Homework

School homework, the bane of many a household, has been closely studied by a pair of Australian academics who found that homework for young primary school children is of little or no value when it comes to academic achievement. Rachel Carbonell spoke to the book’s authors, Richard Walker and Professor Mike Horsley about their views

 

I realise there’s a lot of disagreement, but the consensus findings would be that homework’s not very beneficial for primary school kids. You know, there are very limited benefits for junior high school kids and only reasonable benefits for senior high school kids. Thinking about the effect of the involvement of parents in homework—where parents are over-controlling or interfere in their kids’ homework activities—then that’s clearly not beneficial, is it? But where parents essentially try to provide guidance then that situation is beneficial for students. Not many parents actually do this, they tend to take control but if they can take a back seat then this supports their kid’s autonomy rather than them being interfering and controlling

 

Well, despite the research showing overall that homework is of limited value for younger children, it didn’t discount the value of homework in children. For example, it said that it helps to develop other skills such as managing their time and setting and completing tasks.

 

Yes, but the fact is that the quality of the homework that is set is more important than the quantity. We think that there’s probably too much homework—which is basically just practising and repeating the work done in the classroom.

 

I think the book is valuable because it’s aimed at teachers and parents as well as students. I suppose in essence it proposes a re-think of homework, doesn’t it?

 

Yes— for example it suggests that teachers should develop a homework curriculum. That is, when the teachers are planning their unit of work they should probably plan homework at that time. Homework is often an add-on. So one of the things that we hope to achieve is to try and get the planning of homework to be more sophisticated—much more structured and organised.

 

The other thing is that homework tends to be seen as being an individual activity. But if you see homework as being social and cultural in nature then you’re going to set different types of homework for students. If you believe this then you’re probably going to emphasise more collaborative learning. You’re probably going to emphasise the fact that students need some assistance with their homework from parents and other people rather than just the idea of students sitting at home, in isolation, doing their homework.