Schoolkids getting confused by homework jargon

From partitioning to phonological, this is the homework and assignment gobbledygook our children are battling to get their heads around.

PUZZLED pupils are being bamboozled by academic jargon in homework and assignments, confounding kids with highbrow curriculum jargon.

Year 1 gobbledygook includes maths homework to “partition collections into two equal parts’’ and “develop other three-part partitioning’s (sic) of the number’’.

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In spelling homework, six-year-olds at one Brisbane primary school were told to use “phonological and visual spelling knowledges to remember these words’’.

And in maths, Year 4 students were given simple multiplication tasks, with instructions to “solve using standard algorithm or an area model’’.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan yesterday vowed to work with state and territory governments to improve the national curriculum next year.

“Homework and assignments should be set in language that is easy to understand,’’ he told The Sunday Mail.

“Parents and teachers keep telling me the curriculum is overcrowded, and that means we are sacrificing quality for quantity.

“We support a curriculum that concentrates on the fundamentals, especially literacy and numeracy, and teaches a deeper understanding of essential content.’’

Wording in Year 4 maths homework

Education experts yesterday criticised the jumble of jargon in curriculum documents, warning that some students are too confused to properly learn the basics of reading, writing and maths.

In physical education – traditionally a time for kids to enjoy playing sport – Queensland students now need to “access, evaluate and synthesise information to take positive action to protect, enhance and advocate for their own and others’ health, wellbeing, safety and physical activity participation across their lifespan”.

Dr Kevin Donnelly, who reviewed the national curriculum for the Federal Government in 2014, said it had “only got worse”.

He criticised the convoluted “edu-babble” in many curriculum documents.

“There’s all this jargon that parents find hard to understand, and it’s driving teachers batty,” he said.

“Teaching is no longer about how you construct a sentence and use punctuation – it’s all about personalised learning that is drowning teachers in red tape and bureaucracy.

Education in Australia is a slow-moving train wreck.”

Queensland students went backwards in more than half the categories in this year’s NAPLAN tests and scored lower than the national average at every year level and in every subject.

Parents for Quality Education convener Tempe Laver, a mother of two teenage students, is critical of “Google teaching, where students are expected to access the knowledge on computers and teach themselves”.

Year 4 maths homework

“The fixation on social justice issues such as mental health, climate change and pollution at the expense of subject knowledge is very disappointing,” she said.

“Parents are having to teach a lot of the basics themselves, or go to tutoring companies.” Many curriculum documents, written to tell teachers what to teach in their classrooms, are so full of jargon that they contain a glossary of terms.

Queensland’s senior English syllabus states that students will “identify and examine the use of aesthetic features and stylistic devices and their effects on one’s own interpretation of (and aesthetic engagement with) a text”.

QCAA has provided an incomprehensible sentence written by a five-year-old as an example of “satisfactory’’ work for Year 1 English.

The handwritten sentence says: “Ten basit bol in NBA baiat is i ov. Ten bes paas n wod hi is my faft pla, edifisa.’’

The QCAA “analysis of evidence” states that the child “used the words ‘favourite player’ as a referent to the question, indicating that he is developing a sense that a written response has to contain some orientating detail for the reader”.

Report cards are also riddled with jargon: one teacher wrote that a Year 2 student with a sound achievement for reading “frequently demonstrates effective comprehension strategies to construct literal and inferred meaning and provides confident, cohesive and detailed text retells”.

Year 1 maths homework

Centre for Independent Studies senior research fellow Jennifer Buckingham said some schools used jargon in report cards “to avoid quantifying what children know and can do’’.

“Parents want clear descriptions of what their child knows,” she said.

“Jargon has crept into all parts of the curriculum and there’s lots of meaningless stuff there. The expectations on students are very high but quite often they are expected to do things they haven’t been taught to do.”

Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace said parents should discuss homework concerns with teachers or principals.

“Homework should be age-appropriate and relate to what the child is learning in class,” Ms Grace said.

The Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority said that teachers “typically use student-friendly language” when they use the national curriculum to develop activities and tasks for students.

Queensland Teachers’ Union president Kevin Bates said the language might be confronting for some parents, but students would see it right across their education experience.

Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe said there was such an “overload of documents” that some teachers were sharing lesson plans on YouTube and Instagram.

State Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington said an LNP government would “declutter the curriculum”.

“Using jargon that kids find difficult to understand doesn’t help develop the foundation skills of reading, writing and maths,’’ she said.