisfactorily on an exam or by other measures.
B) A couple zeroes on a gradebook can be an insurmountable hill to climb-- leaving no further grade incentive at all for students to work hard in the class.
C) Grades are strong motivation for already-strong students with the most involved parents, but can actually be demotivating for the bulk of your class. An effective teacher needs to find other ways to motivate students. For many students, grades are something that can make one feel bad about oneself but not provide an opportunity for positive differentiation.
The classes I teach are "easy A's" in the gradebook for most of my students... and are incredibly demanding compared to normal MS/HS fare. This requires buy-in from my students. I work to build genuine curiosity and in-class competition (on a variety of axes where all students can excel, not just the top couple dunking on everyone else).
Otherwise this resonates with me so much. Your kids are so lucky to have you.
Grades themselves are truly a mixed bag. They typically conflate work submitted with material learnt, communications skills, work ethic and motivation, as well as any other factors that implicitly seep into the approach the teacher employs (e.g. communicating expectations and meaningful feedback). Grades really should be abolished for more descriptive assessments, unfortunately almost everyone from students to families to schools to boards of education to ministries of education wants quantifiable metrics.
Everyone's different-- what helps one student may harm a couple others. On average, homework looks bad for the young. One reason why is that there's no one there to enforce correctness, so you could easily have dedicated incorrect practice. There's some neat ideas about this, like flipped classrooms. (You send a video lesson home with 1-2 questions to enforce compliance with watching the lesson, and then have the practice happen in the classroom. But this is extraordinarily effort heavy for the educator and there are other drawbacks).
> Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD and Autism, and makework was valuable for me early but useless for me as I grew into myself.
I had pretty rough middle school years, too. I'm trying to make it all better for my students.
> Otherwise this resonates with me so much. Your kids are so lucky to have you.
I'm a new teacher (previously an engineer/entrepreneur) and ... definitely one of the weaker members of faculty overall. I'm in awe of the teachers around me. But I'm definitely trying to understand as much as I can from research and my own observations of students.
Largely the evidence points towards it being harmful to learning in early educaiton.
> On the other hand, it is mostly intended to promote a certain type of work ethic where those who devote additional time and effort have more opportunities for success.
I think if you ask what homework is "intended" to do, you'll get a million different answers from different stakeholders. I think whether you assign homework or not, there's a massive impact of work ethic upon educational success and attainment of mastery. Some students just go the extra mile and are more successful as a result.
> Grades really should be abolished for more descriptive assessments,
I like grades for MS and up. As much as you talk about the confounds of grading, every criticism you've levied would apply even more to more subjective, descriptive assessments. But I do support emphasizing them less and trying to make what they measure truly be mastery of material.
Do you have a sense of whether that's harmful at the margin (a small reduction from typical produces better results), harmful in total (our results are presently worse than if there was no homework at those ages), or harmful in any quantity?
> harmful in total (our results are presently worse than if there was no homework at those ages)
Most studies compare schools / classes assigning no homework to various "normal" levels of homework, so they imply that our results are presently worse than if there was no homework.
I do assign homework to middle school students. But I don't do it often, and it's typically of the form "think about an idea on the topic of _____ we can discuss" or "do the first couple items of this lab worksheet so that we can use our time in the classroom more efficiently tomorrow." I enforce its completion with social pressure, not the gradebook. "Dude, you were supposed to do the first couple questions on the lab worksheet!"
I have a feeling that there is better homework we could assign that would be useful. But we don't have a lot of evidence of what that would be. Proponents of flipped classrooms think that is the path forward, but the research quality is very dubious in primary education.
It’s so frustrating how worthless it all is too.
if his situation is anything like mine was, then the answer is likely to maintain good grades to support future educational prospects.
which is unfortunate as this system encourages the pursuit of the grade over the pursuit of knowledge. it took me many years to shake that mindset.
(Indeed, one reason homework may be harmful is the way it can create an adversarial relationship with teachers and condition students to ignore teacher suggestions and feedback).
For my boys, we went outside school to various providers of math offerings for gifted kids. But quality is rather variable.
Being ahead academically doesn't mean you're ahead developmentally. Rote practice to avoid mistakes and do really systemic work is useful sometime around ages 12-14 -- during first algebra classes for kids on the normal plan. But courses for gifted 10 year olds taking Algebra I at e.g. CTY tend to lean even more into the "rigor", which my kids survived but it was unnecessarily difficult. Instead, they should be looking for ways to shorten problem sets and approach problems from various angles.
That is, whether you can keep a 9 term polynomial straight and avoid swapping signs or coefficients is really a measurement of attention span and focus, not understanding of algebra... and students that are way ahead in math are probably slightly ahead in attention span and focus, but not to a degree commensurate with their mathematical knowledge.
(We really like Art of Problem Solving, though it's pretty intense).
You have to excel in all coursework on the default track to competing in race of society. There are opt-outs/alternatives popping up, but they're not mainstream.
Most homework is just something like "read for 30 minutes". Other than that, they do sometimes assign more formal homework, but most of it takes 5-10 minutes, and they explicitly state that if it you spend 30 minutes on it and haven't finished, you can stop.
Every week the kids pick 4 books from a set of books the teacher chose for that individual's reading level. And they get to go to the library and pick any book they want.
And no homework over the weekend, except to "have fun".
I learned the hard way that skipping the homework means bombing the test. You don't learn problem solving skills by listening to a lecture or watching TV. It's easy to imagine you've learned it, till you're confronted by the test.
There are two cultures in the US.
Isn't the article about removing homework in high school?
Mr. Moreno, the Alhambra High School English teacher, specifically said he no longer gives homework. Doesn't this mean the research indicates he is removing something valuable?
It might all be semantics though.
I assume the "opportunities to improve essays and classwork" is done outside of normal class hours. Perhaps, the work is done at home. And that they addressed your point A by allowing students to resubmit work, and your point B by removing deadlines. I can definitely see how it could be an improvement.
This is true in later education, but it seems to not be so helpful in earlier education. You're far better off with supervised practice than unsupervised, at-home practice in younger students.
The teachers hardly ever filled up the class time, so there was always time to just do the homework.
B) yes, happened to me in higher education, fucked an Electrical Engineering work assigment, got a crushing 0, dropped the whole thing, focused on Maths and CS, changed school, and became a programmer. Gave me a kick to never fail an assignment ever again, so not sure what to do if the 0s are so many the kid just doesnt care anymore.
C) The teacher doesnt need to change how to measure I think, he needs to change how they deliver: if they cant reach the level, either they must move out because they never will and that s fine, or they must be handled specially so they reach at a different speed with a different method. I ve seen first hand you can teach hard math fast and burn most or slow and get most super motivated. Grades and exams being the same.
It seems to be broader-- speaking to school district policies that cross the entire gamut from elementary to high school-- but the focus is on high school. Certainly I'd say the case for removing homework is weakest in high school. (I only teach one HS class, and my homework load there is pretty light, too).
> I assume the "opportunities to improve essays and classwork" is done outside of normal class hours. Perhaps, the work is done at home. And that they addressed your point A by allowing students to resubmit work, and your point B by removing deadlines. I can definitely see how it could be an improvement.
I think these are very difficult things to drive as a policy from the top down. Removing deadlines just encourages students to dig themselves into a different kind of hole: an insurmountable backlog of work that makes doing any of it feel less worthwhile.
This is only likely to be effective to the extent that you have extensive support at home and that grades are highly valued by the student.
> B) yes, happened to me in higher education, fucked an Electrical Engineering work assigment, got a crushing 0, dropped the whole thing, focused on Maths and CS, changed school, and became a programmer. Gave me a kick to never fail an assignment ever again, so not sure what to do if the 0s are so many the kid just doesnt care anymore.
Higher education is a far different game than primary or secondary school.
My students tend to complete their work. If I was in a position where I had a lot of not-turned-in assignments, I'd probably look at giving students 2/3rds credit for those parts of the assignment that they'd shown mastery of in some other way (in class or on tests). It's still at best a D, and most likely an F, but it does not pull down the average nearly so much.
> C) The teacher doesnt need to change how to measure I think,
I don't fully understand your comment, but-- what I'm saying is: grades are not a great motivator for most students. We treat them like they are necessary to get hard work from students, but I think teachers who get strong performances from students mostly get them in other ways.
I feel like if I'm relying upon a student's fear of a bad grade as a motivator, that I've already lost.
Typical homework loads today are waaaaaay over 5 minutes per class in MS and HS. Current high school homework loads are on the order of 10 hours per week in many places.
And in fairness, people like you or me, or most of Hacker News-- don't really count. We're outliers and not really predictive of typical experience.
If the school-by-zoom accomplished anything, it gave the parents a window onto what was actually being taught. They didn't like what they saw, hence the pushback in the PTA and school board meetings.
I remember my highschool chem teacher harping on the class after every test "I'd like to tell you all that if you don't do the homework, you won't pass the test, but toast0 didn't do the homework and did the best on the test so do the work" (or something like that). To be fair, I'd look at the homework, I just didn't feel like writing it down and turning it in, most of the time, so for classes where grading let me skip homework and I felt I had a good grasp of the material, I skipped it.
But, for kids like me, we'll succeed im school as long as there aren't active roadblocks from staff (or other students or other life issues). I think the real question is how to help the kids that need help. How do we get them motivated and engaged and empowered to learn the material?
A small (effectively zero) positive correlation was found between the amount of time a student says they spent on homework in elementary and achievement, but a slight negative (effectively zero) correlation was found when looking at the time parents reported students spending on it.
These measures don't show a causal relationship: "good students" are more likely to do homework. "poor students" are more likely to take a lot of time to complete the same amount of homework.
Elementary student reports of time spent on homework are not reliable. Parent reports are even worse.
The only causal evidence of a benefit in assigning homework in elementary comes from two short-term intervention studies: whether giving a homework take-home worksheet about vocabulary improves performance on the next vocabulary test (it seems so, very slightly). The longest term observational studies show a negative effect.
I certainly was not.
> for kids like me, we'll succeed im school as long as there aren't active roadblocks from staff
I did get some roadblocks from some the staff. I did well in spite of the staff's efforts :-) My biology teacher disliked me (for good reason, I was a jerk), and told me he was going to be very hard on my grades. If an assignment was subjective, he'd give me a bad grade. If it was objective, he was forced to give me As. Fortunately for me, nearly all the assignments and tests were simple checkboxes.
You are citing research that apparently is stating the obvious, namely that good students are faster at completing homework than poor students. Not sure how that supports the statement that homework is harmful for either group.
Skimming the lit review you linked, homework appears to have a moderate positive effect on the immediate measures of achievement, e.g. grades. Though the effects of lifelong habit of completing one's homework are more interesting than short term grade improvements, and a quick skim of the 60 page lit review you quoted doesn't seem to attempt to quantify this effect.
Food for thought: attempts to scientize every aspect of life, even if the measures used are obviously limited and shortsighted, is perhaps not a good way to steer an entire society forward.
AS SAID: I deliberately sent you the most pro-homework review. Despite being confounded in almost all of the component studies (being based on reported homework completion times rather than amount of homework assigned), no real benefit was shown in elementary.