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A public elementary school in New York City has stopped giving its students homework.
Public School 116 (P.S. 116) Principal Jane Hsu wrote a letter to parents last month detailing the decision, explaining that after more than a year of analyzing studies, the school had concluded that students’ after-school time would be better spent on activities like reading at their own pace and playing rather than working on class assignments.
Hsu’s letter says that many studies indicate that there is no connection between homework and academic success. Indeed, there are some studies that show that the link between homework and success is doubtful at the primary school level.
A 1989 study on homework by Harris Cooper, a social psychologist who researches education, found that doing homework led students to perform better in school as they grew older. In later grades, students who did homework performed increasingly better than students who did not. In 2006, Cooper published a study that analyzed 15 years’ worth of data on the effectiveness of homework. He found that homework had a more positive impact on students as they aged, and identified stronger link between homework and achievement for students in grades seven through twelve than for students in kindergarten through sixth grade.
A 2012 study from the Indiana University School of Education on 10th-graders found little link between time spent on homework and better course grades, although it did find a positive link between homework time and standardized test performance.
Some parents of P.S. 116 students are not happy with the decision to eliminate homework.
“I think they should have homework—some of it is about discipline. I want my daughter to have fun, but I also want her to be working towards a goal,” Daniel Tasman, the father of a second-grader at the school, told DNAinfo.
“You have to do homework in order to gain; you have to do homework because they may not be able to comprehend everything in school,” Sharon Blake, a grandmother of a P.S. 116 student, told ABC news.
(Note: Answer the questions or complete the statements in NO MORE THAN TEN WORDS.)
78. The passage is about a New York elementary school’s decision to _____.
79. What did P.S. 116 do before it came to the decision at last?
80. The studies in 1989 and in 2006 both found out that there was _____ when students were younger.
81. Some parents of P.S. 116 students are against its decision because they hold that homework can _____. |
