Posted on 04/05/2024 1:06:33 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Supporting kids with math homework is a common afterschool activity. But beyond the basics, new curricula and teaching strategies are making it harder for parents to help and it's taking a serious toll on children's confidence and learning.
In a study from the University of South Australia, researchers have found that mathematics homework can sometimes cause more harm than good.
Exploring how homework policies and practices affect families, researchers found that mathematics homework could inadvertently affect a child when it often:
was too difficult for a child to complete independently, and/or with the support of a parent required significant support from parents and seeped into family time resulted in a negative experience for the child and their parent, leading to negative associations with mathematics and potentially students' disengagement from the subject generated feelings of despair, stress, and negativity among parents who were unable to help made students feel inadequate when they struggled with the work. UniSA researcher Associate Professor Lisa O'Keeffe says such negativity around mathematics has broad implications.
"Homework has long been accepted as a practice that reinforces children's learning and improves academic success," Assoc. Prof. O'Keeffe says.
"But when it is too complex for a student to complete even with parent support, it raises the question as to why it was set as a homework task in the first place. We know that parents play a key role in supporting their children with schooling and homework. When children need help, their parents are often the first people they turn to.
"But many parents are unsure of the current mathematics strategies and approaches that their children are learning as these have changed a lot since they were at school. Like many things, mathematics teaching has evolved over time. But when parents realize that their tried-and-true methods are different to those which their children are learning, it can be hard to adapt, and this can add undue pressure. When children see their parents struggle with mathematics homework, or where mathematics homework becomes a shared site of frustration for families, it can lead to negativity across generations.
"For example, we might hear adults saying things like, 'I wasn't very good at math, so my child won't be either.' Negative interactions with mathematics, and negative discourses like these can lead to reduced confidence, reduced self-efficacy, and can negatively affect children's resilience, persistence, and ultimately their inclination to continue with mathematics."
Any decline in STEM subjects such as math can have long-term impacts for Australia's future. Statistics show that fewer than 10% of students are studying a higher level of math, with math capabilities declining more than 25 points (15-year-olds in 2022 scored at a level that would have been expected of 14-year-olds, 20 years earlier).
Co-researcher, UniSA's Dr. Sarah McDonald, says the research also identified gendered biases.
"Our research showed that it was overwhelmingly mothers who were responsible for managing children's homework. And they often experience frustration or despair when they were unable to understand the math problems," Dr. McDonald says. "When mothers find math hard, there is concern that this may demonstrate to their children, especially their girls, that this is not an area in which they would naturally excel.
"The last thing teachers want to do is disadvantage girls in developing potentially strong mathematical identities. We need a greater understanding of homework policies and expectations.
"The experiences of the families in our study do not support the often-quoted claim by researchers that that homework has potential non-academic benefits such as fostering independence, creating positive character traits, developing good organizational skills, or virtues such as self-discipline and responsibility."
More information: Lisa O'Keeffe et al, Mathematics homework and the potential compounding of educational disadvantage, British Journal of Sociology of Education (2023). DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2023.2240530
“But when it is too complex for a student to complete even with parent support, it raises the question as to why it was set as a homework task in the first place”
In other words it is not homework that is the problem, it is homework that was set at the wrong level.
“The last thing teachers want to do is disadvantage girls“
And there it is.
My daughters are out of college now, but 15 years ago they brought home textbooks and methods that made my physics major brain swim with a complete and abject ignorance of whatever it was they were trying to do.
I wasn’t allowed to teach them my way or they’d have been penalized for not following the method taught. I apologized to them and said I can solve the problem, but not using the method they want you to...because to me it’s much less efficient.
They got through...but I could tell for a period they thought I might not be as smart as they originally gave me credit for...which is exactly what I think the point is.
They don’t want parents to know what they are teaching them.
“Math Is Hard!”
Lol my kids went to Mom for help with the math. They definitely didn’t ask me because they wanted a semblance of accuracy.
In my day, it seemed as if they were teaching to the smartest kids in the class. The rest of us had to keep up.
I thank God for my elementary school teachers who recognized that I was bored with the same repetitive lessons at the beginning of each school year. I was allowed to complete the assigned work, and then work independently on other material, in both math and reading. That way, they could still work the slower pace for the students who needed help, and I was still learning new material. Oh, and this was in classes of 40 kids with one teacher, no aides.
And what its actually doing is destroying boys. Common public school education practice treats boys as defective girls
That new math again. It’s a problem.
Not new math, Common Core. I was unable to help my younger son with his math homework because of the bizarre and convoluted problem solving methods being taught
Homework is all stupid. If you can’t get it done in 8 hours of “education” five days a week, it isn’t necessary.
Our kids were homeschooled. Their school was 2-3 hours a day normally, sometimes more sometimes less. Among my kids, the Astronautical Engineer and the Book editor may choose to disagree with the need for hours of homework.
Back when I was in school I was reduced to tears because of my long division homework. The method made no sense. There was no logic. It was glorified guessing. And they would not tell me what I should do with the numbers that were left over. We would "get to that later".
My dad was home and sat down with me and in the course of one evening taught me how to divide. It was simple, it was clear, no guessing and what was left over was called the remainder. The next day I went in and flew through the worksheet and got a zero because I had the right answers but had not used the convoluted guessing method.
Dad went down and had a word with the teacher. Then he had a word with the principle. Then he took me out of that school.
The goal for decades in public education has been to keep kids from learning.
Mess them up at the basic level and you have ruined their best chance of rising up the social ladder.
My husband's ninth grade teacher bluntly said as much. He said that only 10% of the students were going to understand what he was teaching and the rest should just shut up. He would give them a passing grade unless they bothered him with questions. In which case he would flunk them.
This was in the sixties.
Homework nowadays is about getting the kids to do all their learning of the core subjects at home, while the school hours are meant for the teachers to indoctrinate the kids with their progressive/liberal/communist/DEI big government requirements. Indoctrination takes precedence.
funny how for hundreds of years kids learned the same arithmetic the same way, now they can’t... what’s changed???
The problem with ‘publik skoolz’ math is that ‘twould appear that it was oozed from the feeble brains of ‘eddikashun majors’. Sorry, but I’d take the old math teachers of the mid 20th century over any of the tripe that currently exists.
I was a rebel. I taught them real math and told them to solve that way and pretend to use new math if teacher asked.
After I explained to my son’s 2nd grade teacher that he needed to add up his groceries in his head before he got to check out to be sure he had enough money and that her methods wouldn’t allow that task she shut up.
I also explained that diagraming and making outlines of the science book chapter by chapter was a waste of time for two reasons.
#1 every child learns differently and the point is to see what method works best for you noyt to waste time on what doesn’t.
#2 The book the “science teacher” had chosen wasn’t organized in a way that would allow it to be grouped into general and then examples or any other systematic way. The book just rambled though collections of unrelated examples.
I told her it took me three hours to make an outline of the book, that the outline was worthless and that I wouldn’t let my daughter waste her time on that kind of busy work because she needed the time to study so I did the outline. Sometimes you have to speak out clearly.
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