The poor man may have been misquoted - after all, the article was written by a mere journalist, but embedded in the following quote is (by implication) a classic False Cause fallacy (Post hoc?... ergo propter hoc?).
John Roulston, executive director of Independent Schools Queensland said a good rule of thumb was that homework should be assigned on the basis of 10 minutes for each grade level up until senior school.
Dr Roulston said homework at most independent schools ranged from 10 minutes a day for Year 1 students to 20 minutes a day for Year 3, 60 minutes a day for Years 6 and 7, 75 minutes for Year 8 and 90 minutes for Year 9. Year 12 students often did up to three hours home work a day, he said.
"Schools in which homework is routinely assigned and graded tend to have higher achieving students," Dr Roulston said. "The more homework students complete, especially from grades 6 to 12, the better they do in school. "The correlation between homework and higher achievement is higher the further a student moves through school."
Sounds reasonable but... higher aspiring students, with pushy parents, might do more homework - and achieve higher results - because of their pushy parents and higher aspirations. More homework might not "cause" higher achievement, despite the superficial attractiveness of such an assumption.
Maybe Doctorates in education cause executive directors of independent schools to jump to hasty conclusions - or to confuse correlation with causation? The only way to really test Roulston's assumption that more homework gives more betterer results in school would be to force slackers to do mountains of homework and to forbid keen students to do any. I shall be applying for a grant to conduct just such a study.
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Tagged - Fallacy, Skepticism, False Cause.
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11 comments:
"The more homework students complete, especially from grades 6 to 12, the better they do in school."
Well, that's obvious.
Any kid who sits down & DOES three hours of homework a night certainly deserves something.
In case you get that grant. How would you force the slackers to do mountains of homework?
bring back whipping I say
Hmm...Where does the figure of '10 minutes' emerge from? Why not 15 or 20 minutes per grade?
Perhaps you could, as part of your research, conduct a parallel study and test my 'Theory of Linear Performance'* and see whether or not students who do twice as much homework do twice as well academically?
*This is closely related to my 'Theory of Linear Cooking' i.e. cooking something at twice the temperature will take half the time...
In response to both L>T and Ben: (a) I would give the slackers a sound thrashing; and (b) like your theory of linear cooking, I have a theory of linear motoring - drive at twice the posted speed to get twice the demerit points.
Quote:
Schools in which homework is routinely assigned and graded tend to have higher achieving students," Dr Roulston said. "The more homework students complete, especially from grades 6 to 12, the better they do in school. "The correlation between homework and higher achievement is higher the further a student moves through school."
Sounds reasonable but... higher aspiring students, with pushy parents, might do more homework - and achieve higher results - because of their pushy parents and higher aspirations. More homework might not "cause" higher achievement, despite the superficial attractiveness of such an assumption.
Maybe Doctorates in education cause executive directors of independent schools to jump to hasty conclusions - or to confuse correlation with causation?
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Maybe. Unfortunately this article wouldn't indicate anything like that, since the expert quoted said no such thing. Even in the part of the article you reprinted he never posited causation, and he didn't do it anywhere else in the article. There is nothing in the article to suggest that he confuses the two. Maybe there is correlation between frequent fallacy-hunting and drawing hasty conclusions about what a text says.
Jimpee, note the parenthetic aside in my original ("by implication"). The reader of a newspaper report is likely to draw the causation inference. It may surprise you, but most readers of newspapers don't apply forensic scrutiny and tease out subtle semantics and possible meanings, while weighing up probabilities. Next time Jimpee, have the courage to identify yourself as the responsible subeditor for the Courier-Mail. Come on, no more dissembling and disingenuous sophistry...fess up.
Jim P must be very literate. Indeed he only take things literally - no room to interpret implied meaning in someone's text. Spot on I say - a delightful antidote to postmodern "discourse". (How anyone could conclude that Dr Roulston and the reporter were implying increasing homework increases grades is a level of interpretive ability beyond me I'm afraid…)
Then the readers make that fallacy, not Roulston.
I'm not sure whether you're joking, but I am not in fact an employee of Courier-Mail. I am just a philosophy major expecting a little more skill from people who wrote a book on fallacies.
Jim P, what is it you don't understand about the masthead to the humbug blog? Viz: "we expose erroneous thinking with irony, whimsy, sarcasm, satire, caricature, "distortature" and occasional breathtaking hypocrisy".
A philosophy major eh! That explains a lot! Let me guess, a Solipsist... in which case you are arguing with your own fantasies... which apparently leave no room for "whimsy, sarcasm, satire... and occasional breathtaking hypocrisy".
You're right, of course. I concede the argument. Never mind.
One more thing for Jim P.
Communication comes in two parts. What the communicator actually means, and what the "communicatee" thinks the communicator means.
It is the communicator's job, within reason, to make sure their meaning is clear. It is not unreasonable to assume the journalist (and Roulston through her) would have known that the meaning people would take from this report is that more homework causes higher achievement.
As they did not categorically state that the evidence does not make this clear, they are guilty of a deliberately implied false cause.
I assume this is "skilful" enough… "philosophy major".... phfff... That's nothing. I've a Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Science (Physics, Maths and first class honours in History and Philosophy of Science), not to mention my two awards for academic excellence, not to mention that I've presented at the AAHPSSS conference, all the articles I've written... and so on, but you don't hear me bloviating about it to prove my credentials (okay, obviously that's not true, I do it all the time - it impresses the ladies).
Plus, I win as I've had the last word. (I've turned comments off for July posts!)
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