The Homework Debate

Homework remains a hot-button issue. The science is inconclusive—predictably, some studies demonstrate a link between homework completion and higher test scores. However, other studies found no significant link between performance and homework completion, which suggests there’s more nuance to the story. At any rate, you probably didn’t need experts to tell you that homework is a contentious issue—one evening of persuading a recalcitrant student to do their work is all the convincing most of us need. 

Quality Matters

The truth is that not all homework is created equal. Teachers may assign homework for a variety of reasons. Good reasons for homework include reinforcing a skill students practiced in class, preparing students for an upcoming lesson (i.e. “flipping the classroom”), and allowing students choice as they apply skills in innovative ways. Problematic reasons for homework include simple compliance measures and the sense that this is what is expected of teachers. Each homework assignment should have a clear rationale and reinforce skills that were already introduced in class. 

The Most Important Type of Homework

Some schools, particularly elementary schools, have already made homework optional or eliminated it altogether. While well-intentioned, this decision may leave families in a bind: how can families create an academic environment at home without painstakingly creating the resources students might have traditionally received in the past? Luckily, it's easier than one might think. Regular reading at home is one of the most effective activities for reinforcing literacy skills.

Exposure to a wide variety of texts that students find inherently interesting will reinforce the reading skills they practice in school throughout their subjects. Ideally, students would read texts in their zone of proximal development (books that present a slight challenge and therefore grow their reading muscles), but any reading will do! Reading at home has the added benefit of involving the family in the academic conversation. Consider facilitating a brief conversation daily so that everyone in the family can share something exciting they read that day. 

The Bottom Line

If homework remains a part of your school’s culture, look for signs that it is tied to the curriculum and provides your child an opportunity for successful engagement rather than a disheartening challenge. If you feel your child's homework may be purposeless, always speak to her teacher first. There may be purpose in it that you aren't aware of! And if your child is struggling unnecessarily, make sure his teacher knows that as well. They might be able to help by altering the assignment, or giving you the tools to help from home. In all cases, creating a reading culture at home will reinforce good academic habits and encourage a love for learning that can last a lifetime.

Working Smarter (Part 2)

Continuing on from our last post’s breakdown of the reasons that students frequently opt for relatively ineffective study methods, today we will outline a few research-backed learning strategies that any student can adopt instead. So far, we introduced one study reporting that student comprehension dramatically increased (an 86% bump) when they created their own summary of lecture slides, rather than just reviewing the original slides. Understanding why that increase is so significant helps illuminate other, similar strategies that students should employ. 

The key to the success of summarizing, and of each of the below strategies, is that learning that lasts requires some form of active cognitive resistance. In other words, you have to give your brain something to actively do with the content, not just skimming the surface by reading it off a page. Reorganizing the information, picking out the main ideas and articulating it in your own words, causes your brain to integrate that knowledge into its preexisting schema. These strategies all share a common theme—that is, meaningful engagement with the material—and cover a variety of modalities to suit different learning styles. It’s also worth noting that combining modalities by using more than one strategy in combination will only help students increase their understanding and retention. 

Better study strategies:

• Ask Questions: 

  • Students should be encouraged not just to engage with comprehension questions in a textbook, but to write their own. According to Mirjam Ebersbach (2020), “students who studied a lesson and then wrote their own questions outperformed students who simply restudied the material by 33 percent.” It’s also a great way for students to go about predicting what they might be asked on test day, giving structure to their studying. The best will go beyond yes/no or fill-in-the-blank-with-facts type questions, to get at the significant theme or takeaway and make connections to earlier material. Students should aim to start their questions with “Explain/why/how/to what extent” etc, and teachers can provide a list of such question starters at the beginning of the year.

• Create visual representations: 

  • Concept maps and graphic organizers are a powerful way to stimulate learning, since they encourage students to create categories, (literally) draw connections, and put their thoughts in order. The type of schematic macrostructure these visual representations create is significantly more effective than note-taking in an undefined list structure. 

• Draw your work: 

  • Relatedly, drawing is a remarkably powerful way to combine modalities and increase retention. According to a study from Myra Fernandes, students are twice as likely to remember vocabulary words they draw. That’s because drawing brings together visual memory (what did it look like), semantic memory (what did it mean), and kinesthetic memory (what did it feel like to draw). And you don’t have to draw well to generate this positive outcome! Just draw. 

• Teachers learn best: 

  • Another way to ensure that students will meaningfully engage with the material is to give them a teaching role. This role might draw on other strategies as well by requiring them to summarize, to create visual representations, and to generate questions. Teachers can institute a “three before me” rule, encouraging students to seek help from three peers before coming to a teacher, or use “think-pair-share” to have students work together to understand an issue and then teach it to the class. Jigsaw groups are another innovative option—students are each given information about one aspect of a new concept, and then they discuss their area with the group to assemble the ‘puzzle.’

Working Smarter (Part 1)

Teachers make daily choices about how to structure their students’ learning — and students themselves often have a significant amount of individual control over which tools and strategies they will use to break down readings, study for exams, or approach an essay. But research collected by Edutopia suggests that a majority of students opt for strategies that yield only superficial results, when more effective and easy to implement alternatives could significantly improve their understanding (Miyahatsu et al., 2018). Today we’ll consider why that is—and in our next post, we’ll go over a few research-backed study strategies that students can use instead. 

Unless teachers require students to study in a specific way, they will generally fall back on rereading sections of the textbook or looking over lecture slides, reviewing flashcards with copy-and-pasted definitions or scanning old notes, according to one study from 2018. And certainly these options are better than not studying at all! But the truth is that while these strategies might require less effort and brainpower than a more active approach, they are significant less effective. A 2021 study from learning scientists Alyssa Lawson and Richard Mayer, for instance, found that students who read a prepared summary of lecture slides rather than just looking over the original slides scored 34% higher, while students who prepared a summary themselves scored a full 86% higher. 

Given the dramatic difference, why don’t all students summarize? 

1. Procrastination: Students who leave studying for the last minute tend to seek out the quickest method, prioritizing short-term memorization over real comprehension. 

2. Lack of true understanding: In order to create a summary, students must digest and rephrase the elements of the original material they’re trying to master—that’s why it’s so effective as a study tool. But if a student doesn’t really understand the material, and doesn’t have the skills (or time—see procrastination) to get to understanding, then the best he or she can hope for is memorization of the original. The trouble is that memorizing a formula or definiton might feel like understanding, but when a question appears on the test that asks students to use that formula or consider the implications of that definition in combination with other elements, memorization falls short—and even students who could perfectly recite their notes the night before are caught out. 

3. Lack of metacognitive awareness: Students often don’t know that their methods are ineffective, or that a better way exists! Not everyone spends their free time reading learning science articles, after all—and popular representations of studying in films and television look more like cramming behind stacks of books than writing out new summaries. Students can spend hours flipping through slides or skimming back over a textbook and feel like they’re working hard, but miss out on true comprehension. We want them to think a little more about how they learn best, so they can choose the methods that work best for them—that’s metacognition. 

So to intervene in this pattern we should incentivize (or require) studying further ahead of an exam, give students the tools to reach true understanding, and offer a research-backed picture of just how these tools differ from the ones they’re using now. To that end, we will dig more into alternative strategies and what makes them effective in our next post.

Words to Grow a Growth Mindset

The way we think about ourselves as learners directly impacts our performance. If we think we’re capable, we become capable. If we think we can’t do something, we probably won’t even try. This applies especially to students, who often hear messages that reinforce a “fixed mindset”– a concept of self defined by the idea that one’s strengths, challenges, and abilities are predetermined, “fixed,” and simply a part of our nature. When grades are the only tangible reward students get for their learning, it can be hard to use anything else as a metric for success. Even in the lower grades, students often earn points, cute smiley faces, or even little tchotchkes when they get or do something right. This is how they know if they are on the right track. It’s also usually how a student’s fixed mindset begins.

What are growth and fixed mindsets?

When your kid comes home, beaming about the A she got on her test, but unable to tell you anything she learned—that behavior is the result of a fixed mindset. When she comes home the next day with a C on a paper filled with helpful comments on how to improve next time, then immediately throws it in the garbage, this is another product of a fixed mindset. With a fixed mindset, one believes that one’s inherent intelligence, talents, and value are unchangeable, and that successes and failures in school and in life are a reflection of abilities and not efforts. Fixed mindsets are made, not born, and they are unfortunately all-too common in students.

A growth mindset, on the other hand, comes with the belief that one can always improve if they put in the effort. For a student, actually practicing a growth mindset is easier said than done. It requires the child in the example above to not only be proud of the A she got on her test, but to think about how she might further apply the knowledge that she worked so hard to demonstrate. It also means reading the comments on that less-than-perfect paper, taking them to heart, and applying them to her next piece of writing. A growth mindset not only requires one to work harder, it also requires the emotionally difficult task of looking at one’s mistakes head-on in an attempt to strengthen areas of weakness. This level of self-awareness is hard for adults and sometimes impossible for students, especially when not facilitated by a teacher.

Why is a Growth Mindset Important?

Believing that we can grow and develop our skills is directly related to our learning and how we interact with the world around us. If we all believed that our potential was fixed, there would be no patience or compassion for when others fall short. We wouldn’t feel the desire or motivation to seek out potential or root for the underdog. The course of one’s life would become painfully predictable. But thankfully, we weren’t built that way! Everyone can grow and improve when they apply themselves.

How do I help my child develop a growth mindset?

Start by changing the language you use at home. This chart gives helpful replacement language for some of the (well-meaning) things we often say to our kids:

And encourage them to use “growth mindset” language with themselves, too:

Finally, read your children stories of people who persevered and overcame adversity with their growth mindsets, and model a growth mindset yourself. Choose something you think you’re bad at, change the narrative you tell yourself, and watch yourself improve. They’ll follow your example!

Links Between Reading and Writing

As students develop and hone their writing skills, they become more competent readers. Their ability to think critically about text and interact with it in rich and meaningful ways improves. The opposite is also true. The more we read, the better our writing becomes. That’s because the processes of reading and writing are undeniably connected. One could view them as the inverses of each other, and while they use different skills, growth in one invariably strengthens the other.

“Reading as a Writer”

An effective way to help students see the link between reading and writing is to teach them how to “read as a writer.” This means not only practicing regular reading skills like fluency and comprehension, but actually analyzing how the text itself was written. Students do this by looking for choices the author made, devices they used in their writing, and how they structured their writing. When students read text through this lens, they get more out of their reading, and they deepen their knowledge of choices they themselves can make as a writer.

“Writing as a Reader”

Just like we should read books looking for the writer’s moves, we can also write with our readers in mind. When we “write as a reader,” we keep our focus on how our writing will be received, whether it will make sense, and what message it sends. So often, emerging writers write with one intention, but they end up writing something that has a completely different effect. When writers think about their readers as they write, they are more likely to end up leaving their readers with what they intended.

Writing About Reading

A great way to integrate reading and writing in the classroom is to have students write about the books they read. Writing about one’s reading helps them to process what they’ve read and practice crucial writing skills. There are so many ways to get students to write about their reading:

• Answer open-ended questions/prompts about the text

• Write a sequel/prequel

• Continue the story

• Write a letter or journal entry as a character

• Write a news article about an event (real or imaginary)

• Ask and answer questions as they read

• Teach them how to annotate text

Not only are there lots of ways to integrate reading and writing instruction, but doing so will set your students up for success. They’ll become much more confident and competent readers and writers when the two subject areas are integrated.

Managing Summer Homework

The summer homework scramble is a tradition many parents know well. The limitless amount of time we think lies ahead seems to suddenly disappear. At some point, it hits us that school starts soon and that summer homework is still at the bottom of the backpack. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Here are some tips for helping kids manage their summer homework so that it isn’t all crammed into the last week of summer.

Create a Schedule, Write it Down, Post it Clearly

Constant reminders that your child has homework won’t convince them to get it done. Lots of kids need help knowing when to do it, not just that they need to. Work with them on creating a schedule for completing whatever their homework is in small steps. It’s important that you help them break it down as this can be a difficult skill for kids. If they are faced with the entirety of the task each time they sit down to it, their motivation will be sapped pretty quickly. So help them to look at the task in smaller, bite-sized pieces so they don’t get overwhelmed.

If the homework is a packet of worksheets or tasks that are already somewhat compartmentalized, then breaking it down will be incredibly easy. If it’s a larger, more cumulative task like an essay or project, your child will likely need help creating those smaller steps. Once the breakdown and schedule have been created, make sure to post it somewhere visible. Your child should be able to easily access and refer to it in order to stay on track.

Talk About it Ahead of Time

Before you actually sit down and create the homework plan with your child, give her a head’s up that it’ll be happening. Some kids have a lot of anxiety when it comes to completing homework, especially long-term assignments. They will feel more at ease if you give them some notice that the conversation will be happening. They'll also be more ready for it when it comes. Just be sure to schedule it for a specific time well in advance—not just "sometime soon."

Use Positive Reinforcement

Positive reinforcement (focusing on what the child is doing right) is such a powerful disciplinary tool. But many parents automatically resort to punishment (focusing on what the child is doing wrong). This is understandable! It’s easier and a lot more convenient to identify something to take away. But when it comes to homework, as well as many other things kids struggle with, positive reinforcement is so much more likely to work effectively than punishment. If a student knows that ice cream or an hour of video game time awaits him at the other side of his work, he will be a lot more excited to do it than he would be with the threat of having something taken away. It’s all in how you frame it to the child.

Take an Interest

Show your students that you care about the work they complete and turn in. Not just that they do it, but the content, too. In addition to pushing them to improve, also be sure to point out all the hard work you’ve noticed them doing and give specific praise around what you think they’ve done well. Ask them questions about their work. If they sense your genuine curiosity to know more about what they’re learning, doing, or creating, they’re more likely to invest energy in it themselves.

Dyslexia and Emotional Intelligence

Most people associate dyslexia with letter reversal and reading difficulty. While these commonly appear in dyslexic individuals, dyslexia can affect so much more than just reading skills. Another common trait in dyslexic individuals is higher emotional intelligence. In a 2020 study done by the University of California, researchers found that children with dyslexia showed a stronger emotional response to visual images and clips than their non-dyslexic peers.

We used to believe that any correlation between dyslexia and high emotional intelligence was due to students compensating for deficits. Many dyslexic adults attribute their relative success in school to their ability to win their teachers over. But this and other studies suggest that it isn’t just a compensation technique. The brains of individuals with dyslexia actually allow them to experience feelings more deeply than those without dyslexia.

What This Means for Students

A high emotional intelligence can be a blessing and a curse. With it comes the ability to empathize deeply, connect easily with others, and experience ecstatic joy, but also heartbreaking despair. It means that these individuals are more likely to fall victim to mental health issues like anxiety or depression. For very young children with high emotional intelligence, the ability often manifests in ways that are difficult for adults to manage. Young kids already have a hard time managing their emotions. When those emotions are bigger than usual, it’s especially hard to know how to harness that energy.

Parents and educators who can identify children with the capacity for these “big feelings” can help equip them with both understanding and tools for management. We don’t believe children ever benefit from having their uniqueness hidden from them. So when you notice a child in your life who you believe has high emotional intelligence because of how she responds to good and bad emotional triggers, tell her! The more kids know about their brains and how they are wired, the better they’ll do with navigating school and life.

Despite the challenges of this high emotional intelligence, it is also important to remember that it is ultimately a strength. Just like a gifted child will act out if bored by their classroom instruction, students with high emotional IQ but who lack the tools to deal with it are likely to act out, too. This does not mean that their emotional skills are hindrances. It just means they need some support with managing these skills in healthy ways.

Strategies for Kids with Big Feelings

Self-Awareness

First, as mentioned above, self-awareness is key. It’s important to teach children not only about the emotions they feel and their names, but also their capacity to experience them intensely. Again, this is a strength, and we should talk about it with our children as such.

Give Them Permission to Feel

Feelings are always okay, even if they’re really, really strong feelings. What we do with those feelings is what we have to learn to control, and that can be hard. Lead by example, and show them how you manage your difficult emotions. Don't be shy about telling your kids about the range of emotions you experience. Parents and teachers aren't immune to emotion, and this is an important truth for our kids to understand.

Find Their Calming Strategies

Breathing, counting, drawing, touching, moving...these are all great strategies for kids to use when they are upset and need to calm down. Everyone is different, so help your child discover which of these works best for him or her.

Staying Sharp Over Summer

The summer slide is real. On average, students lose 2-3 months of learning progress they made over the school year when they don’t spend time practicing over the summer. But working this practice into the summer routine is easier than many parents think! 

Here’s a summary of our pro tips for preventing summer skill loss:

Create Structure

Kids crave routine. They need predictability. But they don’t have the metacognition to know this about themselves, and they may even appear to resist new routines. Don’t let them fool you! All kids benefit from structure. Setting aside a designated amount of time each day during the summer months will give kids that practice they need to keep their skills sharp, and they’re a lot less likely to fight it, because they know exactly when it’s happening each day and how long it’ll last! If your kid is the type who likes to get things out of the way early, have them do their 20 minutes of math first thing after breakfast, before their day at the beach. Or have them wind down each night with 20 minutes of reading. Better yet, incorporate both! After a few days, it’ll just become part of their summer routine.

Break Tasks Down

If your child has summer homework, help him or her to tackle it by breaking it down into small chunks. If it’s in the form of a packet, this will probably be easy--just have students do 1-2 pages a day until it’s done! For more cohesive assignments, like a project, essay, or book report, they’ll probably need some help identifying those smaller pieces. To do this, write out a list of all of the action items your students need to take to complete the assignment. Do they need to read a book? Break it down by chapter. Do they need to conduct research in order to write a paper? Have them pose questions and answer one question each day until they’re ready to draft.

Make Learning Fun

Skills practice does not need to consist of “drills” and worksheets! There are so many games out there that are engaging enough to “trick” kids into learning. An easy one to modify is Go Fish, which can be switched around so that instead of finding similar cards, players are working on “Make 10” facts. Or just pull out your child’s favorite board game and substitute the original cards for math facts!

Kids also love it when their parents get involved in their learning. Ask them questions about their work (not to test them, but to show your genuine curiosity). If you have the time, read the same book they’re reading and talk about it as you read it. Hold your own mini book club discussions.

Celebrate Hard Work

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of positive reinforcement! Showing pride and enthusiasm in every little success will go a long way in boosting their motivation so that they carry the good habits they’ve established through the whole summer.

Top Hits for Summer Reading

As summer approaches, we’re reposting some of our top recommendations —just the greatest hits — for students in middle and high school, so that your students can take up this time-tested tool for escape and education. 

Middle School

The Seeds of America trilogy, by Laurie Halse Anderson is a captivating work of historical fiction. Chains, the first book in the series, follows Isabel and Curzon, as they navigate Revolutionary war-era New York City, struggling for their freedom and the freedom of an emerging nation. 

Beloved children’s author Jerry Spinelli has a couple of tried and true classics for the middle school age group: Star Girl and Maniac Magee. Both are deceptively profound stories of kids amongst themselves, with important lessons for any reader. 

And for students interested in a well-told tale full of adventure, fantasy, and clever plot, we recommend the Artemis Fowl series, by Eoin Colfer (which has just been the subject of a so-so film adaptation), and the Percy Jackson series, by Rick Riordan. Both offer the chance to dig into an exciting world that extends across multiple books, to keep kids reading all summer long. 

High School

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a classic of dystopian literature, and a great read; if you’re looking for more bite-sized and engaging stories, Bradbury has written a treasure trove of them, many of which are set in summertime. Check out classic collections like Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, and The Martian Chronicles. 

Everyone should read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This tale of a family adapting to survive as they migrate west to California has important resonance with our current moment. And like Bradbury, Steinbeck was a prolific author with several works worth digging into: East of Eden, The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and more. 

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin is perfect for the high schooler interested in fantasy, who is ready to graduate from the usual middle school fodder -- this book is often cited as Le Guin’s greatest, and her work remains groundbreaking and relevant today. And if your student falls in love with Le Guin, there’s a wide range of texts to choose from to follow.

What are Suffixes?

Suffixes are word parts that are added to the end of a root word to change its meaning. Knowing what suffixes mean can help students make sense of unknown words they come across. Spelling and using suffixes correctly is a bit harder to master than prefixes because suffixes often change the spelling of root words. Furthermore, the way in which a suffix changes the spelling of a root word varies depending on the suffix being used.

Suffix Rules:

The rule that applies to a suffix depends on what kind of suffix it is. There are two main types: consonant suffixes and vowel suffixes. Consonant suffixes are simply those that begin with a consonant, like ‘-ness’ and ‘ly.’ Vowel suffixes begin with a vowel. Usually, when we add a consonant suffix to a root word, the spelling of the root word remains intact. No letters are changed or added, other than the suffix itself. (There are, as always, exceptions to this rule, like the word ‘happily.’) Vowel suffixes are a bit more complex.

Rules for adding a vowel suffix:

1. When you have a root word that ends with two consonants, just add the suffix (fish —> fishing)

2. When you have a root word that is one syllable and has a single consonant at the end, double the last letter before adding the suffix (flop —> flopped)

3. When you have a root word that ends in a silent e, remove the e before adding the suffix (dive —> diving)

4. When you have root word that ends in a y, change the y to an i. This applies to BOTH vowel and consonant suffixes! (baby —> babies, happy —> happiness). There are also some exceptions to this rule, such as “hurrying.”

We created the visual below to help students remember this important but commonly forgotten suffix rule for adding ‘-ed’ and ‘-ing’:

Conclusion

Teaching students individual word parts like suffixes allows them to more competently and efficiently define words they come across. When students learn words as whole units, and not by their parts, they are less likely to see exactly what suffixes do to the meaning and spelling of words. When all students do is memorize whole words, they aren’t able to see that a single suffix, while it can appear in countless words, has just one definition. When they learn these definitions and can apply them to words in which they appear, their reading drastically improves.