shahin marzband's List: research

• Etta Kralovec, author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, disagrees, saying NAEP data is not a reliable source of information. "Students take the NAEP test and one of the questions they have to fill out is, 'How much homework did you do last night' Anybody who knows schools knows that teachers by and large do not give homework the night before a national assessment. It just doesn't happen. Teachers are very clear with kids that they need to get a good night's sleep and they need to eat well to prepare for a test.
• Etta Kralovec, author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, disagrees, saying NAEP data is not a reliable source of information. "Students take the NAEP test and one of the questions they have to fill out is, 'How much homework did you do last night' Anybody who knows schools knows th
• Many students and their parents are frazzled by the amount of homework being piled on in the schools. Yet researchers say that American students have just the right amount of homework.
• • opposing
• "Kids today are overwhelmed!" a parent recently wrote in an email to GreatSchools.org "My first-grade son was required to research a significant person from history and write a paper of at least two pages about the person, with a bibliography. How can he be expected to do that by himself? He just started to learn to read and write a couple of months ago. Schools are pushing too hard and expecting too much from kids."
• • supportive: specific example
• "The last 20 years or so have been the period when there has been the strongest consensus that homework is a good thing and that more is better. Very recently, in the last five years or so, there has been some evidence that that consensus is starting to crack." — Brian Gill, Rand Corporation
• • *supportive

  • in the past five years or so, people are starting to disagree about the fact that homework is good for students OPPOSING

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• They believe "more" means "better."
• but when it comes to homework, more is definitely NOT better! Too much homework  is one of the leading causes of school burn-out, among other things.
• They are under pressure to cover material
• New subjects, new standards- the amount of material keeps increasing, but the school day stays the same. So, work must be sent home ("homework" get it?) with the hope that students will somehow get it done and/or learn it.
• They must raise test scores.
• They believe (incorrectly, in my humble-yet-backed-by-research opinion) that higher test scores mean smarter students. Higher test scores mean happier voters and parents
• if we believe that more means better, we should cram as much information into students' heads as possible, right?
• One, more material and information equals more homework. And, two, if students' scores do improve, the tests are made more difficult and the whole vicious cycle begins again.
• They want their badge of honor.
• In middle and high school, especially, they have a "tough rep." Sure, they may have more homework to deal with, but they also get more respect from students and parents.
• They don't communicate with others.
• If teachers don't periodically talk about this, there is a tendency to "forget" that everybody else is also giving students homework.
• They aren't told not to assign it.
• teachers do NOT take a class about homework. They are NOT told if, how, when or whether to assign homework. They are not told which kinds of homework are  good,   which types are  bad,  and how much is  too much.
• understand that each teacher will assign homework based on his or her own personal history, beliefs, philisophy, personality, school culture, and what the principal expects.
• homework information straight from the source- the teacher- and in front of witnesses
• If Back-to-School Night has passed, make an appointment (please, do not just show up!) and ask the questions in person
• Administrators (the bigwigs downtown and the school principal) should be able to explain the type and length of homework a student will be assigned at each grade level- and support this policy with scientific data!
• Communication between school and home is crucial for student success. That being said, I am not recommending that you contact the school every time your daughter has a problem with her homework!

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• Many students' grades seem to suffer because of a lack of involvement. They see the school as a bureaucratic institution with little to offer on an individual level.
• At Seneca Valley High School in Germantown, Maryland, the Sports Academy is trying to change that. The program offers sports, trips to parks and plays, and adult supervision and help with homework. The experiment has so far been a success, and participants report higher grade point averages than in previous years.

• Despite its name, the Sports Academy encompasses far more than sports. The program mixes adult supervision and academic help with a wide variety of leisure opportunities ranging from video games, flag football and basketball to weekend trips to amusement parks and plays. 

   The program is open to all students, but much of it is designed to encourage students struggling with grades or showing signs of getting into trouble with the law to change their attitudes and behavior. Students need parental permission to participate. 

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• The average homework load for first- through third-graders has doubled over the past two decades, even though research shows homework doesn't benefit such young children
• Indeed, some schools require preschoolers to tackle academic subjects like reading and writing.
• sponse a parents' movement has arisen — mainly in middle- and upper-income suburbs — protesting excessive homework and other forms of academic pressure, including so-called high-stakes testing
• In re
• Parents say the added pressure robs children of needed play and family time and can cause stress, sleep deprivation, depression and family strife.
• At the same time, however, U.S. high school students spend less time in class than students in most other countries, and their homework loads remain far below the two hours per day that research shows is optimal for college-bound students
• "I hate school," recalls Kalish, a journalist in New York City. "She started saying it every single day."
• "a reasonable amount" of homework for Allison in grade school "had mushroomed into four hours a night" in middle school."
• Soon, "our entire relationship revolved around homework," with "the first question when she came in the door each afternoon, 'How much homework do you have?' " says Kalish. The answer determined whether Allison would see friends, attend a concert or a grandparent's birthday party or stay home studying.
• once "true believers" in the value of homework — into activists who sought a school policy limiting homework at Allison's school.
• too much homework — particularly in elementary and middle school — causing stress, sleep deprivation, depression and family strife.
• Over the last two decades, worries about global competition have prompted U.S. business leaders and lawmakers to increase pressure on schools to raise achievement.
• even though it's U.S. high-schoolers who score lowest on international achievement tests.
• But high school homework loads haven't increased, while first-, second- and third-graders have been getting more homework, even though data show homework doesn't improve learning for young children
• pressuring kindergarten and preschool teachers to teach academic subjects to 4- and 5-year-olds, who often lack the physical and cognitive skills to handle them.
• Meanwhile, under the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, teachers — especially in high-poverty schools — fear they'll be unable to bring their students to mandated achievement levels, which could lead to firings and school takeovers
• That pressure on teachers may be seeping down to students in such schools, some researchers say

• Piles of homework dim children's love of learning — while depriving them of vital free time — without improving their school achievement, says Kalish's coauthor, Sara Bennett, a New York City lawyer.

   

  "
• Polls say that kids no longer read for pleasure after age 8," mainly because of too much homework,
•  

  Young-Wolff)

   

  A number of schools around the country are mulling similar moves.

   

  In Massachusetts, for example, Needham High School Principal Paul Richards sought to limit stress after three student suicides in recent years. Richards urges teachers not to give homework over school vacations and to be more flexible about assignment deadlines. He also ended the tradition of publishing the school's academic honor roll in the local newspaper, which made him the butt of jokes and criticism from "Tonight" host comedian Jay Leno and conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.

   

  But Richards has stood firm, saying that critics don't understand the amount of stress his college-bound students feel, even as they try to act cool. For example, "there are perceptions that Boston College only takes two seniors from each high school," said Richards. "Students hear this and start ranking each other," adding more pressure to an already "product-oriented and competitive" culture that's "gone into overdrive."

   

  Education researchers who study student workloads say that such high-pressure situations may be more the exception than the rule, however.

   

  "Most of what you hear" about excessive homework "is anecdotal," says Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "You have a group of kids who take tons of Advanced Placement (AP) classes and have lots of extracurricular activities" who experience a major school-related time crunch, he says. "But they're not numerous.
• "There's lots of pressure to get into the best universities, and this has led some kids to take the most challenging courses they can," he says. "If you find a student with two AP courses and two honors courses, then each of those will be 45 minutes of homework a night" — three hours overall, more than the usually suggested maximum for high school of two hours a night, says Cooper. "Non-elite courses would only assign about 30 minutes a night each," he says.
• The increase has occurred even though reviews of research on homework by Cooper and others have turned up no evidence that homework actually improves achievement for children of that age.
• "In my professional opinion, these trends suggest that the emphasis in the United States is kind of backwards," says Gerald LeTendre, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University
• "We have a lot of discouraged teachers," especially in low-income schools, from standardized tests coupled with insufficient resources, says David C. Berliner, a professor of education at Arizona State University. "Schools of education aren't perfect," he acknowledges. "But it's bad when the students come back and say, 'This is not why I became a teacher.' They end up being drill sergeants."

• Are students today under more academic pressure than in past generations? 
• With businesses and state and federal governments looking more to schools to produce savvier workers and entrepreneurs, some parents say today's kids face unprecedented school-related stress beginning as early as kindergarten. Critics of that view, however, point to data showing that many students, especially high-schoolers, may actually spend less time on schoolwork than in the past.
• More information exists for today's children to absorb, but that isn't translating into excess academic pressure, said Lynn Spampinato, deputy superintendent of the Pittsburgh Public Schools. "There's more for children to learn today, more exposure to all kinds of information at younger ages." Nevertheless, "I'm not sure I believe we're pushing children to the edge. I'd say in many cases we're not challenging them enough."
• Learning "inevitably requires very substantial commitments of student time and effort," but contemporary trends require teachers "to produce learning in ways that are stimulating yet minimally obtrusive," with "only minimal levels of exertion"
• oday's education mindset puts the whole burden on teachers to entice students to learn and to avoid boring or pushing them, a far cry from creating excessive stress, Stone says.

• But others point to what they say are new, intense pressures on at least some children.

   

  For example, as more families in the United States and around the world hope to send their children to top-tier colleges, students in those families and neighborhoods face more intense pressure to compete for limited spots.

   

• "It's fair to say the pressure has increased on the top tier of kids applying to competitive colleges and universities," says Steinberg.

   

  "It's gotten about 200 percent harder to get into Harvard than it was in the 1960s," says David P. Baker, an education professor at Pennsylvania State University.
• In the Northeast, too, more affluent parents are "inappropriately pushing" kids beyond their capabilities to be "superkids," says Carl Arinoldo, a psychologist in Stony Brook, N.Y., who has written books on managing stress. The pressure reaches to the youngest children, says Arinoldo. "There are a number of preschools in Manhattan, for example, that are hammering away at academics," even though 3- and 4-year-olds "need to run around and play spontaneously" instead.
• Are schools assigning too much homework?
• Several recent books have called for an end to homework, describing it as a growing burden on American children that threatens family life.
• In surveys, about 10 percent of parents complain students get too much homework, 25 percent say not enough is assigned and the remainder — a strong majority — says the amounts are just about right, said Loveless of Brookings. "The issue has been overhyped," partly because "journalists run in the high-powered crowd whose children feel pressured to take four Advanced Placement courses," he says. There are students in that position, and some likely are overburdened, "but they're not numerous."
• Given the level of distractions in modern life, it's likely that some families who complain about homework overestimate the amounts, says Loveless. "Compare a middle-class kid's bedroom today to one 30 years ago," he says. "It didn't have cell phones or instant messaging or downloading from the Internet. So when kids are supposedly in their rooms doing homework, how much time are they actually spending on homework?"
• "Learning takes work; it's a life-dislocating activity" that will inevitably lead to some parent-child struggle, Stone says. It's parents' job to require children to complete school chores, despite struggles, because the short-term pain brings long-term gain, he says. "Kids aren't aware of their long-term needs," so they protest, he says. "They don't realize they're going to run into a world where there are no excuses."
• What has changed is the amount of "structured time" experienced by children today, a fact that "has been left out of policy discussions," he says. Unlike in the past, most "parents are no longer home to welcome the kids after school," in part because many children play sports or attend classes until nearly dinner time.
• In addition, "there is no evidence of any correlation between homework and achievement in elementary school," yet homework amounts for grade-school children have been rising, says Bennett, and possibly causing harm.
• can cause a lot of family conflict
• Moreover, assigning homework to young children may be conditioning them to cheat later on, she says. Many parents "say their kids come home and need help in math" or help with a project, like a diorama or science project. "When the kids get a lot of parental help" in the early years, "they get dependent on it," Bennett says. "It confuses them about whether it's OK to get help with your work."
• five math problems "are enough to tell whether a child understands the concept and can move on or doesn't understand and needs help," yet many teachers assign 30 or more problems, says coauthor Kalish.
• Excessive homework has caused some low-income students to drop out of school
• Despite popular belief, eighth-graders in some industrialized countries actually do less homework than U.S. children while scoring just as well or better or achievement tests,
• "It's not that homework is wrong," it's that too much current homework is of the fill-out-the-worksheet variety and keeps children from other valuable activities, like social interaction, says Arizona State's Berliner. "If homework has the effect of isolating the child from his family, then that's bad, generally,"
• Are high-stakes tests putting too much pressure on students?
• To prepare students for the tests, teachers now work as teams to "enrich the curriculum," a middle-school principal told Yeh. Contrary to what many experts fear, teachers aren't "teaching to the test" — by exclusively drilling students on questions similar to those on the exam or alerting them to test-taking tricks, said an elementary school principal.
• Under the new testing regimes, many teachers are "feeling an extraordinary amount of pressure, and that does affect the kids," says Peha. Nevertheless, "most of the pressure" teachers are feeling "is out of proportion to the reality,"
• "Schools with low scores don't get shut down; some states do require passing tests, but most states have devised other ways for students to get diplomas, like attendance. Most of the pressure is really the fear of the unknown," because "we're really only 10 years into the accountability culture."
• In at least some classrooms, teachers' testing anxiety clearly affects students, says Marshalita Peterson, an associate professor of education at historically black Spelman College in Atlanta. "There are some teachers who say, 'You have to do well on this test,' and in response students self-impose requirements" to achieve, Peterson says. "Some can't take the emotional strain of that, and it shows."
• If a school is getting pressure for students to perform on tests in third grade, then the third-grade teacher is looking to the second-grade teacher and the first-grade teacher" to help make that happen, says Peterson. Such pressure has an upside, when "a group of teachers ends up working more together."
• Schooling Expands
• Today's lawmakers and business leaders have upped the pressure on American schools, urging them to raise graduation rates to 100 percent. Meanwhile, a growing number of students, mostly from affluent families, compete ever more fiercely for a limited number of spots in top colleges
• It was only a hundred years ago that industrial nations came to believe that government should provide basic education to all, says Baker. Since then, the proportion of children attending school has grown rapidly. During the early 20th century, wealthier countries expanded their primary education, and in the 1930s and '40s secondary education took off. But "only in the mid-'60s was it assumed that everybody should finish high school,"
• Different Visions
• Among Americans, especially, some parents believe in allowing children to develop largely at their own pace, pressure-free, says Brookings' Loveless. These parents are likely to oppose both homework and testing, he says. Meanwhile, some cultures embrace a general belief "that children's main job is to master all the stuff that the culture thinks is important," leading parents there to value study highly, Loveless says.
• "When you look at how education is thought of as part of a teenager's life in Europe and Asia, it is totally different than the United States.
• When it comes to homework, international comparisons are tricky, partly because cultures have different notions about what actually counts as homework.
• "high-achieving Asian nations report almost no homework," but that report may be deceiving, says Loveless. In China, for example, "a child may come home without a homework assignment, but nevertheless the kid will sit down at a table with mom and study all evening,"
• Moreover, when it comes to assigned homework, international studies don't show a clear connection between homework and achievement.
• Differing views of homework's purpose also make cultural comparisons difficult. For example, the United States is one of the few nations where teachers include homework scores as an element of course grades. Elsewhere, homework is often regarded as practice or preparation only. Eighty-two percent of American teachers give grades to homework, compared to 14 percent in Japan and 6 percent in Germany.
• Cold War Fears
• In the United States, the pros and cons of homework are regularly debated. However, many researchers say that while attitudes have varied, the average American student has seldom been overburdened with take-home work.
• for example, California legislators banned homework for children under age 15, who lawmakers declared would be better off playing outdoors. In 1941, an article in the Encyclopedia of Education Research declared that "the benefits of assigned homework are too small to counterbalance the disadvantages.
• n 1957, the Soviet Union's surprise launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first satellite, further roused the critics. Worried that schools weren't preparing students to best America's Cold War rivals, Congress in 1958 passed the National Defense Education Act, increasing federal aid for math, science, foreign language and technical education.
• Bulging Backpacks?
• In the early 1980s, homework again became a national issue. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education issued A Nation at Risk, a report arguing the once mighty American education system was "being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity."
• Effort and discipline were prominent among the elements missing from the schools, the commission said. "Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them."
• Meanwhile, in the same survey, average weekly homework time for 9-to-12-year-olds only rose from three hours and 22 minutes in 1981 to three hours and 41 minutes in 1997
• High school students' homework burden has increased little overall. In a national survey in 1999, for example, 11th-graders reported only slightly more homework than eighth-graders.
• For older students, a moderate amount of homework — 60 to 90 minutes per night for middle-schoolers and 120 minutes for high-schoolers — has been shown to improve student achievement, says Cooper of Duke University. Students who do less as well as those who report doing more both achieve less, says Cooper, who published a study in 2006 synthesizing all existing research on homework amounts.
• Even more important than how much homework is what kind, say many educators. Nevertheless, while schools of education acquaint teachers-in-training with theories of learning and lesson planning, none actually offers specific classes on assigning homework.
• She had traditionally asked her grade-school students to build dioramas depicting favorite scenes in the children's book Make Way for Ducklings, McGarvey recounted. But as she considered the issue of homework more closely, she decided that the assignment didn't make sense.
• he question of how much and what homework to assign will be crucial as long as schools look for the best ways to help students learn.
• But the current battle — mostly led by parents who decry homework's threat to family time — reflects "larger cultural wars" over the place of work in Americans' lives generally, said John Buell, an education scholar and columnist for the Bangor [Maine] Daily News and the author of two books on homework.
• endorse the so-called 10-minutes-per-grade ru

• Current Situation

   

  Reevaluating Homework
• Dialogue among parents, teachers, and school administrators often leads to lighter loads of more carefully developed assignments, says anti-homework author Kalish. The dialogue can be a bit hard to launch, she says. Parents tend to consider homework such a time-honored tradition "that there's no hope of change," she says. At the same time, "the school administration often thinks parents want more homework."
• Efforts to make such changes are occurring in private and public schools around the country. In 2006, for example, Greenville, S.C., public schools limited daily homework and how heavily homework could count in a student's final grade
• considering a ban on grading homework. The policy would establish a more "level playing field" among students by putting "the emphasis of homework on practicing for assessments such as tests, projects and quizzes" and avoiding the possibility of some students ending up with higher course grades based on homework for which they got substantial help from their parents
• policies to ensure that only homework that really increases learning is assigned. "If five problems help students understand a concept, then don't assign 15,"
• Testing the Tests
• "Teachers aren't all opposed to NCLB, but we saw a big problem with teacher morale" in a new large-scale study of teachers' and administrators' responses to high-stakes testing in California, Georgia and Pennsylvania, says Laura S. Hamilton, a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation, a Palo Alto, Calif., research organization. "Majorities of teachers were telling us that NCLB was badly affecting teacher morale," but majorities "also said it was having a good effect on coordination in the schools."
• In addition, many teachers don't feel confident that current tests actually match their states' learning standards or curricula, and virtually all believe NCLB's ultimate goal — having 100 percent of students test at "proficient" levels by 2014 — is unrealistic
• "When people perceive goals as impossible to attain, they'll tend to take shortcuts," such as "teaching to the test," she says
• "teachers are spending a fair amount of time with practice tests, test-taking strategies and problems that mirror what will be on the tests,"
• "a lot of states now have benchmarking tests," which don't carry any stakes but help teachers see how well students are doing and enable them to readjust their teaching accordingly — "four to six times a year," Hamilton says. "All these things together have classrooms very focused on tests."
• igh-stakes tests "are also dictating the pace and the timing of what's taught," sometimes in ways that make a hash of the curriculum, says Nichols. For example, middle school teachers she surveyed complained about tests that include Civil War information the state curriculum dictates should be taught in the weeks after the test. "So they have to roar through it" to cover it in time for the exam.

• Outlook

   

  Learning to Teach 
• Education systems around the world are inexorably moving to require more years of strictly academic education for more students than ever before, says Baker of Penn State. The "slow death of vocationalism" that sees virtually all students pursuing a math-and-literacy-heavy curriculum through high school is occurring globally and in the United States, he says.
• Exactly what that implies for homework and testing, however, is unclear. Much is still unknown about how particular homework practices and testing policies affect students and about how to teach academic subjects successfully to everyone
• "I've noticed that many people take it as a given now that homework and achievement don't go together," Bennett says.
• "In a school in Alberta, Canada, the principal asked the teachers to read up on homework over the summer, and when school started in the fall they changed their policies," greatly limiting the homework assigned, Bennett says.
• Many education researchers say the demands of educating all students to a high academic standard will require understanding much more about how students learn. Some also say Americans may have to make a tough shift to a more academics-friendly society to see real result

• o improve U.S. standings, increased study time on academic subjects would be required, as well as increased attention to academics and learning by families and the society at large, he says. But "even though everybody wants the nation's schools to be better, there's not a huge push" for that kind of cultural change.

   
• Research shows that "you can add an hour to the school day" and "get a small gain in achievement but not nearly as much as you'd expect," he says. "The missing element is — productivity," says Loveless. Extra hours must be spent addressing individual children's specific academic deficiencies to pay off, he says
• An Associated Press poll in 2006 found that about 57 percent of parents felt their child was assigned about the right amount of homework. Another 23 percent thought it was too little, 19 percent thought it was too much
• When most of us were growing up, our homework was manageable. We were able to complete it without constant supervision, then run out to play (and burn some calories), have dinner with our families and go to bed at a reasonable hour. But today many young children are giving up all those things to spend hour after sedentary hour at their desks.
• My colleagues and I have conducted a combined analysis of dozens of homework studies to examine whether homework is beneficial and what amount is appropriate.
• students average 78 minutes of homework per night while middle school students average 99 minutes
• But it means children are routinely spending 50 percent more time on their homework than the 10 minutes total per grade level per night recommended by the National Education Association, the National PTA and Duke University's Harris M. Cooper (essay at right)
• Students assigned homework in second grade did better on math, third- and fourth-graders did better on English skills and vocabulary, fifth-graders on social studies, ninth- through 12th-graders on American history and 12th-graders on Shakespeare.
• When schools push beyond them, many children, including teens, are developmentally unable to cope. They react by misbehaving, becoming anxious, burning out and eventually coming to hate school — not exactly the way we want our young people to feel about learning.
• Yet other studies correlate homework and achievement with no attempt to control for student differences. In 35 such studies, about 77 percent find the link between homework and achievement is positive.
• Even in high school, Cooper says more than two hours of homework can diminish its effectiveness and become counterproductive. Ironically, there's plenty of research showing that exercise, play and the family dinner — all things children are giving up — are more highly correlated with cognitive development and achievement than is homework.
• Younger children have less-developed study habits and are less able to tune out distractions. Studies also suggest that young students who are struggling in school take more time to complete assignments.
• It's true that homework overload doesn't affect every child. But even if only 10 percent of America's 54 million schoolchildren are suffering (and I believe it's much more), it's still a serious problem for those 5.4 million. All children need time for active play, time to spend with their families and time to be, well, children.
• "Most educators agree that for children in grades K-2, homework is more effective when it does not exceed 10-20 minutes each day; older children, in grades 3-6, can handle 30-60 minutes a day; in junior and senior high, the amount of homework will vary by subject."

• Short Features

    

  Low-Income Kids Face Toughest Pressures

  Creating a family atmosphere in the classroom helps
• Stress is a universal affliction among students, but the impact of psychological stress and school pressure is particularly hard on low-income students, many analysts say.
• puts more pressure on students in low-income areas, says Peter Sacks, the author of several books on standardized testing and the relationship between social class and education.
• In low-income schools, however, many kindergarteners start out with well under half the skills and knowledge that school-ready children are expected to have, "so the ground they have to cover over time is so much greater," says Sacks
• The entire school has a siege mentality because failure to meet the [NCLB} goals can lead to the firing of teachers" and takeover of the school, he says. "As a consequence, in many low-income schools teaching and learning is reduced to whatever is necessary to score on the tes
• High-stakes testing also can act as "a disincentive for recruiting" the neediest kids to good schools, since administrators may fear an influx of high-needs children will harm overall test scores
• Even modest homework demands take a higher toll on poor students, according to John Buell, a former professor at the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the author of two books on homework. Students in poor families often have greater family responsibilities and lack basic supports for doing homework, such as a quiet, well-lit place to study, dictionaries and Internet access, he says.
• Indeed, among the lowest-income students, mostly black and Hispanic, "half don't even graduate" from high school in an era when graduation is expected of virtually everyone, says Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Philadelphia's Temple University and author of one of the largest sociological surveys ever done on U.S. teens. Impoverished children also have the highest rate of mental-health problems, another sign of stress in their lives, he says.
• To provide a supportive family atmosphere in the classroom, the New City Public Schools Charter School in Long Beach, Calif., teaches some lessons in mixed-age classrooms, says Co-Director Stephanie Lee. New City also aims to make its students bilingual in English and Spanish, so afternoons feature multi-age K-5 groups, with "the older kids serving as language models,"

• Tailoring Teaching to Fit the Brain

  Neuroscience helps overcome students' cognitive difficulties
• Learning research suggests that "the more homework is individually structured to the student, the better it may work," says Pennsylvania State University Professor of Education Gerald LeTendre. But time-pressed teachers often respond to demands for improved student achievement with one-size-fits-all assignments like worksheets. And "there is not a lot of evidence this is effective," says LeTendre.
• Some education experts say that as the findings of neuroscience seep into schools of education, the tide may turn in favor of more individualized instruction. That prospect isn't as scary as some teachers think,
• "The main mistake teachers make is they think you need a different plan for every kid," says Barringer. "That's not it. The key is: Just don't go right down the middle"
• Teachers can learn the particular cognitive challenges presented by different subject matter and point them out to students, along with some strategies that will help those with differently wired brains.
• One strategy that helps spatially oriented kids succeed at writing is having them tap into their spatial-thinking abilities before committing pen to paper, Gurian says. "Allow the kids to draw a storyboard of what they want to write; then, after an hour of drawing it have them start writing," he says. The visual kick-start makes their writing better organized and more detailed, he says.

• Over the past three decades, neuroscience studies of conditions like Alzheimer's disease and dyslexia have shown a lot about the very different wiring of individual human minds, says Barringer. "There have been just amazing breakthroughs in brain research and learning," she says.

   
• "Kids who have differences in learning have faced added pressure from being in schools where their minds were misunderstood, she says. But today there's a much greater possibility of finding a parent or an educator who has the knowledge to help. Kids in this decade have a better chance of finding someone."

• How Cognitive Science Helps Teachers

  Educators say research findings are not widely understood

• Cognitive science is beginning to answer such questions, but the findings don't always make it into the classroom.

   

  Putting discoveries in cognitive science — the study of thought and learning processes — to work in education will happen, but the process is only beginning, says Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer at K12 Inc., a Herndon, Va., firm that develops online-learning products. "When you look at how teachers are trained, there's still not much said about how minds work," he says.
• Many American children and teens are overscheduled and overstimulated, putting their health and ability to learn at risk.
• "You have to let your kids be bored for at least an hour a day" — with no TV or computer — to figure out what they enjoy doing. "If they're never bored, they'll never find out who they are."
• Sleep deprivation is an unrecognized problem for many teenagers, too, says Denise Clark Pope, a lecturer at the Stanford University School of Education. "Not a lot of people know that adolescents need nine and a half hours
• "However, some have backward-mapped from that to argue that we should focus on preschool as an academic thing, to begin preparing children at age 4 for the high-stakes testing they will face later," Mangiofico says.
• After a period of slow, conscious practice, though, skills are mastered and move into "the huge infrastructure of subconscious modules in which expertise you've already developed is stored," he says. T
• "no short cut" to going through an initial period of slow practice building any skill, says Saxberg. But the good news is that mastering a skill doesn't depend on innate talent but "whether you have the will, patience and interest to put in that practice," he says.
• eachers assigning homework must make sure that the work is doable and that kids have a way to prove that they've mastered the task; then they can stop practicing, Saxberg explains.
• "Some teachers think they're doing the right thing by assigning mounds of worksheets for practice, he says. But once children know how to do it, they begin to hate the work, and their performance drops off, Saxberg says.

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