Parents in poorer countries devote more time to their kids' homework
economist.com
economist.com
For a lot of families this is the only way for their kids to get out of poverty. Moreover because of the way the school system is structured, your kid could easily fall behind at age 7 and never recover. The reason for this is because of stratified classes, where they group kids into classes, by their performance on yearly examinations.
So there is simply much more incentive for families in poor countries to put more effort into homework, which BTW, is nothing like the homework that American kids get.
It is nonsensical to try to compare what parents in India and parents in Finland are doing.
By contrast, in countries that have been industrialized for over a century, the preceding several generations found that they could relatively easily find low- to moderate-skill factory jobs that secured a reasonably prosperous lifestyle.
There are also industrialized countries with stratified school systems, and I see that some of them fall toward the bottom of the graph.
Even if the system is broken, even if the quality of education is bad, you have to play along because private education is too expensive.
1. Some places just have more homework than others. Chinese kids have mountains of homework aged 7, vastly more than British kids. Chinese parents spend much more time either managing or literally doing their kids homework for them.
2. Efficiency/productivity - What are kids doing in school if their parents are still spending hours and hours after school helping them with homework? How is this a productive use of parents precious work/leisure time?
The third, I suspect that the time spent on helping children with homework has more to do with how education is viewed culturally than income. I can imagine if you ask the question of the percentage of income the parents spend on their children's education, the ranking is going to be very similar as well. Asian people and countries seem to devote a lot of time, and money, and they tend to steer to their kids more than other groups. That is even a stereotype now. I bet in America, rich Asian parents also spend more time to help their kids with homework. It just happens to be that Asian countries tend to be poorer so they float on top.
You can actually already see it in Singapore, which is not a poor country, being well above the average in terms of time parents spent helping kids.
My kids mess around, constantly want breaks ("Well I've written a line! time for a 10 minute break!"), waste hours doing shit that should take them minutes... When they start "accidentally" dropping their pencils on the floor because they'd rather be faffing around picking it up than working, I often just lose my temper. Man, I'm getting slightly pissed off just thinking about it now! xD
There are brief moments of joy/relief where you can see they've grasped a concept or improved and you can be proud of 'em. But most of the time it is a frustrating experience, slow going, and a slog to get them to do anything. The worst of learning, with the worst of kids messing around, with a massive feeling of wasting everone's time.
In a nutshell, the idea is to take the traditional breakdown of what is done in class and what is done at home, and swap it: Kids do their readings and watch recorded lectures at home. And then they work on problem sets and projects in class, typically in groups.
It's a really clever idea. Compared to the traditional model, it has so many interesting advantages: It levels the playing field between kids whose parents have time and inclination to help them with homework and those who don't. It makes the teacher much more available for questions and any necessary 1:1 assistance. Having kids work together (even on math problem sets!) helps them to learn better, and has the side benefit of giving them more opportunity to develop social skills.
I've heard it criticized for expecting students to have better access to technology at home than they necessarily do. In the case studies I've read about, though, the schools supplied equipment to students who needed it, and the most dramatic relative improvements were seen among the kids from less wealthy families.
I do enjoy helping with math & science homework, but that’s it.
My 6th grade daughter is total opposite; never had a B student, science fair winner, violin & cello player. My son a video game & skateboard slacker; just like me. The joys of parenting.
And on top of all that, you're lucky if the teachers even look at the homework they assigned.
My kid's teacher doesn't bother -- she emails photos of the answer sheets to the parents because I guess we are supposed to review the homework too?
Maybe this isn't obvious... but if I wanted to homeschool my kid, I would homeschool my kid.
(j/k it gets better.)
Some reasons why there was so much home work 1) large class sizes so a lot of the time in the day the teacher is just controlling the kids not teachinig them. So teaching of new things was assigned for homework, then in class they would just do excercise based on what learned at home
2) No money for resources.I have read about issues with US schools and no money for text books and teachers having to buy them. Here you have to buy your own, nothing is provided, so a lot of the home is "prepare the materials that will be needed for class".
3) and honestly, the daughter didn't want to do it, so what should have taken 40 minutes would take 2-3 hours. It was turn off from learning. So much homework is self defeating, that at times I would just do it for her to save the battles and I just didn't have 2-3 hours to talk her through the concept. We also learnt how to use a calculator
For that matter, light green and dark green are shades too, but they are not the same color and are not used intercheably.
Agree that blue and green are generally different although aquamarine is contentious.
If there is one thing I regret about my college years it is not doing math assignments.
I dont have the sources to hand, but i recall an economist talking about large studies in this area.
Just because that's the case it doesn't follow that "homework doesn't improve grades."
I find that hard to believe.
Writing, to take one example, requires practice. The amount of practice you can get in a single academic year maxes out at 180 hours without homework and you would have no time to actually teach.
I can imagine that 5 hours a week of writing homework in English rapidly exceeds the amount of time you could ever spend in class.
Imagine a manager saying "you need to brush up on your C++. But we're too busy to arrange training. An hour a day after work should help instead"
Children need time to develop in ways other than rote education. Homework steals that time from them. I am quite happy to write "did not have time to complete due to Scouts / swimming / x " on assignment sheets.
The discrete goals that schools are expected to fulfill are excessive, poorly defined, and politically vulnerable. It's a odd game.
That's fine, but don't complain about the education of the children not being very good afterward.
100 hours barely moves you out of the novice category for any subject.
> Imagine a manager saying "you need to brush up on your C++. But we're too busy to arrange training. An hour a day after work should help instead"
Funny, that's exactly what about 1/3 of the students in the CS classes that I taught were doing. Almost all of whom paid for the class themselves.
They disagree with your assessment to the tune of several thousand dollars of hard earned money.
That said, OPs comment is overly broad and devoid of specifics, so okay, you refuted his "never".
No, it’s not his job. I’m guessing programming is probably his job.
He’s not a researcher and this is not a peer reviewed journal. This is a place where amateurs of conversation come to discuss things that are of interest, but most of us know nothing about, in our spare time. It started out differently but that’s basically what it has evolved into.
Providing citations is nice, it helps, it’s useful and constructive. But it’s not a job, it’s not a duty. You are a capable person with a working, sceptic brain who can do your own research if you so please. Anyone is free to make baseless claims, just downvote them or kindly ask for more info if you don’t like it.
But I’m tired of this “provide 3 different citations from peer reviewed journals to get a passing grade” attitude. It’s getting so bad I’m seeing it in daily life now, and it’s killing all sense of colloquial conversation. You do some work if you don’t like what people are saying. Everyone will thank you for it.
Or just ignore them. Or downvote them. Or be amicable, at least. But nobody has to do anything. I disagree.
Sorry, I guess :/ pet peeve.
But the discussion went:
* original poster (HN1) made a general claim
* someone (HN2) answered with a sourced counter-argument for a specific case
* another commenter (HN3) said something like "good on you, but your source doesn't prove much cause it doesn't disprove all the other cases"
Conceptually, for me at least, I'd rank their statements, from good to bad: HN2 > HN1 >>>>> H3.
The one thing I dislike the most is the IANAL - "Don't take this as legal advice" disclaimer that I see abused. I mean, really, who is naive enough to take random legal advice from strangers?
Having recently read some stories over at darwinawards.com, I can think of quite a few people who would seem a lot less naïve, if all they had done was taking legal advice from strangers...
Even in the study mentioned in a previous comment [1], the authors disagree as, "we find additional homework to be most effective for high and low achievers".
[0]https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/why-handwriting-is...
[1]https://www.binghamton.edu/economics/research/old-working-pa...
I also think the "poorer countries" is a red herring (e.g. Singapore scores quite highly on the list), I think it's more about cultural differences and competition about a much more limited number of places for higher education.
My own (very limited) experience with the education systems in several Asian countries is that the focus is more on feeding students facts. Whereas the education in the Nordic countries generally focus more on learning how to solve problems, either by yourself or in groups.
I'm not sure if there is any work directly comparing the two, but it's true that emotional stability and encouragement are very important.
"The most determinative factor in parental involvement appears to be what could be called: good parenthood in the home situation (Desforges & Abouchaar, 2003; Fantuzzo et al., 2004; McWayne et al., 2004). This factor is characterised by the establishing of a safe and stable home setting, stimulation of intellectual development e.g. by discussions between parent and child, modeling, disseminating the importance of education and fostering high expectations about children’s school success." [0]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265632472_Parental_...
How did you draw that conclusion? Do you have any data for this?
Intuitively I'd expect poor people to work more since they still need a baseline amount of money (food, rent, etc.) and it takes them longer to get it.
please, rather, try to think about it in terms of what best-explains the difference.
this data seems highly inversely correlated with productivity, in countries with lower productivity, people spend more time with their child. Time available seems to be the best explanatory factor.
No, this is not universal. There are parents who had a bad experience of education and think that is universal, and those who fear that their children will move away if they become educated. It's one of the challenges of teaching in particular areas.
If its the former could you expand on that, like they learnt to read and it messed their life up?
I understand the selfish desire to keep children near, no need to go in to that.
“Rich countries” are time poor that’s why they produce time related articles like these. :)
What does your FYI line mean - very cryptic.
All else is not equal here.
This is a bit of a numbers/definition game.
I don't know if there's an official definition of poor but if over half of the population lacks indoor plumbing and makes only a few dollars a day, I'd say most people in the 1st world would call it a poor country.
Many positive things might be said about India, but the notion that it is not a poor country is objectively quite mistaken.
There, a lot of parents (esp. from lower and mid-middle class) invest a good chunk of money/resources on their kids' education. BUT, unlike this article claims, they aren't that heavily involved in kids' homework. The parents in my country seem to believe that once they pay money to send kids to after-school classes, the progress in students' learning is up to the teachers in those after-school programs.
Most of them don't have time or mental energy left to tend to their kids' homework because they are too busy working (both parents working is typical in poor countries too) and/or running errands (thanks to inefficient bureaucratic system and insufficient infrastructure such as frequent power outages, life's chores take enormously more time than they would in developed world...)
Second thought: my mother was unemployed at least 70% of my childhood and didn't devote any time at all to my homework
I was the no-effort-good-grades type. Maybe if I dedicated myself more I would've left my country and got a prestigious degree. Who cares. I'm glad I was taught independence and responsibility by my parents instead of them trying to control me.
The problem here is that the parents best able to help their children are more likely to have kids in the top half (who don't need help) and the ones least able to help have the kids who need help the most. This can be solved with a restructuring of our school system but very few schools are willing to try. Instead we stick with the ridiculous age == learning level method.
I am not counting the other things a parent does to enhance a child's learning experience as homework time - so we all might be saying the same thing.
I will give a small example which might illustrate having an enhanced learning experience. One of my volunteer assignments was to teach children math using coins. My son and daughter were naturally motivated to understand how much money they had because I had them save money buy things at a very young age. I was shocked that some classmates did not understand denominations and others could not do the math. My husband made coin dice for the classroom kids. They rolled the dice and added the values to figure out how much money they had on the coins. This was a big hit with the kids.
What I didn't want to do was do homework for my kids or give answers. Discovery is how children learn. My kids ended up proud of what they could do on their own. When they failed - we discussed taking ownership of failure.
It is amazing how even two kids from the same parents can vary greatly in personality and how they learn. It takes time and energy to find the best way to nurture each child.
Oh yeah, and it feels good too. Remember that time when you spent hours explaining something to your kid and he suddenly got that "Eureka!" look? It's hard to quit that.
There is huge difference in amount of homework given in countries like India and that in Australia.
We cannot compare that in exact hours.
Just my 2cents.
Also, the results from the highly competitive India and China might be skewing the results.
Finally, survey is the worst method for this research. Because parent would lie instead of admitting negligence about their kid(s) education.
If you travelled a little bit like I have, you'll discover a few things.
E.g. The poor are usually uneducated. Meaning they can't help with homework.
Even in poor black American communities, house work is often more important than school work.
More important, the poor tend to work longer and harder on mental jobs.
They most impoverished behave like reptiles (no insult intended) give birth to many children and abandon them to varying degrees. (Fulani people actually, literally abandon their kids and may never see em again)
Read about how American Indian handled children.
> Even in poor black American communities, house work is often more important than school work.
You pretty much nailed what I wanted to described earlier. My mother works from home and although she has a bachelor's degree, since the education system (esp. in her times) was poor, she is not even at the level of a high school grad in terms of knowledge regarding math, humanities and science. This is not to mention that she (nor my more educated, late father, who was a doctor) wouldn't be able to help her/his children with their homework due to lack of knowledge/education or time.
One thing I remember though is that after finishing homework, my mom would expect us to help out with house chores like sweeping the floor, collecting clothes from clotheslines, buying small grocery items, etc.
Also, I am more involved where I think school is not sufficient to fix the issue. Where I trust the teacher and school, I am involved much less.
1. Perhaps people in some countries get a lot more homework than others. This does not look like a normalized plot.
2. Perhaps some countries see helping their kids with homework as a positive, whereas others do not.
3. What is the pressure to do well? We already have another HN submission on the pressures students have in India to do well. Maybe people in developed countries don't help them as much because they know their kids are not at risk of not being able to get into college.
Spend an hour and you can probably double the list above.
https://www.varkeyfoundation.org/sites/default/files/People/...