There's one kind of homework 10-year-old Emily Harris likes to do: "The homework where the teacher says, 'If you don't do this, you're spending lunch inside'."
At home in Sydney's inner-west, her older sister Lily, 13, does four or five hours of school work a week, depending on what assignments are due. She finds practising what's taught in class "really gets it into my head".
More News Videos
- Video duration
- 02:28
Growing inequality amongst our poorest
- Video duration
- 00:37
16-year-old killed in house party stabbing
- Video duration
- 02:59
Collider examines where it all begins
- Video duration
- 00:40
Doonside house fire: nine year-old hospitalised
- Video duration
- 02:03
Adeel Khan gets 30 years for Rozelle fire
- Video duration
- 01:32
NSW land clearing impacts koalas
- Video duration
- 00:31
'Drive-by' shooting at Heckenberg
- Video duration
- 00:54
Rozelle fire victim's mother 'grateful'
Growing inequality amongst our poorest
UNICEF research shows poverty is growing in Australia and the gap between children at the bottom and those in the middle is widening.
"I'd say it's quite a healthy amount [of homework], otherwise I wouldn't know any of what I need to know for my tests at school," she said. "You don't want to squash yourself with too much homework or you'll feel too much pressure."
Australian students aged 10 to 13 do an average of four hours of homework a week: 37 minutes on a typical weekday and almost an hour on weekends, a Roy Morgan survey has found.
That's an increase of 40 minutes since 2007, but still one-third of the time they spend watching television each week. Australian tweens also use the internet at home for an average of 10.5 hours a week and play computer or console games for 5.5 hours.
The 2015 survey of 1628 children also found girls, only children, and students from Asian backgrounds and wealthier families did more homework than average.
Girls completed almost an hour's more homework each week than boys, while tweens from an Asian background worked two hours longer than the average.
A tween's weekly homework time decreased by about half an hour for each sibling aged 6 to 13 in the home, but increased with wealth; students whose parents earned more than $200,000 annually spent an hour more on homework than those whose household income was less than $80,000.
Education experts have long debated whether or not homework has academic benefits.
Professor John Hattie, from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, is renowned for his evidence based research into what improves student learning. He said the type of homework, not the amount of time spent doing it, was what mattered.
"There's no evidence that, by doing homework, kids learn how to learn," he said. "If the homework is an opportunity to rehearse and deliberately practise something they've already learnt, it's quite effective. But if the homework is about new material or projects the kids have to work out by themselves, it has a very, very low impact. For many kids, that kind of homework is a turn off."
Professor Hattie said homework was more effective when evaluated by the teacher "because it says to the kid that what you did at home was worthwhile". And while parents wanted to help their children with homework, warm encouragement was better than intervention.
"The more you involve the parents, the less effective it is, because the parents end up doing the work for the kids," he said. "If the homework is related to what they've already learnt and gives them the chance to practise, they don't need the parents' help.
"The worst kind of parent involvement is the one that sets up surveillance and says, 'you must do this, you must do that'. It becomes a very negative experience, and has a negative effect on kids' learning."
When it came to homework for her daughters Emily and Lily, Tina Harris said the important thing was the nature of the task, not "clocking up time".
"I think there's great value in homework that is creative, and elaborates on or explores the topics the children learnt at school," she said. "Homework for homework's sake is really a waste of everyone's time."
1 comment
New User? Sign up