Word: maths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this homework really doing any good? Julian Betts, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, examined surveys on the homework habits of 6,000 students over five years and found that students who did an extra 30 min. of nightly math homework beginning in seventh grade would, by 11th grade, see their achievement level soar by the equivalent of two grades. Betts argues that the amount of homework is a better indicator of how students perform than the size of class or the quality of teachers. But his study was limited to students in junior...
...researchers make a case for elementary school homework. Carol Huntsinger, an education professor at the College of Lake County, near Chicago, compared the academic performance of local Chinese-American children with that of European-American kids. In the early grades, the Chinese-American students outperformed their white counterparts in math and mastery of vocabulary words. After examining a host of other factors, Huntsinger concluded that homework made the critical difference. In first grade the Chinese-American children were doing more than 20 min. of math homework a night, some of it formally assigned by their parents, while their white classmates...
...time. For preoccupied teachers, admits Michelann Ortloff, a Portland school official and former elementary school teacher, "it's always easy to pull a few things out of the workbook, give them to students and say, 'This is your homework.'" Too many teachers send kids home with mind-numbing math worksheets that are not even reviewed the next day. Too many are enamored of those unwieldy "projects" that seem to exasperate kids more than they instruct them and that lead to excessive parent involvement. For young students, the optimal arrangement would mix skill-building drills with creative tasks closely tied...
ROMESH RATNESAR joined TIME in 1997 and wrote his first story for the magazine on new ways to teach students math. Since then, he has profiled U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, written our initial story on Monica Lewinsky and landed on a missile cruiser off the coast of Bahrain to detail the American military buildup against Iraq. This week Ratnesar returns to the classroom for our cover story on homework. "Reporting on education is always intriguing," he says, "because while we seem able to reach a loose consensus on other social issues, people can't agree on the most basic...
...donor herself may not even be aware that such a distinction exists. After years of expensive private schooling and math tutors and tennis camps and SAT prep courses and letters of recommendation from important family friends, she's been told that, unlike beneficiaries of affirmative action, she got into an Ivy League college on pure merit...