Yahoo Autos Raising Resilient Children May Require You to Rethink Homework Help
We now know the pandemic will not have a clear endpoint but will fade slowly. Each of us must decide when we feel ready to fly on a plane, shake a stranger’s hand or eat at an indoor restaurant. You may make these decisions tentatively, and even reverse yourself.
Parents face a similar decision in supporting their children with their schoolwork.
When schools were closed, there was no question that kids needed help; they were under stress, and Zoom was a tough way to learn, so parents stepped up. Sixty-three percent said they monitored their child’s schoolwork during remote learning, and 65 percent actually taught content. Some of my friends, frazzled by working at home and full-time childcare responsibility, told me that they sometimes completed school assignments themselves, saying, “it was just easier.”
Now, students are back in classrooms, but things aren’t back to normal at most schools. Parents may wonder how much help to provide in this new situation.
Kids differ in their needs, of course, but parents should know that too much help with schoolwork can backfire in two ways.
To understand the first, consider this example. A father is helping his daughter study for a history test by listening to her explain the content to him. She reads from her notes “The Era of Good Feelings in the United States lasted from 1815 to 1825.” Her father jumps in to ask, “OK, so when was the Era of Good Feelings?” She’s readily answers without checking her notes again, and so she concludes she has this fact memorized.
As you might have guessed, she’s probably mistaken—she read the fact moments ago, so it’s still in her short-term memory. This type of mistake is common; when someone behaves like a person with knowledge—in this case, answering her father’s question—she thinks she has that knowledge. She ignores that something else—in this case, reading her notes moments ago—supported the behavior, not her long-term memory.
In a recent experiment on this sort of confusion, nine- and 10-year-olds were shown a toy pantograph. The child used a stencil to trace a letter with a stylus. The stylus was connected, via hinged, jointed rods, to a carving needle, which etched the traced letter into a crayon. Some children received no guidance about how to use the pantograph, and none of them got it to work. A second group of children watched an adult use the device before trying it themselves, and 97 percent of them succeeded.
Yet 70 percent of them said that watching the adult was unnecessary; they would have figured out how to use it on their own.
This is one way providing help with homework may backfire; children can develop an unrealistic idea of what they actually understand and what they still need to work at.
