Homework Inoculation and the Limits of Research

Abstract

WHY DO so many teachers throw up their hands at educational research? The exchange over research in the March 2007 Kappan, which thoroughly muddied the waters around a core educational issue, provides a fine example of what might prompt such a reaction. Short on time and on patience, classroom teachers generally resort to doing whatever makes sense, drawing on the advice of colleagues and their personal experiences as teachers and learners. On the whole, this is not a bad strategy, except when the long-term consequences of teachers' decisions are unknown or counterintuitive, or when teachers are called upon to justify their actions. When it comes to homework, the commonsense approach is doubly vulnerable, since is often a hot-button issue for parents, school boards, and the students themselves, while its long-term consequences extend well beyond the immediate school setting. One might hope for less heat and more light from the experts--perhaps even a nuanced understanding of that recognizes its complexity, variability, and potential for both positive and negative effects. Missing from these discussions, and from the vast majority of educational research, is a longitudinal perspective. An exception directly relevant to the debates at the high school level is Laurence Steinberg's Beyond the Classroom, (1) which, oddly, is rarely cited by either Alfie Kohn or Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering. To my knowledge, there are no comparable efforts to track K-8 students' behavioral patterns over extended time periods in different social and cultural contexts. Such research would be critically important to our mission in the schools, but it is expensive, time-consuming, and not easily reducible to the treatments and effect sizes favored in current expert research. The longitudinal view is quite familiar, however, to the non-expert parents who labor to support their students' in the elementary years, only to watch these fall apart in middle or high school. And among teachers, a few of us have managed to job-hop repeatedly, gathering impressions about how the social meanings of things like change dramatically between elementary and secondary education. THE INOCULATION HYPOTHESIS From this combined elementary/secondary perspective, I would advance a about one aspect of long-term effects for which there is strong anecdotal evidence but little chance of generating quantitative data anytime soon, particularly in the high-mobility, low-income areas where it matters most. My inoculation hypothesis argues that for a substantial portion of our students, the experience of constantly facing routine assignments in the name of developing good habits during the early elementary years has a perverse effect on later attitudes toward truly important homework. Geometry homework. The evidence for this comes from personal experience teaching in a variety of fourth- through sixth-grade classrooms and teaching math for the past five years in an urban high school. The became particularly compelling in the high school setting as I tried to figure out why promising students in my own geometry classes persistently failed. Every year students entered my classes not fully prepared for the large body of new concepts, vocabulary, skills, and logical principles that are central to a college-prep geometry course. With rare exceptions, the deficiencies were surmountable, provided that these students accepted the need to study and work on sample problems outside of class. But, despite a claimed orientation toward college, many of them failed geometry, in large part because of homework resistance that seemed rooted in early elementary school and shaped by adolescent identity pressures. Occasional missed geometry assignments weren't a big deal in my classes. After all, an unknowable but surely substantial portion of completed involved copying from classmates. …