Stop Homework

After some parent complaints that their children were doing too much homework, the Eastern School District in Newfoundland, Canada, implemented a new homework policy. According to vocm.com, “guidelines for Kindergarten students are roughly ten minutes, primary 30 minutes, elementary 40, intermediate an hour, and high school students one to two hours.” In addition, homework cannot be assigned over holiday breaks and cannot be assigned as a form of discipline. Read the policy here.

A recent article in The New York Times quoted a number of college professors who find that their students expect good grades if they attend lectures and do their out of class work. The associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “ The vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, stated, “I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences. They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

Read the story here.

According to an article in the Times of India, there were more than 16 suicides a day during a peak exam period in the 2006-2007 school year. “The sense of failure comes from the perception that success in exams is the key to success in life,” says a counselor and family therapist. “The burden of expectations — their own and their parents — makes them feel that only coming first is good enough.” The therapist continues, “One should always strive for excellence but failure isn’t a catastrophe.”

Indeed, as the article notes, failure

can even spur success. Thomas Edison famously told a reporter who asked him how it felt to have failed 700 times to invent the electric light. “I have not failed 700 times…I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work.”

Seven New Zealand primary schools have just decided to cut back on homework because research shows no correlation between homework and academic achievement and there’s no evidence that homework teaches time management skills. (Nothing new there! Readers of this blog already knew that.)

According to stuff.co.nz, a recent study by Auckland University education professor John Hattie, which analysed the effectiveness of 113 different teaching tactics, ranked homework at 88th. Further, Hattie found no evidence that homework helps improve time management or study skills. Read the article here.

A school in St. Paul, Minnesota is trying something new. Instead of grading students based on homework, tests, extra-credit and participation, it will assess them solely on how well they understand the material, either through tests or projects.

According to The Star Tribune, the director of teaching and learning for the district. “I’d love to get away from the idea of a report card. I’d love to think about a continuous process in which parents, students and teachers have a great sense of how the student is progressing.”

Now if the school would move away from tests and state standards, too….

Last week, the Broward County School Board in Florida approved new homework guidelines that suggest that teachers not assign too much homework and that the homework that is assigned be meaningful. According to The Sun Sentinel, the policy requires teachers to “provide ‘timely and appropriate feedback’ on assignments, be sensitive about the costs of materials for projects, and collaborate with other teachers so projects are not assigned at the same time.”

The Coalition for Better Education, a nonprofit started in 2004 by a group of aspiring teachers to push for the elimination of the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP), has put up billboards in the Denver area to urge parents to opt out of testing. The main emphasis of the group is to let parents know the dates of the high-stakes tests so that they can keep their children home.

According to gazette.com, the head of the CBE stated, “We’ve been successful if even one parent sees the light in what this high-stakes testing is doing to their child. We want parents to know that they have the last say in their children’s education.”

A new neuroimaging study on stressed-out students suggests that male humans, like male rats, don’t do their most agile thinking under stress. The findings, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that 20 male M.D. candidates in the middle of preparing for their board exams had a harder time shifting their attention from one task to another than other healthy young men who were not in similarly stressful situations. Luckily, when the stressful situation no longer exited, their attention-shifting performance and brains returned to normal.

You can read a summary here.