Canadians Dislike Homework, Too
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 3/5/2008 2:10:00 PM
Americans and Canadians have a lot in common. Now, it turns out, they share something more: a fervent dislike of homework. Researchers at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education recently released Canada's first national study of parental opinions and attitudes about the amount and role of homework. As Professor of Education Lee Bartel, coauthor of the report, describes it, those attitudes are far from upbeat.
Do American and Canadian kids get the same amount of homework?
Linda Cameron and Lee Bartel.
U.S. data generally report an increase in homework in the U.S. from the late 1980s. We got that in Canada from the mid-1990s, so school boards here started creating policies around homework around 1998, '99, mirroring what was happening in the U.S. Ten minutes per grade was a good guideline. As we found in our study, these guidelines were generally adhered to, but with an incredible amount of variance among students. Teachers may be assigning what they consider 20 minutes of homework, but some kids take an hour to do it.
Are there any homework problems that are unique to Canada?
One problem [derives from the fact that] the United Nations has designated Toronto "the most multicultural city in the world." We have schools where there are 50 to 80 language groups represented. One of the huge problems is ESL learners; they may not have the resource support at home or anyone to help the kids with homework—[parents] themselves are often struggling with English. So the time that takes then expands. Our study was looking at parent attitudes and family stress.
You and coauthor Professor Linda Cameron surveyed 2,072 parents and other caregivers nationwide, with the bulk of responses coming from Ontario. What were the most interesting things you found?
Parents feel the amount of homework is more than they can comfortably handle. [We found] that students’ attitudes become more negative as the amount of homework increases, which it does with grade level, that homework is considered a big source of family stress. That, in our opinion, parental competence to help with homework is an issue. We believe that homework, therefore, is a social justice issue: homes where the resources are not as available are disadvantaged, because one of our findings was that homework is very Internet/computer-dependent. You take that combination of support and resources, and homework really becomes a social justice issue.
But haven't people always found something to dislike about homework?
There is some degree of resistance to homework at any time or place, but at this point there’s such a strong correlation between amount and attitude that, if we believe that amount is increasing, we must see attitudes becoming more negative. Therefore, you extrapolate back to [the conclusion that] when there was less homework, there was less of a problem in the home with it.
Your report calls homework a major source of arguments and marital strain.
We believe there are multiple contributing factors, including the complexities of modern parenting [such as kids no longer being able to play outside unsupervised]. Parents are faced with the time—from when kids arrive home from school to bedtime—to fill with supervised, structured, or guided activity. [Considering] the cultural negativity toward just "having the kids watch TV and be sedentary," the option is—what?
And parents must feel the pressure for their kids to succeed?
There's a significant shift in how parents determine their self-worth as parents. It's perceived that parental virtue [self-assessment] is now associated with children’s achievement.
It must be hard for kids to find the time for homework with so much to do these days.
Kids are incredibly busy with extracurricular [and community] activities: sports, music, dance, swimming, religious activity, and paid jobs. It’s a very complex situation, societally, in which the homework amount has been increasing. Even if homework had not increased, we would have seen growing resistance to homework because of this complexity of how you fill kids’ time and the stresses on families.
What motivated this study now; and what's next?
The media reaction in Canada was very strong following the release of the [Alfie] Kohn book [The Homework Myth (Da Capo, 2006)]. We just said, 'There’s no Canadian data, so we'd better come up with some.' [We're now] working on finalizing a questionnaire-survey of teachers.
