[brigadier132]

Homework is practice, practice works. You can tell me how you've found a thousand published articles that practice doesn't work and all it would do is confirm my prior that the vast majority of research is not well done or fabricated

[vundercind]

Practice being effective, and homework assignment being effective, are two very different things.

[lmm]

So you are convinced of your views and uninterested in evidence to the contrary? Then why should anyone care what you think?

[bko]

I think the (justified) doubt about research comes from personal experience. Everything I have ever learned in my life I have learned through deliberate mundane practice. I didn't go to school for comp sci, but I learned programming through copying countless tutorials, making edits, breaking things and learning from my mistakes. I have never learned anything any other way and I am yet to meet someone that learned any other way

> not a single study has ever supported the folk wisdom that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits such as self-discipline, responsibility or independence

This I know is wrong because, again in my experience hard work is incredibly rewarding. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, whether I'm painting a house, going for a run, or focusing on programming, I feel much better about myself and act with more dignity. The most miserable people I have met have no purpose or drive.

> You can’t “reinforce” understanding the way you can reinforce a behavior

Hard disagree. First you have to mimic, only later you gain an understanding. I remember copying code over and over again, just following the same patterns and then one day it just clicks. It's happened to me in a lot of different domains.

This is a great high signal article, not because it's true, but its exactly false. Everything about it is exactly opposite of the truth. I wish we should push more homework and more arbitrary rote memorization. A lot of religious groups in the US get great benefits from studying their holy books, only to apply that focus and energy on commercial tasks with great success.

We should bring back memorization of poetry, or calligraphy. Because at least then children had some purpose in their studies. Today we purport to teach logic or reasoning that can't be referenced easily by google, but today's students are worse in these fields than people in the past. And at least long ago, children knew some poetry to boot.

[Dalewyn]

I see it a little differently: Everything I've learned I found was either critically necessary to my life or was just god damn fun.

No amount of homework or practice or whatever you want to call it has helped me learn something whose value I could not discern nor find fun. Same goes with lectures.

[GauntletWizard]

I am unconvinced of my views, and interested in evidence the contrary. The modern academic journal paper is not evidence, it is one step below a newspaper opinion piece. The most obvious piece of evidence, among many, of academics descent into psychopathy, is the recent firing of Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was ultimately not fired for the obvious errors in her study, but for plagiarism that amounted somewhere between a clerical error and her having it zero original thoughts. She was fired as a scapegoat, not because she had lost the faith of any of her peers, whose Faith is thereby rendered meaningless.

[yCombLinks]

Any honest reading of Harvard's Academic Integrity policy will show Gay's work was in violation.

[GauntletWizard]

I don't deny that she was in violation, but if the firing had been genuine, it would have been concurrent with an investigation into academic fraud, at several levels.

She had to be fired, that was clearly the only option. It also should have raised the question of how she got the job in the first place.

[brigadier132]

> So you are convinced of your views and uninterested in evidence to the contrary

Yes I am convinced in my views. Am I uninterested in evidence to the contrary? It depends, what's the evidence?

If research comes up with a conclusion that significantly diverges from common sense I don't pay much attention to it unless it's been replicated and the experiments are well designed.

edit: removed my inflammatory comments

[andybak]

Plenty of "common sense" turns out to be nonsense over time.

[ptero]

Mate, please tone it down a notch, this is not reddit. You make some good points, which will likely get downvoted and hidden just for the writing style that has nothing to do with your argument. My 2c.

[bdangubic]

she/he is the product of the system he’s defending ;)

[nitwit005]

Imagine you do the study yourself. You have your class, and you decided to stop handing out homework for a year. Nothing bad happens. Students seem to learn just as much, test scores don't budge.

Do you just say "well, but practice work!" and ignore your results?

[jmprspret]

You can still practice during school hours. Simple.

[lolinder]

This is fallacious reasoning:

* A is in S

* For many B in S, P(B) is true

* Therefore P(A) is true

Step three in this chain doesn't logically follow from step two, so preemptively rejecting evidence against P(A) is irrational.

[brigadier132]

Cool, I'm sure there is a better way of formulating the argument that is more logically sound. I'll stick with "I know practicing works".

[lolinder]

I don't disagree that practicing works, but I'm very open to evidence that homework is an ineffective form of practice.

My wife is a music teacher and frequently objects to the phrase "practice makes perfect" because the kind of practice that you're doing has an enormous impact on the outcomes. Practice works to solidify behaviors, but ill-conceived practice will actually end up solidifying the wrong behaviors.

I think it's likely that it turns out that homework solidifies behaviors that are objectively a net loss for the individuals and society.

[brigadier132]

I don't think it's a particularly fun thought exercise but I know people enjoy this kind of thing. I feel like I've seen so many decisions being made backed by "research" that have caused significant harm. I think if you come up with a conclusion that significantly diverges from common sense it needs to be replicated multiple times and the experiment has to be fool proof before it really deserves consideration.

[estarkio]

I had a teacher/coach who always said "practice makes permanent."

[rich_sasha]

I came here to say more or less this. Everything I learned at school, I learned through homework.

Good teachers are engaging, interesting, passionate, and you listen to them like they're good story tellers. Everything they say seems obvious and clear. Then you try to replicate what they tell you and you fail.

At home or at school, you need to get stuck on your own into the problem and try to solve it yourself, else you won't learn - is my hard-earned experience.

Perhaps you can do homework at school, so to speak. But the other truth about homework is that it takes a lot of attention from an adult. Kids young and older often get stuck, someone needs to help them, and there aren't enough teachers.

Maybe AI can help, but until then, I can't see a viable alternative.