介绍:
20160729ou 一中两外锵锵三人行
今日话题：英国学校为了能让家长更好的参与到孩子的学习中同时督促孩子完成作业，校方会短信家长有关孩子的作业情况，近期考试时间， 以及学校合适准备放假等信息。
MB: We’re talking first about the age-old problem for parents everywhere – namely, how to make your children do their homework. Wu You, what’s the latest?
WY: Well, how to make children do their homework. To many parents, that can be a million-dollar question. But recent reports suggest that maybe children can do better in school when their parents are involved in their school life. A recent study published by Education Endowment Foundation suggests something counter-intuitive. The best way to get parents involved may also be the cheapest - simply by sending them text messages about the time of exams and also the homework.
MB: Okay, well I’m looking at some details here. It seems that this group, they examined three programs that a group of schools had done in order to get parents more involved and more engaged in their children’s schooling. There was one program which taught the parents of five and six-year-olds who were struggling to read some techniques in order to help their children. There was another which paid parents of older primary school children thirty pounds, so that’s about forty dollars, per session, to attend classes on improving their children’s literacy and numeracy. But there’s a third program, Wu You.
WY: A third program developed by researchers at Harvard and Bristol universities was more promising. The parents of nearly 16,000 pupils at 36 secondary schools in England were sent regular text messages to remind them of forthcoming tests and to report whether homework was submitted on time, and to outline what their children were learning. So they were making the parents be a monitor at home.
NL: Yeah, absolutely, I think one of the key things about the first two methods that you just outlined there – teaching the parents techniques to help their children, and paying them to attend classes – they’re both very time-consuming, they take up a lot of parents’ time. Obviously parents have their own jobs, they’re busy people, and the text message thing is so much easier. It’s a much more easy way to engage people, as well, because when you’re looking at the results, as well, I think the kind of parents who are going to go and volunteer to take classes on how to better be involved in your child’s education are probably the ones who are already quite hot on their child’s education, if you think about it. This way you get a much broader range of pupils’ families, and it seems that it’s a better way to reach people.
MB: Do you think this sort of scheme would be popular in China, among parents?
WY: I think this scheme can be the primary level in China, because we have created even better schemes. In China we use WeChat. Schools just let all the parents join a WeChat group, and then the teacher will directly send one message in this WeChat group to let every parent know. This can be harsher than the situation in England, because they were texting each parent, but they didn’t know what was happening to other people. But here, if you’re in this kind of parents’ WeChat group, no matter what the teacher sends out, every parent can see. If the teacher just accidentally sends something about one kid, the other parents will also know it and the other kids will also know it. And then they will be afraid, sometimes, of public shaming.
MB: Accidentally, or accidentally-on-purpose? That’s the question.
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