紐約一小學取消家庭作業
A public elementary school in New York Cityhas stopped giving its students homework.
紐約一所公立小學日前宣佈，停止給學生布置家庭作業。
P.S. 116 Principal Jane Hsu wrote a letter to parents last month detailing the decision, explaining that after more than a year of analyzing studies, the school had concluded that students’ after-school time would be better spent on activities like reading at their own pace and playing rather than working on class assignments.
公立116小學（P.S.116）華裔校長許簡上個月在給家長們的信中闡述了這一決定，並解釋稱，學校在經過一年多的研究分析後得出如下結論：學生的課餘時間應該用來玩耍，或是按照自己的節奏閱讀，而不該是做作業。
Hsu’s letter says that many studies indicate that there is no connection between homework and academic success. Indeed, there are some studies that show that the link between homework and success is dubious at the primary school level.
許簡在信中寫道，不少研究表明，家庭作業與學業表現並無關聯。事實上，有一些研究表明，在小學階段，家庭作業與學科成績之間的相關性並不明顯。
A seminal 1989 study on homework by Harris Cooper, a social psychologist who researches education, found that doing homework led students to perform better in school as they grew older. In later grades, students who did homework performed increasingly better than students who did not. In 2006, Cooper published a study that analyzed 15 years' worth of data on the effectiveness of homework. He found that homework had a more positive impact on students as they aged, and identified stronger correlations between homework and achievement for students in grades seven through 12 than for students in kindergarten through sixth grade.
1989年，專門研究教育的社會心理學家哈里斯·庫珀進行了一項影響深遠的研究。他的研究發現，隨着年齡的增長，做家庭作業能讓學生在學業上表現更好。與不做家庭作業的學生相比，完成家庭作業的高年級學生學習表現越來越好。2006年，庫珀發表了另一項研究，依據15年的有效數據分析了家庭作業的作用。研究發現，隨着學生年齡的增長，家庭作業的積極作用會不斷顯現。此外，研究還發現，對於7年級到12年級的學生來說，家庭作業與學科成績之間的相關性要比幼兒園到6年級的學生更加明顯。
A 2012 study from the Indiana University School of Education on 10th-graders found little correlation between time spent on homework and better course grades, although it did find a positive correlation between homework time and standardized test performance.
2012年，印第安納大學教育學院針對10年級學生進行的一項研究發現，家庭作業時長與課業成績之間並無關聯。但研究的確發現，家庭作業時長對學生的標準化考試成績有積極影響。
Some parents of P.S. 116 students are not happy with the decision to eliminate homework.
公立116小學的一些學生家長對學校取消家庭作業的做法表示不滿。
“I think they should have homework -- some of it is about discipline. I want [my daughter] to have fun, but I also want her to be working towards a goal,” Daniel Tasman, the father of a second-grader at the school, told DNAinfo.
二年級學生家長丹尼爾·塔斯曼在接受DNAinfo網站採訪時表示：“我覺得學校應該佈置家庭作業——做作業是一種紀律的體現，我希望我的女兒可以玩得開心，但同時也希望她有努力的目標。”
“You have to do homework in order to gain; you have to do homework because they may not be able to comprehend everything in school,” Sharon Blake, a grandmother of a P.S. 116 student, told ABC news.
另一位學生的奶奶向ABC新聞表示：“要想有收穫，就必須做家庭作業。孩子必須做家庭作業，因爲他們在學校時未必能完全理解學到的東西。”
Vocabulary
dubious：不確定的
seminal：有重大意義的
comprehend：理解
