Does math homework help middle-school kids learn and retain knowledge?

September 29, 2015 7:19 PM

Does giving math homework really help middle-school aged kids (11 to 13 years old) with learning and retention? Is "practice makes perfect" really a thing with pre-teen learners? Are (or were) you a middle school math teacher? If so, do you give homework? If so, how much and what kind? And what were your outcomes?

I'm a middle school math teacher in Texas with 10 years experience and I got a whole lotta flack during our department meeting today because I've decided this year to not give homework (in the traditional sense: students are given packets from the textbook and are expected to bring their packets and binders and math journals every day to class). The department head is giving homework: lots of pressure on the rest of us to do the same even if it's not the best for students.

Here's my question: am I right? Am I okay to advocate for the "no homework" philosophy before high school? Any studies that might back me up? If you have studies, then I want to read them.

TL;DR: Should a middle school math teacher giver her students homework just because her department head is giving her students homework?

posted by blessedlyndie to Education (19 answers total)

I know Alfie Kohen has compiled a lot of research debunking the "value" of homework. Since kindergarten, I've been hearing my kid's teachers justify it by saying they need to practice for when there's even more homework next year, an endless and meaningless self - justifying escalation, as far as I can tell. This year, my math loving 8th grade daughter has no math homework: students do the workbook rote stuff at the beginning of class, then lots of group projects geared toward deeper learning, with a little time outside class finishing up the written presentations of those group projects which seem so far to be based on ideas from Godel, Escher, Bach(!). Slower learners get extra time outside class from the teacher. She loves this math class and so do I.
posted by latkes at 7:31 PM on September 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

I am not a middle school math teacher. But I am a middle school Language Arts teacher. Our school tries not to overload students on homework - and we don't - but Language Arts and Math are *required* to give homework Mon-Thurs.

Part of this is just society's long-standing conceptions of This Is How School Works. People will see that you're not assigning homework and assume that your teaching is not rigorous enough. A math teacher in my hall gives homework assignments per week. The assignment is given on Monday, checked on Friday, and it's up to the students to manage their time and complete the work. Maybe you can find your own happy medium.

Finally, your department head is your manager, and they're reporting to your principal. Would your principal be cool with you not assigning homework? Mine would not be, and she's pretty cool as far as principals go. As much as it sucks, you probably don't have complete freedom to teach the curriculum anyway you choose and may have to defer to authority.
posted by gnutron at 7:44 PM on September 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

As a parent we really appreciate it when there is math homework. Math homework works as a formative assessment tool. You can gauge if your child has mastered the material, or has not mastered the material.

We have been dismayed over many, many years about the cavalier attitude from teachers: homework is not important, kids learn at different speeds, they'll catch up in time. And then, in the final report card of the year, when it is too late to do anything, our child will receive a "not performing to level."

We have gone through this cycle a few times now, where our son does poorly in math, we learn about it after the fact (because there is no homework and no formative assessment results presented to us), we help, math score does better, and then it's another year.

We spend part of the year in Japan and math drills are sent home 3 times each week. They take about 20 minutes to do together, often with friends. It works well.

My wife and I used to run a "cram school" or learning center in Japan. We taught math, often to students who were left behind in class.

We used textbooks and drills, and guess what? The students caught up and exceeded expectations.

So, as a parent I would implore you to, if not provide math homework, provide parents with weekly updates about what you are studying and how parents can help.

School and teachers cannot possibly do the entire job of teaching kids. It takes a village etc and parents should not be left out.
posted by Nevin at 7:51 PM on September 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

I was pretty advanced in math by the time I graduated from high school--I was enrolled in a differential equations course at a local university in my senior year. But even as a person who soaked math concepts up like a sponge, mastering and integrating these concepts required the practice that you only get through doing a lot of math problems in a lot of different ways. Which pretty much requires homework, because it isn't really possible to both teach the concepts and get all that practice in only during school hours.

I have now forgotten much of it, both the technical stuff like rules of integration and the more abstract stuff like being able to connect patterns and concepts together across topics. It sucks, and the primary reason is that I spent the bulk of my twenties not doing any math.

This applies to classes like physics and chemistry too, you can read textbooks all you want but you aren't going to know how to apply what you're learning unless you've done the work of trying and failing and trying and then succeeding at problems.

So while I think abandoning math homework will make your students and their parents happier, I don't think it's going to lead to improved math skills for anyone but the most dedicated who enjoy practicing that stuff on their own.
posted by Anonymous at 7:58 PM on September 29, 2015

To your specific question, there's a lot that's easily googled re: the scientifically validated value of homework. My read of the available research (and I haven't made a study of it) is that there isn't much evidence that homework helps kids learn and retain knowledge - but check out the research that does (or doesn't) exist on this topic! If nothing else, having that research (or lack of) to fall back on will help you justify your decision to superiors and parents.
posted by latkes at 8:12 PM on September 29, 2015

Googling "research amount math homework" turns up a number of link that are more authoritative than the opinions of random mephitis.

This results (quoted here) suggests that there may be some small benefit, about not very much considering the cost to the student and family of the homework time:
De Jong, Westerhof, and Creemers (2000) accounted for the relationship of many factors to one another in examining homework and math education. Through their multi-level analysis, the researchers found that the amount of homework was the only factor related to achievement—and that it accounted for only 2.4 percent of the difference in achievement between students who did homework and those who did not. Notably, the frequency of homework assignments and the amount of time students spent on them were not related to achievement.
posted by metahawk at 8:15 PM on September 29, 2015

My read of the available research (and I haven't made a study of it) is that there isn't much evidence that homework helps kids learn and retain knowledge

Yes exactly. Instead homework serves as a formative assessment tool that includes and prevents exclusion of all education stakeholders: students, parents, and teachers.
posted by Nevin at 8:15 PM on September 29, 2015

To be honest, I did a maths course as part of my degree that relied heavily on a number of concepts I should have internalised during school and did not. The concepts were covered in class at school but nobody followed up on my failure to produce set homework and because I intuitively got some other concepts I always got acceptable grades anyway. It sucked to have to sit down and work through the school level textbook first before I could work through the stuff I was meant to work through.

I would also like to highlight that the one year I actually got decent marks in my Latin tests and a decent overall grade was the year I had a teacher who set a reasonable amount of homework and followed up on failure to produce homework.

And I wasn't drowning in homework when I didn't do it - I was too lazy to do it and as there was nobody following up at school and I was too old to have a parent check my homework so I got away with being lazy. And as I found most school work very easy this was never reflected in bad grades, just in not excellent ones.

So make of that what you will.
posted by koahiatamadl at 8:17 PM on September 29, 2015

I don't know anything about the research, but I'm a parent of a middle schooler whose public school does not assign homework in any subject. The school day is intense, the level of work they achieve is amazing, test scores are high, and the graduation rate is 100% (it goes 6-12). I know it sounds like a unicorn but there it is. I don't know what the pedagogy is but seeing it in action is a beautiful thing.
posted by BlahLaLa at 8:52 PM on September 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Peter Brown's Make It Stick book is a pretty accessible round-up of the current psychological research on learning and what is effective. Homework as a default isn't, but homework used thoughtfully as part of a teaching strategy can be. You're right that the usual "worksheets 5 to 7, turn them in on Wednesday" is just busywork, but worksheets with immediate test results as pop quizzes, worksheets that parents can use to keep track of their kids' progress and help them, worksheets that students can use to get extra credit or to help them revise towards specific learning goals - that becomes helpful.

You can assign homework that is non-homework in math (play this math-related board game, research this math history event, draw a math-inspired quilt pattern) for pleasure (also a significant goal for kids really in math) for the kids to do if you have to give them homework but can cover all the learning goals within classroom hours, but you can turn homework into part of that learning if you are strategic about it.

For the parents, one thing I really would have and did appreciate from the very few teachers who did this on the specific areas the kid was weak in. I wrote more on this but it got pretty angry and have deleted it because math teachers ignoring parents and struggling students has been partly through mindless homework, and you sound like a thoughtful teacher.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:58 PM on September 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

If you don't assign homework, other than finishing up classwork for slower learners, then do please send home corrected classwork and tests. It helps to get a sense of what our kids are and aren't learning in time to work on it; it's like homework but with less arguing. (And I do think just having some classwork to finish up is the right idea, because otherwise you have students finishing that up as well as doing whatever the mandated minutes of math homework are for a better student, and suddenly they have hours of homework.)
posted by Margalo Epps at 9:05 PM on September 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

The value of homework seems really dependent on what kind of homework it is and how the child approaches it. I am very mathematically-minded, and just didn't bother memorizing my times tables for years, because -- hey, I got the concept of multiplication, I could figure it out, I did fine in tests and on homework etc. And then my parents enrolled me in Kumon (which I hated, ugh, busywork, BUT) and suddenly the only way I could complete the timed worksheets with a high enough score to move on was if I actually just knew off the top of my head what 7*6 was (instead of, say, 6*5 = 3 * 10 = 30 + 6 + 6 = 42). Again, did not like it at the time - particularly since I was doing 3rd-grader math worksheets as a 5th-grader with perfectly fine grades thank you - but it paid off later as the foundation for making more advanced math easier to do and reducing my "stupid mistakes" rate.

But I also tutored classmates in high school for whom homework was just something to sort of throw stuff at until they got the right answer (or a good enough answer to be 'done'). They weren't helped one bit by those assignments, and the overwhelming quantity of homework just encouraged them to take the path of least resistance ("Solve for pressure. This equation has pressure in it, maybe this is the right equation! Oh, nope. What other equations have pressure in them?") rather than muster the energy to figure out what was really going on. This method also takes twice as long, so it's doubly self-defeating...
posted by Lady Li at 12:02 AM on September 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm a high school teacher and the answer is it depends on the quality of the homework.

Example of okay homework: in class, the teacher begins a new concept (or is spiraling down and is reteaching an already mastered concept). The students practice some of these concepts as a group, then individually in class, and they are assigned a few more for homework.

That's decent homework. You will find studies that show just like using any muscle, when the brain knows how to do something, repetition can strengthen that skill.

Better homework is learning doing the above and connecting it with a real-world problem, not just numbers in a vacuum. So instead of a worksheet with 10 problems on it, the students have to apply the mathematical principle to a real-world application to solve a problem.

This is often referred to as Project Based Learning, and it's wonderful and very few teachers do it because it's a lot harder than handing kids a worksheet. But it creates higher interest and kids learn more and the homework has more value because it's all part of something the kids understand. Crunching numbers over and over has less value to most kids.

Really bad homework is when the class finishes a concept and the teacher assigns homework that explains a new concept. The expectation is the kids will teach themselves the new concept and the teacher will go over it the next day in class.

Most unfortunately, this is the type of homework most high schools assign.

However, the short answer to your question is this: you do whatever most of the math teachers are doing. If your department head is giving homework, then give homework. In most schools, maverick teachers get fired.*

If you really want to create meaningful learning experiences for kids (and this is especially true for math), you can start doing more project-based learning and create genuine learning experiences for kids. You'll be doing them a far greater service than by becoming the teacher who doesn't give homework.

*If you're really interested in considering no homework, you have to do some research and prove with data that learning is not diminished. Unfortunately, most studies are skewed because it's difficult to find two equal groups of kids, teach them the exact same stuff, one with homework and one without, and measure those results accurately over a long period of time. What I'm saying is that there are studies that support multiple perspectives, but most of them are bullshit.
posted by kinetic at 2:47 AM on September 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think I love you. No homework! As a mom, thank you for not interfering with my family time. As a past student, thank you for not burdening me with junk that I will do quickly and resent every minute of.

No, practice makes perfect does not help with memory retention. If it did, most Americans would still remember algebra as adults. We do not. What helps with memory retention is adrenaline. Having competitive math games once a week or month where students compete to see who is the fastest or most accurate at solving problems would help more than thousands of hours of homework. And, your parents love you so much for not cutting into our hometime that we would love to support you by donating prizes for these games. Here is what you would send home with the students:

Dear Parents,
You have probably noticed by now that your student isn't doing any math homework this year. Don't worry, they aren't slacking off, they are learning their math in a more efficient way. Please support them in this by donating prizes for our Friday Math Competitions. $5.00 gift cards to your student's favorite fast food restaurant would be great!
Thank you
posted by myselfasme at 6:13 AM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

No, practice makes perfect does not help with memory retention. If it did, most Americans would still remember algebra as adults. We do not.

Doesn't that kind of prove the adage? Most adults never use algebra (or don't realize they're using it) so it's not surprising they forget. Math is a language. If you don't use it regularly it disappears.
posted by Anonymous at 7:12 AM on September 30, 2015

Dear Parents,
You have probably noticed by now that your student isn't doing any math homework this year. Don't worry, they aren't slacking off, they are learning their math in a more efficient way. Please support them in this by donating prizes for our Friday Math Competitions. $5.00 gift cards to your student's favorite fast food restaurant would be great!
Thank you

I figure you know this as a seasoned teacher, but if I ever sent a note home like this to parents, I would be fired so quickly your head would spin. This is just NOT a good idea.

Having competitive math games once a week or month where students compete to see who is the fastest or most accurate at solving problems would help more than thousands of hours of homework.

Kids who have anxiety issues or processing issues or any other HUGE number of disabilities would absolutely LOSE THEIR SHIT over games to see who is the fastest.
posted by kinetic at 8:12 AM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: My teachers' college mathematics teacher had a neat trick for assigning homework. She gave the kids three nights of homework (say, 20 minutes worth for each night) on Friday and it was due the following Friday. That way the kids had some room to breath, and they could also get some help from the teacher if they noticed mid-week that they didn't know what they were doing. This also seems more likely to prepare kids for skills they'll need later: budgeting time, seeking help when needed etc.

Personally, I enjoy assigning homework that involves the students designing their own questions. "Create three questions that test for x skill. Be sure to include a simple/ easier question and a difficult question. Provide answers. Bonus points if you create a very difficult/thoughtful question." There's a learning curve but eventually most students end up putting some thought in to it.
posted by eisforcool at 3:53 PM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Basically, there are ways to make homework more appealing and meaningful if you find that you have to assign it)
posted by eisforcool at 4:03 PM on September 30, 2015

I will weigh in with the expertise only of having recently taken a lot of tests as an adult and say: the best way to learn something is to do practice problems. It's been my experience (and I believe shown in various studies) that retention of material is much higher via quizzes than any other study method. I think the implication for middle school math homework is that the students should practice at home (since there's never enough class time), but it's not like you need to be heavy handed about it.
posted by annie o at 8:30 PM on October 3, 2015