What can teachers do to help parents help their children with homework?
Just what kind of parental involvement — and how much involvement — truly helps children with their homework? The most useful stance parents can take, many experts agree, is to be somewhat but not overly involved in homework. The emphasis needs to be on parents’ helping children do their homework themselves — not on doing it for them. In an Instructor magazine article, How to Make Parents Your Homework Partners, study-skills consultant Judy Dodge maintains that involving students in homework is largely the teacher’s job, yet parents can help by “creating a home environment that’s conducive to kids getting their homework done.” Children who spend more time on homework, on average, do better academically than children who don’t, and the academic benefits of homework increase in the upper grades, according to Helping Your Child With Homework, a handbook by the Office of Education Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. The handbook offers ideas for helping childre
