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> there is on average no academic benefit What? This sounds BS. If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? Eg. How will you l

> there is on average no academic benefit What? This sounds BS. If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? Eg. How will you learn integration if you don’t do some practice problems?

tofflos 8y ago
Parent also wrote "You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time" so he/she agrees with you but argues that there is enough time for that practice to take place at school.
- btilly 8y ago
  Exactly right. Practice is essential, but it is essential that it be correct practice. According to research, supervised practice in the classroom is both superior to homework, and sufficient for learning.
LyndsySimon 8y ago
Not everyone needs that practice to master concepts. There is a point at which homework becomes a burden with no academic payoff for every person, depending on their understanding of the topic.
myelin 8y ago
+1. It's been a couple of decades since high school, but I remember making a genuine effort at homework being one of the critical differences between success and failure. I find it hard to believe that there's enough time for all the practice during class.
milesvp 8y ago
The recent studies that talk about this are slightly more nuanced. But much of it comes down to, what I suspect to be, some combination of the 60hr per week fallacy (that someone working 60hrs/wk creates more value than someone who limits their work to 40hrs/wk), the play trade off, the physical trade off, and the sleep trade off. The brain needs lots of downtime to properly learn new skills, and if you're trading downtime for studying, at some point you're going to get negative returns on investment. This seems to happen somewhere between 40 and 50hrs/wk for cognitive tasks. There's also a growing body of evidence that play, hard as it may be to define, really has an enormous impact on learning, as well as mental health. One of my favorite anecdotes is by Richard Feynman who was completely burned out when one day he, for the fun of it, tried to calculate the wobble of a plate being tossed in the air, and this changed his attitude with long lasting effects on his work. http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~compcuantica/RICHARD%20P.%20FEYNMAN-SURELY%20YOU'RE%20JOKING%20MR.%20FEYNMAN.PDF http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~compcuantica/RICHARD%20P.... (search for "throws a plate in the air", though the whole book is a fun read) I'm convinced, though I've not seen much research on the topic, that physical movement is essential to learning. Something related to stimulating the entire nervous system, or possibly just related to increasing non-circulator fluid exchange in the brain. Hell, it may just be a chance for certain areas of the brain to have downtime, while the centers related to muscle control take their turn. But if you're making this trade off, it'll start to have negative returns. And then there's sleep. You're doing yourself a great disservice if you switch an hour of sleep for an hour of studying, your long term retention will go to shit, and the odds of you remembering some fact 3 months from now will greatly diminish, which mostly defeats the purpose. This may be the biggest problem with giving homework to highschoolers, who tend to have the habit of both procrastination and staying up late. So, yes, I can see homework having almost no academic benefit when a student is in class all day. I can already see issues with my daughter in Kindergarten. There's so much pressure to teach too much content, that her school has made huge tradeoffs around play and exercise during the school day. I certainly don't want them forcing even more work on her, especially as she's getting old enough to start to have chores and other responsibilities that have nothing to do with school.
gowld 8y ago
In theory, you are right. But experiment trumps theory.
projektir 8y ago
> If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? I really don't recall many people mastering anything in normal school. Besides the few whizzes, most people are just bouncing about trying to figure out the easiest way to get an acceptable grade (for various definitions of acceptable, which mostly depend on your parents), and then forget it all by next year. Some exceptions around math/physics, and people notoriously have difficulty with those. "master" is a very strong term to use for anything going on in education...

tofflos 8y ago

Parent also wrote "You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time" so he/she agrees with you but argues that there is enough time for that practice to take place at school.

btilly 8y ago
Exactly right. Practice is essential, but it is essential that it be correct practice. According to research, supervised practice in the classroom is both superior to homework, and sufficient for learning.

LyndsySimon 8y ago

Not everyone needs that practice to master concepts. There is a point at which homework becomes a burden with no academic payoff for every person, depending on their understanding of the topic.

myelin 8y ago

+1. It's been a couple of decades since high school, but I remember making a genuine effort at homework being one of the critical differences between success and failure. I find it hard to believe that there's enough time for all the practice during class.

milesvp 8y ago

The recent studies that talk about this are slightly more nuanced. But much of it comes down to, what I suspect to be, some combination of the 60hr per week fallacy (that someone working 60hrs/wk creates more value than someone who limits their work to 40hrs/wk), the play trade off, the physical trade off, and the sleep trade off. The brain needs lots of downtime to properly learn new skills, and if you're trading downtime for studying, at some point you're going to get negative returns on investment. This seems to happen somewhere between 40 and 50hrs/wk for cognitive tasks. There's also a growing body of evidence that play, hard as it may be to define, really has an enormous impact on learning, as well as mental health. One of my favorite anecdotes is by Richard Feynman who was completely burned out when one day he, for the fun of it, tried to calculate the wobble of a plate being tossed in the air, and this changed his attitude with long lasting effects on his work. http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~compcuantica/RICHARD%20P.%20FEYNMAN-SURELY%20YOU'RE%20JOKING%20MR.%20FEYNMAN.PDF http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~compcuantica/RICHARD%20P.... (search for "throws a plate in the air", though the whole book is a fun read) I'm convinced, though I've not seen much research on the topic, that physical movement is essential to learning. Something related to stimulating the entire nervous system, or possibly just related to increasing non-circulator fluid exchange in the brain. Hell, it may just be a chance for certain areas of the brain to have downtime, while the centers related to muscle control take their turn. But if you're making this trade off, it'll start to have negative returns. And then there's sleep. You're doing yourself a great disservice if you switch an hour of sleep for an hour of studying, your long term retention will go to shit, and the odds of you remembering some fact 3 months from now will greatly diminish, which mostly defeats the purpose. This may be the biggest problem with giving homework to highschoolers, who tend to have the habit of both procrastination and staying up late. So, yes, I can see homework having almost no academic benefit when a student is in class all day. I can already see issues with my daughter in Kindergarten. There's so much pressure to teach too much content, that her school has made huge tradeoffs around play and exercise during the school day. I certainly don't want them forcing even more work on her, especially as she's getting old enough to start to have chores and other responsibilities that have nothing to do with school.

gowld 8y ago

In theory, you are right. But experiment trumps theory.

projektir 8y ago

> If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? I really don't recall many people mastering anything in normal school. Besides the few whizzes, most people are just bouncing about trying to figure out the easiest way to get an acceptable grade (for various definitions of acceptable, which mostly depend on your parents), and then forget it all by next year. Some exceptions around math/physics, and people notoriously have difficulty with those. "master" is a very strong term to use for anything going on in education...