What is cognitive apprenticeship?

Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of instruction in which teachers make thinking visible: they model expert reasoning aloud, coach students as they attempt the work, scaffold the parts students cannot yet manage, and fade support as competence grows. Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Ann Holum introduced the model to a wide audience in 1991.

Who developed the cognitive apprenticeship model?

Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Susan Newman first described the model in a 1989 research chapter. The 1991 American Educator essay by Collins, Brown and Ann Holum, restored on this page, is the version most educators cite and assign.

What are the four dimensions of a cognitive apprenticeship learning environment?

Content (domain knowledge, heuristic strategies, control strategies, learning strategies), method (modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, exploration), sequencing (increasing complexity, increasing diversity, global before local skills), and sociology (situated learning, community of practice, intrinsic motivation, cooperation).

How is cognitive apprenticeship different from traditional apprenticeship?

Traditional apprenticeship teaches physical work that is naturally visible, in the place where the work is used. Cognitive apprenticeship adapts the same arc to thinking, which is invisible: reasoning must be deliberately externalized, school tasks must be situated in meaningful contexts, and practice must be varied so skills transfer beyond a single setting.

What do modeling, coaching, scaffolding and fading mean?

Modeling: the expert performs the task and voices the reasoning while the learner observes. Coaching: the learner performs while the expert watches and guides. Scaffolding: the expert supports only the parts of the task still beyond the learner. Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.

The Case Against Homework and the Homework Myth

First published 2007 by the 21st Century Learning Initiative. Restored 2026.

Janet Lawley's 2007 dual review found both books arguing the same thing: the evidence for homework is far weaker than its grip on family life. Research shows little correlation between homework and achievement in the primary years, and the costs, in sleep, family meals, and children's appetite for reading, are real and measurable.

Two books, one question

Janet Lawley reviewed two books together for the Initiative: Alfie Kohn's book on the homework myth and the case against homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, both published in 2006. Her opening observation is that few topics generate more conversation at the school gate than homework, yet there is remarkably little discussion of it among educationalists, in teacher training, or in practice. Homework, which Kohn mocks as a modern cod liver oil, had come to dominate home life for many children, starting in kindergarten and growing longer each year, often encouraged by ambitious parents in a misguided focus on competition. The assumption underneath, that it consolidates schoolwork, teaches independence and responsibility, and raises attainment, is precisely what both books test against the research, and find wanting.

Lawley traces the history the books recount. In the early 1900s, doctors led a movement to abolish homework on the grounds that children needed hours of daily fresh air. Mid century competition for economic and military supremacy is blamed for the modern escalation, and when a weak economy in the 1980s needed a scapegoat, education served, and the call for more homework was loud. All of it rested on the assumption that homework raises test scores, an assumption she notes is not supported by the studies.

The case

Kohn's conclusion, as the review presents it, is that homework burdens parents, stresses children, causes family conflict, deprives the young of time for physical and creative activity and for childhood itself, and dulls the appetite for learning. Bennett and Kalish, an attorney and an education writer, both parents, ground the same case in the experiences of families, with practical advice on managing homework, negotiating with teachers, and working toward policy change. Lawley dwells on the messages homework sends: that work matters more than family time, that learning is drudgery, and that only getting it right will do. Children recognize busy work when they see it. She quotes the books' sharp line that homework makes home an emotional tinderbox, and their observation that few teachers receive any training in homework at all.

The deeper argument is about the nature of learning. Time on task is of little value unless it is engaged time; drill may polish behavioral responses but does not build meanings and connections. Lawley asks, with the authors, whether a transmission model in which class time is for receiving and home time is for practice goes with the grain of the brain, and answers that reading, writing, discussing, and reflecting with immediate feedback would serve better. People, in Kohn's phrase, are active meaning makers, not passive receptacles.

The research

The review's appendices preserved the evidence base, and the restored edition keeps its essentials. Harris Cooper of Duke University, the leading researcher in the field, reviewed well over a hundred studies and found very little correlation between homework and achievement in elementary school, a moderate correlation in middle school, and diminishing or even counterproductive returns from excessive homework in high school. His widely cited guideline recommends no more than ten minutes per grade level per school night. International comparisons cut the same way: several of the highest scoring countries assign little homework, while several low scoring ones assign a great deal. A British study by Farrow and Tymms in the British Educational Research Journal found what looks like a paradox at primary level, with less homework accompanying higher test scores, and concluded that homework helps only in sensible quantities, when the pupil sees the point of the task, and when teachers plan and follow it up with care. The review also gathers the collateral costs: surveys showing sharp declines in children's sleep, in reading for fun after age eight, and in family meals, which one large study found to be the single strongest predictor of better achievement and fewer behavior problems in childhood.

The Initiative's angle

Lawley ties the books to the Initiative's oldest question, its president's challenge: do we want our children to be battery hens or free range chickens? The homework debate, on this reading, is a proxy for a larger one about trust, freedom, and how much of childhood adults are entitled to schedule. Her closing counsel borrows the Initiative's favorite phrase for the parent or teacher who acts on evidence against habit: become the child's advocate, a responsible subversive. If there is any doubt about the effectiveness and value of homework, she writes, we ought to encourage one another to rethink basic assumptions about its inevitability.

Reading it now

The evidence has not moved much since 2007: subsequent syntheses still find homework's benefits concentrated in the secondary years and dependent on quality rather than quantity, and the primary school case remains thin. What has changed is the arrival of machine assistance, which severs the last link between assigning work at home and knowing who did it. That development, which makes Lawley's question urgent rather than merely contrarian, is taken up in this publication's essay on the homework question, asked honestly, and the wider evidence on what practice at home can and cannot do sits alongside the archive's other restored reviews.

A note on provenance

This restored edition condenses the Wayback Machine capture of 26 December 2015 of the three page review at this address, credited to Janet Lawley and dated 2007. Quotations are verbatim from that capture.