"Research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance. Rather, I ask that you spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success. Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside, and get your child to bed early."Or perhaps you've seen the media coverage of Kelly Elementary School in Holyoke, Massachusetts which recently announced it has banned homework for the entire year! This particular school, as well as most of the other schools in the Holyoke (MA) school district, is instead opting for a longer school day, moving from the old 9 am to 3 pm schedule to an extended 8 am to 4 pm schedule beginning with the 2016-17 school year. As reported by ABC News, Kelly Elementary principal, Jackie Glasheen, adds,
“Face time with a teacher … is going to impact their learning more than doing skill-and-practice work at home.”So how much homework is too much? And are our children realizing any real benefit from their [often overwhelming] homework assignments? Many experts, including educational research expert Harris Cooper of Duke University, believe that the benefits of homework are minimal, and age-dependent, with high school students benefiting most. Based on multiple studies compiled by Cooper over a period of nearly 20 years, homework may also have a negative impact on young students' attitudes toward school. Cooper advocates instead for more reading at home for elementary students, and a maximum of 2 hours of homework per night for high school students. Do you need help with homework? If homework is overwhelming your children, Club Z! can help. We offer one-on-one, in-home or online tutoring programs to help make homework manageable, and keep kids engaged in learning. For more information, call 800-434-2582 or fill out our contact form on our web site.
No matter how you look at it, college is an expensive proposition these days. Both public and private colleges and universities have had to raise fees and tuition as costs have increased. As a result, college student debt has skyrocketed and many students end up with loan payments years, sometimes even decades, after graduation. But with some careful planning and creative thinking, there are lots of other ways to help pay for college and avoid being stuck with big loan payments after graduation. One final but important step in the college application process is to include an application for financial aid.
As parents, and grandparents for that matter, we consider it to be a bit of a rite of passage to tell our children just how easy they have it compared to what we went through at their age. File this under the “when I was your age, I had to walk 2 miles to school each day, uphill both ways” category.
For any parent of a college-bound student, SAT and ACT test scores are no doubt at the center of most dinner table discussions. While no one will argue that test scores alone are the deciding factor in college admissions, and many colleges are moving toward a test-optional admissions policy, strong scores on the SAT and or ACT can definitely help a student’s chance of gaining admission to his/her college of choice.