Power, Thomas J., Karustis, James L., & Habboushe, Dina F. (2001). Homework Success for Children with ADHD: A Family-School Intervention Program. New York: The Guilford Press.
Pp. xviii +232.$30 ISBN 1-57230-616-5 (Paper)
Kathleen Rutowski
Arizona State University
December 18, 2001
There is no doubt that homework can be a family struggle, especially for children who are already struggling in school. Dudley-Marling (2000) provides vivid and moving descriptions of family interactions surrounding the completion of homework, the impact a child's struggle in school has on that child’s life at home, and the relationships between parents and school people. Homework Success is manual describing a program aimed at reducing the stress accompanying homework for young children with ADHD while increasing their efficiency and the accuracy of the homework they complete. It was developed by school psychologists Thomas Power, Ph.D., James Karustis, Ph.D., and Post-Doctoral Fellow Dina Habboushe, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Homework for young children is a typical feature of schooling in the United States. Power, Karustis, and Habboushe define homework as "assignments given by teachers that are to be performed by students outside of school or during noninstructional classroom time" (p. 4). Arguments in favor of homework stress the opportunity for children to establish study skills and work habits essential for success in later grades, opportunities to practice skills, and opportunities for parents to become familiar with the work their children are doing in school. Power, Karustis and Habboushe offer Homework Success as a means to ameliorate the inevitable family stress caused by homework. "In this program it is our intention to offer hope, using approaches that have been empirically validated, for children and families coping with ADHD" (p. 3). To accomplish this end Homework Success describes a 7-week program of clinically facilitated group sessions designed to improve parent-child relationships and decrease parental stress by helping parents to: 1) develop a deeper understanding of ADHD; 2) begin to use behavior modification strategies with their children; and 3) establish collaborative relationships with the teachers of their children.
Power, Karustis, and Habboushe posit that children with ADHD display two important characteristics in school: 1) they are less actively engaged in academic instruction; and 2) they require more instruction and practice than their classmates. They suggest that homework provides opportunities for children to develop a useful learning strategy by helping them to take advantage of opportunities to practice academic skills through the completion of their assigned homework. It is ironic that students who struggle in school are likely to have more homework than their peers because their lack of attentiveness at school leads to their failure to complete assignments and that these same characteristics (distractability, lack of organization, poor reading skills) will contribute to difficulties completing homework at home. My own experience working with my son echoes the oft hear parental lament that it takes two hours of struggling with their child to get through 15 minutes of work. The program outlined in Homework Success features clinical support for parents, children, and teachers to help them acquire specific strategies each can invoke to enable children with ADHD to get through homework assignments with reduced stress while increasing the child’s accuracy and efficiency of homework completion.
Seven group sessions introduce parents to strategies aimed at increasing their child’s organizational skills, reducing the potential distractions in the homework environment, controlling amount of time spent on homework, and providing the child incentives to increase their productivity and the accuracy of their homework. These group sessions also provide opportunities for parents/caregivers to "take comfort in the stories of other parents" (Dudley-Marling, 2000, p. 154) as they share their experiences working with their children on homework issues. The authors also provide guidelines for structuring group sessions for children participating in Homework Success and suggest using a token reinforcement system as a behavior management tool. The children engage in two activities relating to the material presented during their parents’ session and are reinforced during 15-minute intervals for appropriate behavior. The token economy used with the children and the interventions taught to their parents are based on a behavioral model and were culled from the research literature because of their demonstrated effectiveness in shaping the behaviors of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD.
Two important features and strengths of the Homework Success Program are: 1) the inclusion of comprehensive practical guidelines for the clinician implementing the program; and 2) the clinical support provided to participating parents/caregivers and teachers as they begin to establish collaborative relationships. Homework Success includes tools clinicians can use to screen for parent/caregivers who are likely to benefit from a behavioral approach to dealing with homework problems; suggestions on how to begin to foster collaborative home-school relationships; detailed descriptions of how to plan for and conduct the seven structured group sessions involving parents (Chapters 7-13) and concurrent sessions involving their children (Chapter 14); instruments and instructions on how to measure the outcomes of the program (Appendix B); and support materials to be used before and during the groups sessions (Appendices A, C-E).
The second strength of Homework Success is the clinical support it provides to parents and teachers as they work develop a collaborative relationship that has as its initial focus the resolution of homework difficulties. Program interventions are embedded in a collaborative framework that involves parents, teachers, and children in the setting of goals, collecting work samples, development of rewards, and determination of homework success. "The Homework Success Program is grounded in a multisystemic, ecological approach that recognizes the importance of the interconnectedness among systems in a child’s life. All key players have a role in the program: parents, teachers, medical professionals, and psychologists" (p. xi). This has the potential of opening lines of communication between parents and teachers that are necessary to cultivate the types of collaborative efforts that are responsive to the needs of individual families, their children, and their teachers. "Meeting the challenges of students who struggle in school depends, I believe, on the collaborative efforts of parents and teachers, but the ability to develop these collaborative relationships depends on the development of trust (Edwards, 1999). Trust, in turn will develop only when parents feel that they and their children are being treated with respect. And a key to showing respect is beginning with the assumption that all parents care deeply about their children and their children’s education" (Dudley-Marling, 2000, p. 152-153).
Homework Success provides clinical support to both teachers and parents/caregivers as they work to develop trusting collaborative relationships and as such may provide schools a valuable tool to support their emerging collaborative skills. Parental/caretaker participation in the Homework Success program communicates to teachers the deep care and concern parents/caretakers have for their children. This has the potential of fostering a trusting, respectful collaborative relationship between parents/caregivers and teachers. The teachers participating in Homework Success also have clinical support as they work to develop their own collaborative skills. Teaching has become a collaborative profession as students with diverse needs have been included in heterogeneous classrooms and the inability to establish collaborative relationships between colleagues and parents is commonly cited by districts as a reason for not renewing teacher contracts (Pugach & Johnson, 2002).
Homework Success has the potential to provide a framework within which parents/caregivers and teachers can begin to engage in dialogue that has as its initial focus the resolution of homework issues. Dudley-Marling (2000) states that "...the only way to develop appropriate homework policies that are sensitive to the needs of individual families is by talking candidly with parents about homework—specifically, how teachers and parents can work together to support children’s schoolwork without seriously upsetting family relationships" (p.154). I would suggest that it is this process of establishing collaborative relationships among parents/caregivers and teachers that has the potential to have the most profound impact on all the participants—teachers, parents/caregivers, and children. Homework completion and accuracy is a concrete issue that can galvanize parents and teachers to begin the conversations necessary to establish collaborative relationships critical to supporting children with ADHD in educational systems and Homework Success provides a comprehensive blueprint for use in schools.
There are, however, several complex issues that participants in Homework Success may find it difficult to resolve. An essential element of the program is that the teacher and parents establish a maximum amount of time to be spent on homework. This requires that the teacher develop and describe a strategy for evaluating work that has not been completed or is not accurate. During the initial parent-teacher meeting parents learn from the teacher about the types of homework assigned, how much time should be spent on homework, and how the homework is evaluated. The teacher learns about homework problems as parents describe the child’s approach to homework, how long homework takes, and the impact homework is having on the family. The clinician asks the teacher and parents to determine an absolute time limit for homework and then asks teacher to develop a strategy to evaluate homework that may not be complete or accurate. The clinician periodically contacts the teacher to gather data on the progress of the child in order to assess the outcomes of the program. At the same time the child’s parents/caregivers are encouraged to continue to communicate with their child’s teacher in order to effectively implement the strategies they are developing to increase the rate of completion and quality of the homework produced by their child. There is the risk that some parents and teachers might resist establishing a maximum amount of time to be spent on homework if they suspect that the child is not being held to the academic standards that other children meet and that this may effect their long-term academic success in school. In addition, homework policies must be sensitive to the ability of parents to support their children’s homework. Homework Success stipulates that parents may pre-teach their child before the evenings homework time segment begins. This puts the parent in the role of "teacher" and casts them as a mind-reader as they try to determine what teaching strategies they should use and how those strategies may complement or conflict with the strategies used by their child’s teacher earlier in the day. Parents are also put in the position of having to draw a fine line between helping child understand problem and doing the assignment for their child. At the same time teachers may have conflicting notions about what constitutes a parent helping a student complete a homework assignment and what constitute a parent doing a child’s homework. In addition, parents have different views of homework - intrusion on quality family time, a way to keep children occupied, a constant source of stress and conflict, a measure of the academic focus of their child’s school (Dudley-Marling, 2000).
It is interesting that while Power, Karustis, and Habboushe acknowledge that homework exacerbates stress in families with children who have ADHD, they do not challenge the efficacy of assigning homework for young children. The authors of Homework Success wrestle briefly with this issue in the initial two chapters of the book.
Although the direct effects of homework on academic performance appear relatively modest in the elementary years, there are additional benefits to assigning homework to young students. Homework may help to develop study skills and work habits, which can be useful to students in the classroom and during homework when they get older. Also, homework provides frequent opportunities for home-school collaboration and parental involvement in school which have been shown to be strongly related to student outcomes. (p. 5)
They acknowledge that the empirical basis for claiming a positive impact of homework on the academic performance younger children is debatable but do not challenge the assumption that an improvement in a young child’s rate of homework completion and accuracy will lead to an improvement in that child’s academic achievement. The data collected on a small sample of children participating in a clinical trial of Homework Success and reported in Chapter 15 of the manual indicates families experienced a reduction in the level of family stress, but demonstrates little improvement in the academic performance of the children participating in the program.
The sustainability of the Homework Success interventions may ultimately rest on the ability of the clinician to deliberately address the connections or lack of connections between the culture of the parent/caregiver and the professional community of the school. There are only passing references to this issue in the program. Powers et al. occasionally suggest that the clinician "deliver" the program "in a culturally responsive manner," that behavioral rewards be "designed in collaboration with parents and the child," or that the program strategies be "modified periodically in response to feedback from family members and teachers about intervention acceptability." Failure to deliberately adopt a position of cultural reciprocity (Harry, Kalyanpur, & Day, 1999) and specifically address the potential discontinuity between the program assumptions and those of the culture and community of the parents/caregivers may lead to ultimate failure of the project to promote any lasting changes. For the seven weeks parents/caregivers participate in program they are getting the support of a clinician who mediates between them and the teacher/school. When the program ends and they no longer have that support their actions, like those of their children, may lead to future family and school homework struggles.
The challenge to schools that implement the Homework Success program is to develop ways to adapt the program elements and tailor them to support specific families and parent-teacher dynamics. The parent/caregiver group sessions provide structured opportunities to offer information in a non-threatening environment and a comfortable place to develop empowering skills with school personnel. The danger exists that the strong emphasis Homework Success places on treatment integrity, reflecting the authors’ commitment to research, may serve as a disincentive for clinicians to tailor the program to individual families. The challenge to the clinician implementing Homework Success is to discover how its behavioral approach can be integrated with the cultural assumptions of the parents/caregivers and the teachers participating in the program and in the process lay the foundation for the development of respectful collaborative relationships among parents/caregivers, their children, and the teachers who teach them.
References
Dudley-Marling, C. (2000). A family affair: When school troubles come home. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Edwards, P. (1999). A path to follow. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Harry, B., Kalyanpur, M., & Day, M. (1999). Building cultural reciprocity with families: Case studies in special education. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publiching Co.
Pugach, M. C., & Johnson, L. J. (2002). Collaborative practitioners, collaborative schools. Denver: Love Publishing Company.
About the Reviewer
Kathleen Rutowski received her doctorate from Arizona State University in 2001. She is currently a lecturer in the College of Education at Arizona State University and teaches courses in special education. Her research interests focus on preservice teacher education, the interface between special education and general education, and disability studies. Address all correspondences to Kathleen Rutowski, Division of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2011. Dr. Rutowski can be reached via e-mail at rutowski@asu.edu.
[ home | overview | reviews | editors | submit | guidelines | announcements ]