If you have children in school, chances are you’ve entered the homework battle more than once. The to-and-fro, the bargaining, the begging, the trying to figure out maths equations that remind you how long ago your own school days were. It can feel like an uphill battle and for some time now, parents have argued that it isn’t essential for learning.
Joyce L.Epstein,co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University said, “It’s always been the case that parents, kids—and sometimes teachers, too—wonder if this is just busy work.”
However, after decades of researching how to improve schools, the professor has found that homework is essential but with one caveat — teachers need to have done their homework, too.
Speaking to Futurity, Epstein said that the issue isn’t homework itself but how it’s designed. She said “Future teachers and administrators really have little formal training on how to design homework before they assign it. This means that most just repeat what their teachers did, or they follow textbook suggestions at the end of units.”
She added that it’s important that future teachers receive “systematic training” to understand that they have the power, opportunity, and obligation to design homework that has a purpose and what she means is that this homework should be more interactive.
This is because over time, homework assignments can be stagnant. The example she gives is spelling tests and math problems which lead to students getting bored and eventually giving up all together. Instead, she says that the homework assignments that seem to be the most effective are speaking with parents, grandparents, or peers to share ideas.
Epstein added, “Our data show that with ‘good’ assignments, more kids finish their work, more kids interact with a family partner, and more parents say, ‘I learned what’s happening in the curriculum’. It all works around what the youngsters are learning.”
While some parents and teachers argue that kids should be able to play after school, Epstein urges that if homework is designed so that even struggling students want to do it because it’s interesting, it can a positive experience saying, “Just about all students at any age level react positively to good assignments and will tell you so.”
So, is homework essential? Yes. It seems so. But it seems that the days of going home with a sheet of paper to fill in are ending.
