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October 15, 2001
Homework Helpers to the Rescue
By Roxanne Schneider
Having trouble calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle? Need a practice test to prep for tomorrow's geography quiz? Follow us. We'll lead you to some of the best online destinations for homework help.
Anyone who's tried to answer a homework question or find a quick resource for a student knows how tangled and frustrating the Web can be, with its dizzying array of sites for just about any kind of in- or after-school task. Offerings range from real-time individual tutoring help to full-scale portals that deliver quizzes, research links, expert advice, and more. And they're not just for kids. Teachers and parents will also find rich resources to channel their students' after-school energy or to help with those hard math problems.
Most of the basic help resources here are free, while some sites charge a fee for access to their specialized libraries and tools. Sites also vary in the kinds of help they offer, so we've organized them according to type. Some supply live tutors, others a question and answer forum, and still others charge a fee for short online lessons designed to supplement curriculum areas. There are even a few that offer all these tools and more. For details and features of individual sites, see the charts "How the Homework Helpers Compare" and "The Q&A Quick Guide."
To help you manage your choices, we quizzed live tutors, plugged in math problems, probed subject-area links, and mined self-testing resources to give you a taste of what's out there and what kind of services you can expect. We focused on the quality of content, reliability of information, ease of use-and, of course, what happens when you just need a quick answer to a homework problem.
"Live" Tutoring Help
If you need immediate, one-on-one help and are willing to pay for it, a tutoring Web site may be what you're looking for. There are many such sites available, including QuikkTUTOR.com, Sylvan.net, and TutorCafe.com. Given the scope of this review, we weren't able to look at all of them. We ultimately chose Tutor.com because it's more prolific than most, thanks to services provided through bigchalk and Encarta, among other partners.
At Tutor.com, students can log onto a message board where the site's hand-selected tutors use whiteboard, chat, and even file-sharing features to give brief, targeted lessons in English, math, and science. Most tutors are certified teachers and graduate students who make themselves available during specific hours and come prepared to answer questions. Tutor.com, as with many other live tutoring services, performs security and background checks on all its tutors to insure student safety. Visitors can also read user evaluations and bios of tutors before choosing one for help.
Using my son's fifth-grade science homework assignment, I asked a tutor, "What's the difference between the xylem and phloem in a plant's stem?" It took the tutor a bit of time to find the information in her reference book (ten minutes), and although she wasn't very specific about what was being transported and why, she was able to distinguish that the xylem brought fluids up the stem, and the phloem brought fluids down. She would not share the source of her information, nor answer any questions unrelated to science. The entire interaction took less than 15 minutes and was adequate for our science homework purposes.
Tutor.com's service is free for the first 15 minutes, Sunday-Thursday, 4 p.m. to midnight, Eastern time. After that, the cost ranges from $20-$59 per hour, depending on the tutor's education and experience. A few things to consider, though, before you buy tutoring services at Tutor.com or any of the sites mentioned here: make sure you can sample tutoring services; find out if the company screens its tutors; and check if their rates vary depending on the tutor you select.
Q&A
Many homework help sites let students submit a homework question using an automated form, and then the site's staff, registered volunteers, or experts reply directly via e-mail. Other sites use a message board format, where, after selecting a subject area, kids can read questions and answers that others have posted, or they can post their own. However, students looking for quick answers to homework problems generally won't get them within 15 minutes. Response time ranges from ten minutes to three days. An excellent feature of many of these sites is that they let users search by topic area to find a similar question already answered by visitors or staff. The larger portals like bigchalk and About.com list hundreds of subject-area specialists, so users can sift through ratings and bios to find the best person to answer a question.
To test their mettle, I queried experts, volunteers, and site staff at ten sites that offer this free service. See "The Q&A Quick Guide" for the questions asked and the speed and accuracy of answers. For users without a minute to spare, B.J. Pinchbeck, a 14-year-old whiz kid whose site is hosted by Discovery School, provided the quickest response. Within ten minutes, I received three Web addresses, each illustrating in simple terms and with diagrams the relationship between the moon and tides. Another quick response came from Dr. Universe, accessed via bigchalk, who didn't have time to answer my request for a concrete example of entropy but immediately referred me to Askme.com, where, within minutes, I found a real-life example of entropy in the bulletin board archives.
Online Review
Lessons and Testing
These mostly fee-based sites offer sequential, focused instruction and assessment on commonly taught and tested middle and high school curriculum areas. The two services we reviewed are useful for home schools or as supplemental materials students can use to brush up on common curriculum areas.
StudentAcademy's pricing ranges from $12.95 per month for an unlimited subject-area subscription to $99.95 per year for year-round access to lessons, interactive quizzes, illustrative animations, and self-tests in math and science (single subject-area subscriptions are also available). Sample tutorials, which we encourage you to try before you buy, include math problem tasks, such as calculating the power exerted by a man lifting a 250-kg barbell to the height of two meters in 0.8 seconds. Colorful diagrams accompany these tutorials, and multiple-choice, true/false, and matching quizzes assess student progress. At Homeworkhelp.com, students will find lessons in math, social studies, English, and science, as well as specialized activities that encourage interaction, like ancient Gondwanaland, where kids put a continent puzzle together, or Rat Lab, where they build biological systems.
Though not as comprehensive as the above subscription sites, free lesson resource links and collections are available at most sites included in our review and are organized according to subject area and grade. For example, browsing the geography area of About.com's homework help is well worth your time, as are the math and reading tests at bigchalk.
Education Networks
These robust sites target just about every grade level and subject area and include everything resource-seeking students-and teachers-might need, or can at least direct you to the best links to get there. Encarta, DiscoverySchool, AOL@SCHOOL, bigchalk, Lightspan, and About.com's free homework help areas are among the largest, offering Q&A with visitors and experts, lessons, quick quizzes, links to tutoring sites, and reference materials. Most are helpfully organized so that students, teachers, and parents can find age-appropriate help. Unique features include DiscoverySchool's handy schedule of educational TV programs for videotaping, clip art for computer projects, and science fair ideas. Lightspan's strength is its excellent lessons, projects, and printable worksheets for teachers-not students. AOL links to CNNfyi, Time For Kids, The New York Times Learning Network, and other reliable current-events sites.
Finding what you're looking for can be difficult at these large sites, and students might wander aimlessly, reading all of the enticing headlines and come-ons. It's easy to get lured into voting on the poll of the week, or reading what happened on this day in history, and then forget what you wanted to look for. To help kids avoid the distractions, have them look for the "site map" button that lists everything at their fingertips. Tell them to go immediately to user-specific headings, such as "Students" or "Teachers," and use the search engines to get to their subject.
These networks also offer subscription-based tools and resources that give students access to libraries with research articles, high-quality learning activities, and sophisticated quizzes and assessments. For example, Encarta's Electric Library and bigchalk's Library are fee-based researching resources. Achieve Now Online and eduTest are part of Lightspan's subscription-based options, offering assessment tests, searchable standards (for any state), and lots of learning activities in language arts and math. Given the scope of this review, we weren't able to include all these fee-based features in our evaluation. However, many of these services can be sampled for free simply by registering.
Roxanne Schneider is a school technology consultant for Sun Associates. She lives in Amherst, Mass.
Editor's note: T&L's staff and editors evaluate only those products we can endorse for educational use. Web site reviews are based on content and tools that are available and accurate at the date of publication.
We'd like to thank Apple Computer and Gateway for loaning us the equipment to perform in-house evaluations.
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