Don’t be late with your homework!
Posted Aug 31, 2010 01:51:41 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A group that works to improve public education in the province supports a stricter policy on student deadlines.
New guidelines from the Ontario Ministry of Education will allow secondary school teachers to give students a grade of zero if they fail to hand in assignments on time — something teachers have been discouraged from doing in the past.
Until now, the Education Ministry has said teachers should only give students a mark of zero as a last resort.
Some schools even took it further and banned the zero mark completely. No matter how late students handed in their work they received a mark.
Annie Kidder, Executive Director of People for Education, says eliminating this confusion is a positive step.
“People thought there was a provincial policy that said kids weren’t allowed to be penalized for handing in things late,” she tells 570 News. “So basically they’re saying now that if your stuff is late, the teachers can mark it down. I don’t think the policy says if it’s late you’re going to get a zero. It just says that the mark and the timeliness can be attached to each other.”
Kidder says the somewhat muddy view of the past also gave students a false sense of reality.
“What some kids did is wait until the last possible day and hand in everything,” Kidder says. “They knew that even though there was a deadline it wasn’t a real deadline. The real deadline was the day before the marks had to go in for the report card.”
A ministry report entitled “Growing Success” says “students must understand that there will be consequences for not completing assignments for evaluation or for submitting those assignments late.”
Meantime, an examination of 18 studies on homework reveals that it’s of little benefit to elementary school students but can be useful for older students as long as it is not simply rote learning.
The report last year from the Canadian Council on Learning shows that in some cases homework can boost achievement and that older students – from Grade 8 and up – seem “most likely to benefit from doing homework,” as do lower achieving students.
