There are many parents, dedicated and desperately interested in their children’s education, who cannot involve themselves in their children’s homework. Parents rarely have the expertise to fill in gaps in their children’s understandings of concepts, and the predilection of some parents to take over the homework reduces the autonomy of the children, leaving them less able to work independently at school, and less confident of their own abilities.
Parental involvement in the homework itself can actually reduce the child’s success at school. Those improvements are connected to parental involvement – but parents who are keen supporters of homework may be disappointed to hear that their positive contribution is largely just ensuring their children hand in their homework. Research finds that homework doesn’t improve learning outcomes in primary school, and has a weak link to improved outcomes in junior high school. For some of them, the idea of setting and marking homework is inextricably tied up with the vision they have of themselves ‘doing’ teaching – but they’ve not really thought much about what homework achieves. Then there’s the rest – they think you should do homework, because well, they had to do homework at school.
There are the vocal opponents – they tend to be parents who have wasted too many evenings trying to figure out how long division is taught these days, and too much money on sheets of coloured cardboard. Who wouldn’t want to do homework, they wonder? There are the righteous supporters – they tend to be swats whose memories of gold stars give them warm feelings to this day.
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