Giving Compass' Take:

• Education Dive reports on an ongoing discussion among educators: Some schools make homework mandatory for kindergartners, while others cite research showing it doesn’t necessarily make students better learners.

• No matter which side of the debate you land, how can we come up with more robust data in early childhood education? Is a one-size-fits-all approach really the answer?

• Experts are also stressing project-based learning for all-day kindergarten. 

Questions over the amount of time and the type academic work children should spend doing at home brings answers as varied as the work itself. Should students have homework? That’s likely a given. Flipped classrooms, for example, rely on students being exposed to new material at home. The age a child should be before they start handling tasks, however, is not clear.

While the golden rule of homework has long been to assign 10 minutes of work at night per grade level, that doesn’t provide much guidance for kindergarten teachers. In some cases, even children in pre-K are taking standardized tests, and the push to perform on these exams increases the likelihood that students will be asked to do practice work at home.

A report from the U.S. Department of Education, “Helping Your Students With Homework: A Guide For Teachers,” states that kindergarten is actually not too early for children to have homework assignments. But the work that’s assigned needs “…to be simple,” wrote the authors. “For example, very young students might be asked to bring a book for an adult to read to them — or for the child to read to an adult if he or she can do so,” said the report. “The adult might be asked to initial a bookmark indicating that the book [h]as been read.”

Read the full article about Kindergarten at center of homework debate by Lauren Barack at Education Dive.