13 March 2015
Singaporean students are among the most hardworking in the world, according to a survey conducted on a sample of the country’s 15-year-olds by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Our kids clock 9.4 hours of homework a week, as compared to students in Shanghai, who spend 13.8 hours a week on homework, and those in Russia, who spend 9.7 hours. The global average was about five hours’ worth of homework each week.
Are our students spending too much time on homework? To be sure, a certain amount of time is needed for students to gain enough practice in order to reinforce their understanding of concepts and train them at applying the concepts to exam-style questions and novel problems.
But at what point does homework become excessive, possibly with diminishing returns? At what point do students feel so stressed and bogged down by homework that it becomes self-defeating, and hinders rather than helps learning? These are questions that must be asked.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Education (MOE) said Singapore’s weekly average of 9.4 hours on homework is “fairly reasonable for upper-secondary students, who would be preparing for the national examinations”. She said: “Homework, when used appropriately, can reinforce students’ learning, contribute to their progress and cultivate a healthy disposition towards learning.”
Associate Professor Jason Tan, an education policy expert at the National Institute of Education, said: “The 9.4 hours do not seem that overwhelming, when students are taking six to nine subjects in Secondary 3. “But (the report) also doesn’t give any indication of the subjects the time is spent on, or the nature of homework, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions from this.”
Prof Tan added that although students in South Korea and Japan were ranked low in the number of homework hours in this survey, they were not “learning any less”. “Their students spend long hours after school in cram schools similar to tuition centres, called juku in Japan and hagwon in Korea,” he said. It is difficult to set a “right” amount of homework for everyone, said Prof Tan.