US Students Lag in Science, Math

[Jenn! 918]

Too much of a teacher's time is spent dealing with the bureaucracy created by the 'powers that be'. Too few teachers know enough about maths to teach it properly. Too often maths is made boring for kids because of the lack of skill of the teacher. It'll only get worse.

I think I've mentioned this here before, but I've actually worked with teachers who said to students, "Oh don't worry, I'm not good at Math either" and other similar comments. It has become acceptable, particularly for girls, to be bad at math.

I think it's come time that elementary schools need separate math teachers that actually know what they're talking about.

Edited December 5, 2007 by Jenn!

[Peikko 1,575]

I'm actually very lucky, I have a kid who's good at maths, and he has a teacher that is not only good at maths, but loves it, and loves teaching it and she's not a man :P

However, I agree, a specialist maths teacher in elementary schools could well be one very useful answer to the problem.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Not every parent has an hour to spend with their child every night helping them with homework.

If you don't have one hour to spend with your child, maybe you should reconsider having children?

I think the problem isn't the time to spend with the kids, but that the school does a half-assed job of teaching and then sends the kids home to learn it from their parents. It's like all those science projects where you can tell the kids that won had mom or dad do it for them, except it's daily homework. And if the kid doesn't learn, it just must be because his parents aren't any good.

Cute. But if the curriculum says that the kids are in school seven hours a day and need to do four hours of homework in first grade, that's bad curriculum design. Probably not be the fault of the teacher, who has to put up with a lot of external regulation. But if we were getting better results thirty years ago with less homework, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's just possible that the newest requirements aren't actually reasonable.

I'm not sure why we expect parents to be school teachers. We should expect them to make sure their kid does the homework, and have a quiet place to do it, but that's not at all what homework looks like.

Curriculum has changed over the last 40 years...I seriously doubt parents have changed all that much...something isn't working.

[eau_xplain 2]

One problem I see is the "No Child Left Behind" program. Don't know if the problem is in the way the program is designed. It seems to me that the teachers teach so that the children pass the end of grade tests rather than teach so that the children actually learn and know how to use what they have learned.

[Chica Yeyé 41]

Too much of a teacher's time is spent dealing with the bureaucracy created by the 'powers that be'. Too few teachers know enough about maths to teach it properly. Too often maths is made boring for kids because of the lack of skill of the teacher. It'll only get worse.

I think I've mentioned this here before, but I've actually worked with teachers who said to students, "Oh don't worry, I'm not good at Math either" and other similar comments. It has become acceptable, particularly for girls, to be bad at math.

I think it's come time that elementary schools need separate math teachers that actually know what they're talking about.

Agreed. If you're interested about women and math, here's the doctoral dissertation of one of my former colleagues: she is amazing and super fun to read.

Nolan, K. (2001). Shadowed by light, knowing by heart : preservice teachers’ images of knowing (in) math and science. University of Regina, SK, Canada.

Me thinksssss it's been since published by Peter Lang.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Not every parent has an hour to spend with their child every night helping them with homework.

If you don't have one hour to spend with your child, maybe you should reconsider having children?

I think the problem isn't the time to spend with the kids, but that the school does a half-assed job of teaching and then sends the kids home to learn it from their parents. It's like all those science projects where you can tell the kids that won had mom or dad do it for them, except it's daily homework. And if the kid doesn't learn, it just must be because his parents aren't any good.

Cute. But if the curriculum says that the kids are in school seven hours a day and need to do four hours of homework in first grade, that's bad curriculum design. Probably not be the fault of the teacher, who has to put up with a lot of external regulation. But if we were getting better results thirty years ago with less homework, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's just possible that the newest requirements aren't actually reasonable.

I'm not sure why we expect parents to be school teachers. We should expect them to make sure their kid does the homework, and have a quiet place to do it, but that's not at all what homework looks like.

Curriculum has changed over the last 40 years...I seriously doubt parents have changed all that much...something isn't working.

Want to take a stab at comparing the number of two parent households 40 years ago vs. today and maybe the percentage of households with one major breadwinner and one homemaker then and now? The American family - or broader: the American household - has undergone dramatic changes over the last 40 years and I suspect that these dramatic changes yield a good bit of the explanation for today's student achievement or lack thereof.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Not every parent has an hour to spend with their child every night helping them with homework.

If you don't have one hour to spend with your child, maybe you should reconsider having children?

I think the problem isn't the time to spend with the kids, but that the school does a half-assed job of teaching and then sends the kids home to learn it from their parents. It's like all those science projects where you can tell the kids that won had mom or dad do it for them, except it's daily homework. And if the kid doesn't learn, it just must be because his parents aren't any good.

Cute. But if the curriculum says that the kids are in school seven hours a day and need to do four hours of homework in first grade, that's bad curriculum design. Probably not be the fault of the teacher, who has to put up with a lot of external regulation. But if we were getting better results thirty years ago with less homework, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's just possible that the newest requirements aren't actually reasonable.

I'm not sure why we expect parents to be school teachers. We should expect them to make sure their kid does the homework, and have a quiet place to do it, but that's not at all what homework looks like.

Curriculum has changed over the last 40 years...I seriously doubt parents have changed all that much...something isn't working.

Want to take a stab at comparing the number of two parent households 40 years ago vs. today and maybe the percentage of households with one major breadwinner and one homemaker then and now? The American family - or broader: the American household - has undergone dramatic changes over the last 40 years and I suspect that these dramatic changes yield a good bit of the explanation for today's student achievement or lack thereof.

Well, in terms of parental involvement or lack thereof, I don't think parents were spending a whole lot of time sitting down with their kids over their homework. Both my parents worked but they were both home at night by about 6pm. Pediatricians say that children need at least 10 hours of sleep, so if you're child needs to be up by 6:30am, they need to be asleep by 8:30pm. Even if both parents could be home at night by 6pm, that's not a lot of time to prepare dinner, sit down and eat together, interact with each other, let alone spending an hour every night with your child on their homework.

Homework, IMO, needs to be designed so that the student is capable of doing that homework with a certain level of proficiency without parental involvement. I'm all for giving kids homework, but not an hour's worth for a 1st grader. It's unrealistic and unreasonable for the parents especially.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Homework, IMO, needs to be designed so that the student is capable of doing that homework with a certain level of proficiency without parental involvement.

This I agree with. Homework should not be merely an exercise to tie kids up for the rest of the day but should first and foremost be designed to foster self-discipline and self-study with an increasing amount of challenges to think and conceptualize independently as the student progresses over the years.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Homework, IMO, needs to be designed so that the student is capable of doing that homework with a certain level of proficiency without parental involvement.

This I agree with. Homework should not be merely an exercise to tie kids up for the rest of the day but should first and foremost be designed to foster self-discipline and self-study with an increasing amount of challenges to think and conceptualize independently as the student progresses over the years.

Yes. And I think it was pointed out that unfortunately, teachers nowadays have their hands tied in terms of the curriculum being taught. I've been a firm believer in public education, but I'm seriously considering getting my 6 yr. old into a charter school next year. There just seems so much in the curriculum that is counterintuitive to the fundamentals of learning.

Edited December 6, 2007 by Mister Fancypants

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

[Jenn! 918]

:lol:

[Caladan 19]

Not every parent has an hour to spend with their child every night helping them with homework.

If you don't have one hour to spend with your child, maybe you should reconsider having children?

I think the problem isn't the time to spend with the kids, but that the school does a half-assed job of teaching and then sends the kids home to learn it from their parents. It's like all those science projects where you can tell the kids that won had mom or dad do it for them, except it's daily homework. And if the kid doesn't learn, it just must be because his parents aren't any good.

Cute. But if the curriculum says that the kids are in school seven hours a day and need to do four hours of homework in first grade, that's bad curriculum design. Probably not be the fault of the teacher, who has to put up with a lot of external regulation. But if we were getting better results thirty years ago with less homework, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's just possible that the newest requirements aren't actually reasonable.

I'm not sure why we expect parents to be school teachers. We should expect them to make sure their kid does the homework, and have a quiet place to do it, but that's not at all what homework looks like.

Curriculum has changed over the last 40 years...I seriously doubt parents have changed all that much...something isn't working.

Want to take a stab at comparing the number of two parent households 40 years ago vs. today and maybe the percentage of households with one major breadwinner and one homemaker then and now? The American family - or broader: the American household - has undergone dramatic changes over the last 40 years and I suspect that these dramatic changes yield a good bit of the explanation for today's student achievement or lack thereof.

That doesn't explain the extra homework in wealthy districts with stay-at-home moms and careerist dads, which is actually where a lot of the trend of overparenting is happening. Plus, 30 years ago, your mom wasn't told that part of her 'job' in ensuring 'your child's academic success' was to spend four hours a night drilling you in new math. There have been societal changes, but NCLB is a bad law and it isn't working.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Found this interesting...

How Much Homework Is Too Much?

By Marian Wilde, GreatSchools Senior Writer

Has your child shed tears over the amount of homework he has? Has he stayed up until 10 p.m. working on assignments? Have you sacrificed your weekends for homework?

Many students and their parents are frazzled by the amount of homework being piled on in the schools. Yet researchers say that American students have just the right amount of homework.

"Kids today are overwhelmed!" a parent recently wrote in an email to GreatSchools.net "My first-grade son was required to research a significant person from history and write a paper of at least two pages about the person, with a bibliography. How can he be expected to do that by himself? He just started to learn to read and write a couple of months ago. Schools are pushing too hard and expecting too much from kids."

Diane Garfield, a fifth-grade teacher in San Francisco, concurs. "I believe that we're stressing children out," she says.

But hold on, it's not just the kids who are stressed out. "Teachers nowadays assign these almost college-level projects with requirements that make my mouth fall open with disbelief," says another frustrated parent. "It's not just the kids who suffer!"

"How many people take home an average of two hours or more of work that must be completed for the next day?" asks Tonya Noonan Herring, a New Mexico mother of three, an attorney and a former high school English teacher. "Most of us, even attorneys, do not do this. Bottom line: students have too much homework and most of it is not productive or necessary."

Homework Studies

How do educational researchers weigh in on the issue? According to Brian Gill, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, there is no evidence that kids are doing more homework than they did before.

"If you look at high school kids in the late '90s, they're not doing substantially more homework than kids did in the '80s, '70s, '60s or the '40s," he says. "In fact, the trends through most of this time period are pretty flat. And most high school students in this country don't do a lot of homework. The median appears to be about four hours a week."

Education researchers like Gill base their conclusions, in part, on data gathered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

"It doesn't suggest that most kids are doing a tremendous amount," says Gill. "That's not to say there aren't any kids with too much homework. There surely are some. There's enormous variation across communities. But it's not a crisis in that it's a very small proportion of kids who are spending an enormous amount of time on homework."

"The last 20 years or so have been the period when there has been the strongest consensus that homework is a good thing and that more is better. Very recently, in the last five years or so, there has been some evidence that that consensus is starting to crack."

— Brian Gill, Rand Corporation

Etta Kralovec, author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, disagrees, saying NAEP data is not a reliable source of information. "Students take the NAEP test and one of the questions they have to fill out is, 'How much homework did you do last night' Anybody who knows schools knows that teachers by and large do not give homework the night before a national assessment. It just doesn't happen. Teachers are very clear with kids that they need to get a good night's sleep and they need to eat well to prepare for a test.

"So asking a kid how much homework they did the night before a national test and claiming that that data tells us anything about the general run of the mill experience of kids and homework over the school year is, I think, really dishonest."

Further muddying the waters is a recent AP/AOL poll that suggests that most Americans feel that their children are getting the right amount of homework. It found that 57% of parents felt that their child was assigned about the right amount of homework, 23% thought there was too little and 19% thought there was too much.

One Indisputable Fact

"Before the 1980s it didn't really occur to anybody to assign homework to kids who were young enough that they weren't yet reading."

— Brian Gill, senior social scientist, Rand Corporation

One homework fact that educators do agree upon is that the young child today is doing more homework than ever before.

"Parents are correct in saying that they didn't get homework in the early grades and that their kids do," says Harris Cooper, professor of psychology and director of the education program at Duke University.

Gill quantifies the change this way: "There has been some increase in homework for the kids in kindergarten, first grade and second grade. But it's been an increase from zero to 20 minutes a day. So that is something that's fairly new in the last quarter century."

The History of Homework

In his research, Gill found that homework has always been controversial. "Around the turn of the 20th century, the Ladies' Home Journal carried on a crusade against homework. They thought that kids were better off spending their time outside playing and looking at clouds. The most spectacular success this movement had was in the state of California, where in 1901 the legislature passed a law abolishing homework in grades K-8. That lasted about 15 years and then was quietly repealed. Then there was a lot of activism against homework again in the 1930s."

The proponents of homework have remained consistent in their reasons for why homework is a beneficial practice, says Gill. "One, it extends the work in the classroom with additional time on task. Second, it develops habits of independent study. Third, it's a form of communication between the school and the parents. It gives parents an idea of what their kids are doing in school."

The anti-homework crowd has also been consistent in their reasons for wanting to abolish or reduce homework.

"The first one is children's health," says Gill. "A hundred years ago, you had medical doctors testifying that heavy loads of books were causing children's spines to be bent."

The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. There were also concerns about excessive amounts of stress.

"Although they didn't use the term 'stress,'" says Gill. "They worried about 'nervous breakdowns.'"

"In the 1930s, there were lots of graduate students in education schools around the country who were doing experiments that claimed to show that homework had no academic value — that kids who got homework didn't learn any more than kids who didn't," Gill continues. Also, a lot of the opposition to homework, in the first half of the 20th century, was motivated by a notion that it was a leftover from a 19th-century model of schooling, which was based on recitation, memorization and drill. Progressive educators were trying to replace that with something more creative, something more interesting to kids."

The More-Is-Better Movement

Garfield, the San Francisco fifth-grade teacher, says that when she started teaching 30 years ago, she didn't give any homework. "Then parents started asking for it," she says. "I got In junior high and high school there's so much homework, they need to get prepared." So I bought that one. I said, 'OK, they need to be prepared.' But they don't need two hours."

Cooper sees the trend toward more homework as symptomatic of high-achieving parents who want the best for their children. "Part of it, I think, is pressure from the parents with regard to their desire to have their kids be competitive for the best universities in the country. The communities in which homework is being piled on are generally affluent communities."

Homework Guidelines

What's a parent to do, you ask? Fortunately, there are some sanity-saving homework guidelines.

"If you want your child to do something, have them read. Just read, read, read! If you want to call that homework fine, but I say reading is their ticket."

— Diane Garfield, fifth-grade teacher

Cooper points to "The 10-Minute Rule" formulated by the National PTA and the National Education Association, which suggests that kids should be doing about 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level. In other words, 10 minutes for first-graders, 20 for second-graders and so on.

The Optimal Amount

Cooper has found that the correlation between homework and achievement is generally supportive of these guidelines. "We found that for kids in elementary school there was hardly any relationship between how much homework young children did and how well they were doing in school, but in middle school the relationship is positive and increases until the kids were doing between an hour to two hours a night, which is right where the 10-minute rule says it's going to be optimal.

"After that it didn't go up anymore. Kids that reported doing more than two hours of homework a night in middle school weren't doing any better in school than kids who were doing between an hour to two hours."

Garfield has a very clear homework policy that she distributes to her parents at the beginning of each school year. "I give one subject a night. It's what we were studying in class or preparation for the next day. It should be done within half an hour at most. I believe that children have many outside activities now and they also need to live fully as children. To have them work for six hours a day at school and then go home and work for hours at night does not seem right. It doesn't allow them to have a childhood."

International Comparisons

How do American kids fare when compared to students in other countries? Professors Gerald LeTendre and David Baker of Pennsylvania State University conclude in their 2005 book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, that American middle-schoolers do more homework than their peers in Japan, Korea or Taiwan, but less than their peers in Singapore and Hong Kong.

One of the surprising findings of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. LeTendre notes: "That really flummoxes people because they say, 'Doesn't doing more homework mean getting better scores?' The answer quite simply is no."

http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/ca/586

Edited December 6, 2007 by Mister Fancypants

[Peikko 1,575]

For the average kid, homework at elementary level is unnecessary and is going to turn the kids off the idea of learning, not onto it. It's quite ridiculous. My kid does what he's meant to do, but only because the homework takes up about 20 mins of his time. If it was a lot longer, I simply wouldn't require him to do it. Learning should not be a chore, as soon as it becomes one, you've lost.

If you have a kid that is either exceptionally talented, or has difficulty with any aspect of learning, you are going to have to put in more hours as a parent in order to achieve the best results from your kid. However, that's not in terms of homework from the school (which is by and large just more of the same stuff they do in school) but it will be extra work that ensures that the kid achieves the levels of education that he needs or can attain.

[mawilson 2,133]

Learning should not be a chore, as soon as it becomes one, you've lost.

That's ridiculous. Learning is hard work -- it's silly to suggest otherwise.

The world belongs to the self-disciplined. Children should form the habit of doing

things they don’t like, otherwise they'll have problems later in life.