Should Kids Get Homework?
Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.
Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful. (Getty Images)
How much homework students should get has long been a source of debate among parents and educators. In recent years, some districts have even implemented no-homework policies, as students juggle sports, music and other activities after school.
Parents of elementary school students, in particular, have argued that after-school hours should be spent with family or playing outside rather than completing assignments. And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students.
But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When done well, it can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills. The key to effective homework, they say, is keeping assignments related to classroom learning, and tailoring the amount by age: Many experts suggest no homework for kindergartners, and little to none in first and second grade.
Value of Homework
Homework provides a chance to solidify what is being taught in the classroom that day, week or unit. Practice matters, says Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University 's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.
"There really is no other domain of human ability where anybody would say you don't need to practice," she adds. "We have children practicing piano and we have children going to sports practice several days a week after school. You name the domain of ability and practice is in there."
Homework is also the place where schools and families most frequently intersect.
"The children are bringing things from the school into the home," says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California—Berkeley and the author of "The End of American Childhood." "Before the pandemic, (homework) was the only real sense that parents had to what was going on in schools."
Harris Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework," examined more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that — when designed properly — homework can lead to greater student success. Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary.
"Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing should be appropriate for their developmental level," he says. "For teachers, it's a balancing act. Doing away with homework completely is not in the best interest of children and families. But overburdening families with homework is also not in the child's or a family's best interest."
Negative Homework Assignments
Not all homework for elementary students involves completing a worksheet. Assignments can be fun, says Cooper, like having students visit educational locations, keep statistics on their favorite sports teams, read for pleasure or even help their parents grocery shop. The point is to show students that activities done outside of school can relate to subjects learned in the classroom.
But assignments that are just busy work, that force students to learn new concepts at home, or that are overly time-consuming can be counterproductive, experts say.
Homework that's just busy work.
Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful, experts say. Assignments that look more like busy work – projects or worksheets that don't require teacher feedback and aren't related to topics learned in the classroom – can be frustrating for students and create burdens for families.
"The mental health piece has definitely played a role here over the last couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the last thing we want to do is frustrate students with busy work or homework that makes no sense," says Dave Steckler, principal of Red Trail Elementary School in Mandan, North Dakota.
Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.
With the pressure to cover all topics on standardized tests and limited time during the school day, some teachers assign homework that has not yet been taught in the classroom.
Not only does this create stress, but it also causes equity challenges. Some parents speak languages other than English or work several jobs, and they aren't able to help teach their children new concepts.
" It just becomes agony for both parents and the kids to get through this worksheet, and the goal becomes getting to the bottom of (the) worksheet with answers filled in without any understanding of what any of it matters for," says professor Susan R. Goldman, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois—Chicago .
Homework that's overly time-consuming.
The standard homework guideline recommended by the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association is the "10-minute rule" – 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level. A fourth grader, for instance, would receive a total of 40 minutes of homework per night.
But this does not always happen, especially since not every student learns the same. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy found that primary school children actually received three times the recommended amount of homework — and that family stress increased along with the homework load.
Young children can only remain attentive for short periods, so large amounts of homework, especially lengthy projects, can negatively affect students' views on school. Some individual long-term projects – like having to build a replica city, for example – typically become an assignment for parents rather than students, Fass says.
"It's one thing to assign a project like that in which several kids are working on it together," she adds. "In (that) case, the kids do normally work on it. It's another to send it home to the families, where it becomes a burden and doesn't really accomplish very much."
Private vs. Public Schools
Do private schools assign more homework than public schools? There's little research on the issue, but experts say private school parents may be more accepting of homework, seeing it as a sign of academic rigor.
Of course, not all private schools are the same – some focus on college preparation and traditional academics, while others stress alternative approaches to education.
"I think in the academically oriented private schools, there's more support for homework from parents," says Gerald K. LeTendre, chair of educational administration at Pennsylvania State University—University Park . "I don't know if there's any research to show there's more homework, but it's less of a contentious issue."
How to Address Homework Overload
First, assess if the workload takes as long as it appears. Sometimes children may start working on a homework assignment, wander away and come back later, Cooper says.
"Parents don't see it, but they know that their child has started doing their homework four hours ago and still not done it," he adds. "They don't see that there are those four hours where their child was doing lots of other things. So the homework assignment itself actually is not four hours long. It's the way the child is approaching it."
But if homework is becoming stressful or workload is excessive, experts suggest parents first approach the teacher, followed by a school administrator.
"Many times, we can solve a lot of issues by having conversations," Steckler says, including by "sitting down, talking about the amount of homework, and what's appropriate and not appropriate."
Study Tips for High School Students
Tags: K-12 education , students , elementary school , children
Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?
A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher
“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography
Do your homework.
If only it were that simple.
Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.
“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.
She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.
BU Today sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.
BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.
Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.
We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.
That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.
You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?
Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.
What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?
The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.
Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?
Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.
Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.
The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.
What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?
My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.
Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?
Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.
I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.
The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.
Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.
It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.
Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.
Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.
Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.
Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?
Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.
Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”
Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.
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Senior Contributing Editor
Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile
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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?
Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.
when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep
same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.
Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.
I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids
The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????
I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic
This is not at all what the article is talking about.
This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.
we have the same name
so they have the same name what of it?
lol you tell her
totally agree
What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.
Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.
More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.
You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.
I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^
i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.
I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.
Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much
I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.
homework isn’t that bad
Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is
i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!
i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers
why just why
they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.
Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.
So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.
THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?
Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?
Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.
But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!
why the hell?
you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it
This is more of a political rant than it is about homework
I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.
The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight
Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.
not true it just causes kids to stress
Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.
homework does help
here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded
This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.
I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.
Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.
I disagree.
Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.
Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.
As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)
I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!
Homeowkr is god for stusenrs
I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in
As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.
Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.
Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.
Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.
As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.
I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.
oof i feel bad good luck!
thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks
thx for the article guys.
Homework is good
I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.
I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.
It was published FEb 19, 2019.
Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.
i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids
This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.
There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.
What lala land do these teachers live in?
Homework gives noting to the kid
Homework is Bad
homework is bad.
why do kids even have homework?
Comments are closed.
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Do Homework Assignments Help or Hinder Student Learning?
The Positives and Negatives of Assigning Homework
I am a former teacher turned family therapist . Middle school and high school students often tell me they feel overloaded with homework and have a high anxiety level because of it. Parents , for their part, often share that there is conflict between them and their children about getting homework done.
When I was teaching, I struggled with whether assigning homework to my students was beneficial to them. Over the 10 years I spent as an educator, I found there to be both positive and negative implications of assigning homework.
First, some potential positives:
- It creates opportunities for students to interact with their parents.
- It can promote student independence and self-discipline.
- It can provide a connection between what is learned in school and the outside world.
- It can provide opportunities for parents to be engaged with their child’s learning progress.
- It can reinforce skills and concepts taught in class.
Now, some potential negatives:
- It can promote arguments between parents and children, creating chaos in the family. Such conflicts often are at the core of the work I do with families.
- It does not guarantee that student learning gains will be higher.
- It can force students to choose between extracurricular activities and homework, as often there is insufficient time for both. Colleges and universities often seek students who have a high level of involvement in extracurricular activities.
- Many homework assignments assume that students have access to technology outside of school, which isn’t always the case.
- Students in middle school and high school tend to have several different classes a day. Teachers don’t always take into consideration that students may be receiving homework assignments for multiple or even all classes. As a result, many students end up loaded down with hours of homework, which may create an imbalance between academics and extracurricular and family activities. To try to fit everything in, students may feel compelled to stay up late and lose valuable sleep.
How Can We Find Balance?
Recognizing the potential pitfalls with assigning homework doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its place. During the years I spent teaching in the classroom, I found it to be crucial that any homework assigned be engaging and relevant to students’ lives.
Important questions to be asked when assigning homework include, “What are the expected outcomes of assigning homework?” and, “What is it about those assigned tasks that make doing them outside of school important?”
How Can We Tell If Homework Is Helping?
It can be difficult for parents to know whether homework assigned to their children will have a positive impact on their learning. Parents can determine the value of homework assignments by looking for the characteristics of meta-cognitive learning, student inquiry about what they are learning, and assignments that promote literacy.
I found that homework assignments that require meta-cognitive learning, such as meta-cognitive journals, can be especially relevant and useful for students. Teaching students to be meta-cognitive in their learning may be beneficial to their lives in all areas. When students implement meta-cognition, they are assessing their own thinking and learning.
Parents can determine the value of homework assignments by looking for the characteristics of meta-cognitive learning, student inquiry about what they are learning, and assignments that promote literacy.
For example, when students solve a mathematical problem, the cognition portion is solving the problem. The meta-cognitive part is awareness of the strategies used to solve the problem. Meta-cognitive learning can be defined simply as “thinking about thinking.” It is developing an awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses. It is evaluating, planning, and observing the process. When students use meta-cognitive learning, they become aware of the strategies used in their learning and can generalize those strategies into different contexts.
Another beneficial homework assignment is one that encourages students to question their learning. When students ask questions about what they are learning, they may become motivated researchers. Teaching students when and how to ask questions is vital to learning. While teaching, it was important to me that students left my classroom with a desire to learn more and were equipped with the skills to find credible information.
Finally, I cannot overstate the importance of students developing a love of reading. As an educator, I taught many struggling readers. I found that if students cannot read fluently or comprehend text at their grade level, all academic areas are typically affected. I believe students should be able to choose what they read at home. The more they want to read, the more they will read, and the better their literacy skills will become. Many of the struggling readers I worked with simply had not “practiced” reading enough to be reading at their grade level.
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I must be the only parent who sort of enjoys helping the kids with their homework. When I do that shows me what we need to be working on more at home and just gives me time to look at how my kids are delving into the learning process, what they enjoy and what they don’t. They will not always ask you for help- I have resolved to enjoy it while I can!
It should be something that supplements the things that the teachers are doing in the classroom but there are times that I swear my girls look at the homework like they have never seen the work before in their lives.This should not be used a s a primary tool for teaching the material,m just to reinforce a lesson that has already been taught. I don’t think that it should ever be used as a way to introduce new material for the kids. That only confuses and frustrates them.
busywork and it drives me crazy takes away a lot of the time that we could all be spending together as a family
A large part of it depends on how the teacher is using it and then what kind of home support there is for the student outside of the classroom. I think that if the teachers plan for it thoughtfully with a good purpose, and make it so that parents know exactly what it is trying to teach then I do not have a problem with it. But it should not be the morale bummer that many kids find it to be, when they feel like it is just more of the same old stuff that they will never understand. That brings them down in a terrible way.
This will sound pretty petty but my kids are involved in so many other activities outside of school that it can be difficult to add homework on top of all of their other commitments and responsibilities.
I always felt that my children learned valuable life skills in their extra curricular activities and that those activities were as important to their development as school. When they had homework that appeared to be assigned simply for the sake of assigning homework, I always thought the teacher lacked the vision her/his students needed in their teachers. I agree that homework assignments that apply learned knowledge to the student’s life was most valuable, and I wonder why more teachers don’t create such assignments. My own math skills would have been greatly improved by assignments such as doubling or halving my favorite cookie recipe or figuring out how much carpet I would need to buy to redecorate my room. If homework is going to me assigned, it should enhance the student’s learning, not just take up time.
Personally I think that it helps on a few fronts IT reinforces what they have been learning in class and also gives me the chance to see the level of work that they are doing in school. I think that if too much is not given then it can be a really good thing
I will always hate homework. I want there to be some down time for me too and it feels like homework is what makes this impossible.
Thank goodness we have never had any of those horrific homework nights that I know are common for so many families. So I can’t say for sure whether it is good or bad, but I always feel like it is a good review and a way to study for their tests.
One thing that I think that schools should consider is to have the teachers work on teams, so that there is more awareness of what the kids are doing in each class and who may be assigning homework on any given night. I know that kids have to learn to juggle the assignments but I think that if there was more communication among the teachers then you wouldn’t have as many of those nights where they can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
It’s such a chore and a burden I think that parents and students alike would all have a much more positive view of school of there wasn’t so much homework involved.
There at least has to be some reasoning behind why teachers continue to do this or otherwise I don’t think that they would. I mean this is taking up a lot of their time too, going back and checking for who did it and grading it and all. Teachers are doing this so that they can see what they need to do better too, so it is not just some exercise in futility for the students. The classroom educators should be able to take away a lot from this too.
Staying up with your child past midnight to get homework done is never cool.
Well, I think homework is somewhat necessary. In my opinion, the ability to handle stress and extra-curricular activities may be beneficial for students in the long run.
It depends upon level of complexity. Just like solution manuals, assignment help service often help student to break initial barrier. Keep learning like a pro. If you want assistance, we love to provide suitable help
The distinction between “Assignment Help” and “Assignment Writing Service” lies within the scope of the paper. In their shorter type, they’re normally known as as “Assignment Help” whereby the author is meant to require a stand purpose, develop a thesis and support the thesis victimisation the researches done by others. It should be noted that the non-public experiences don’t count as support for the thesis statement. the author should think about the educational work of others for supporting the thesis statement.
As assignments play a crucial role in student’s life. So, There should be a proper balance between the assignment and the extra-curricular activities, so that it can increase the efficiency of the student. For maintaining the balance you can also visit essaycorp.com/geometry-assignment-help.php for the assignment help.
Homework is definitely helping the students to learn the things properly & also enhance their skill on that topic. So I always care these things for my child. I helped them to do homework perfectly but when something I don’t have any knowledge on this then I looked forward online assignment helper like Courseworktutors Inc provider those helps the students to complete their tasks. Really it is very much effective.
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Homework challenges and strategies
By Amanda Morin
At a glance
Kids can struggle with homework for lots of reasons.
Homework challenges include things like rushing through assignments and trouble with time management.
Once you understand a homework challenge, it’s easier to find solutions.
Most kids struggle with homework from time to time. But some kids struggle more than others. Understanding the challenges kids face can help you defuse homework battles before they start.
Here are some common homework challenges, along with homework strategies and tips to help.
The challenge: Rushing through homework
All kids rush through homework sometimes. They may want to get it over with so they can do something more fun. But for some kids, rushing can be an ongoing challenge.
From finding the work boring to simply being fatigued after a long day at school, there are many reasons kids may rush through homework . And that can lead to messy or incorrect homework. Sometimes, rushing can even cause kids to miss parts of assignments.
Explore topics selected by our experts
How you can help: Some kids rush because they don’t like doing repetitive work. For these kids, you may want to try mixing things up.
Teacher tip: Switch the order of homework .
Try having kids approach the material in a different way. If vocabulary words are a challenge, try using them in everyday conversation. You can also use household items to illustrate math problems in a fun way.
There are other ways to help, too. Get tips for helping grade-schoolers , middle-schoolers , or high-schoolers slow down on assignments.
The challenge: Taking notes
Note-taking isn’t an easy skill for kids to master. Some kids struggle with writing and organization . For others, it may be hard to read text and take notes at the same time.
How you can help: There are several note-taking apps kids can use. It can also help to teach note-taking strategies . For example, there are specific note-taking techniques for kids with slow processing speed .
Watch this video to see three powerful note-taking strategies in action.
The challenge: Managing time and staying organized
Some kids struggle with keeping track of or budgeting their time. They may also struggle to break down a big project into smaller chunks , or make a plan for getting all their schoolwork done.
How you can help: There are a couple of simple ways you can help with organization and time management.
Create a homework schedule. A homework schedule can help kids set a specific time and place for studying. Find a time of day when they concentrate best and when you’re available to help. Choose a time when neither of you are in a hurry to get somewhere else. Also think about creating a designated homework space or homework station . Once you have a set time and place, show kids how to “chunk” homework with breaks in between.
Use checklists. There’s something very rewarding about crossing a task off a checklist. Kids can learn how good that feels by using a checklist to keep track of schoolwork. All they need is a small pad of paper to list daily assignments on. As each one is completed, they can cross it off the list.
How to Color-Code School Supplies
Create a color-coding system . Using colored dot stickers, highlighters, and colored folders and notebooks is a great (and inexpensive) way to keep organized.
Use a homework timer. A timer can help keep homework on track and give kids a better sense of time. There are many types of timers to choose from. For instance, if a child is distracted by sounds, a ticking kitchen timer may not be the ideal choice. Instead, try an hourglass timer or one that vibrates. There are also homework timer apps you can program for each subject. (Don’t forget that your phone probably has a built-in timer, too.)
The challenge: Studying effectively
Developing good study skills can be a challenge. Most kids need to be taught how to study effectively, or they may spin their wheels without getting much done.
How you can help: Kids need to find out what works best for them based on how they learn . You can start early by working on good study habits in grade school .
As kids gets older, learning study strategies can reduce stress about school and improve grades. Keep in mind that in middle school and high school, kids have to study more. You’ll have to decide how much (or how little) to supervise or be involved with homework .
Explore more tips for helping teens develop good study habits .
The challenge: Recalling information
Some kids study for hours but still have trouble retaining information. When it comes time for the test, it may seem like they haven’t done their homework.
These challenges can be caused by trouble with something called working memory . But it can also be an issue of inattention — they aren’t able to tune out the unimportant stuff. Read an in-depth expert explanation about why some kids can’t remember what they’ve studied .
How you can help: Make sure kids study in a medium that’s a good fit. For example, some kids have a hard time processing and understanding verbal or written information. They may be better at remembering visual information, like maps or graphs.
That’s why it can help to present information in a way that engages multiple senses . Discover multisensory techniques to try at home. You can also explore working memory boosters and “muscle memory” exercises .
The challenge: Learning independently
It’s important for kids to know how to ask for help when they need it. But they also need to learn how to become independent learners. Eventually, kids will have to do homework without your help.
How you can help: Help kids set realistic goals and encourage “thinking out loud.” Try using a homework contract . And learn more ways to help grade-schoolers and tweens and teens be more independent learners.
Helping kids work through homework challenges can be tricky. But in the end, it helps them be more independent and confident students.
Sometimes, though, homework challenges don’t go away, despite your best efforts. In this case, consider asking for help. Look for signs kids may have too much homework , and learn how to talk with teachers about concerns . You can also learn about different tutoring options .
Key takeaways
Eventually, kids have to learn how to do homework on their own.
Try tailoring homework strategies to kids’ specific challenges and strengths.
If homework continues to be a challenge, look for signs there's too much or talk with the teacher.
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8 tips to help grade-schoolers slow down on homework
About the author.
Amanda Morin is the author of “The Everything Parent’s Guide to Special Education” and the former director of thought leadership at Understood. As an expert and writer, she helped build Understood from its earliest days.
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Jim Rein, MA has lectured on postsecondary options and summer programs for kids and young adults with learning and thinking differences.
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School Life Balance , Tips for Online Students
The Pros and Cons of Homework
Homework is a word that most students dread hearing. After hours upon hours of sitting in class , the last thing we want is more schoolwork over our precious weekends. While it’s known to be a staple of traditional schooling, homework has also become a rather divise topic. Some feel as though homework is a necessary part of school, while others believe that the time could be better invested. Should students have homework? Have a closer look into the arguments on both sides to decide for yourself.
Photo by energepic.com from Pexels
Why should students have homework, 1. homework encourages practice.
Many people believe that one of the positive effects of homework is that it encourages the discipline of practice. While it may be time consuming and boring compared to other activities, repetition is needed to get better at skills. Homework helps make concepts more clear, and gives students more opportunities when starting their career .
2. Homework Gets Parents Involved
Homework can be something that gets parents involved in their children’s lives if the environment is a healthy one. A parent helping their child with homework makes them take part in their academic success, and allows for the parent to keep up with what the child is doing in school. It can also be a chance to connect together.
3. Homework Teaches Time Management
Homework is much more than just completing the assigned tasks. Homework can develop time management skills , forcing students to plan their time and make sure that all of their homework assignments are done on time. By learning to manage their time, students also practice their problem-solving skills and independent thinking. One of the positive effects of homework is that it forces decision making and compromises to be made.
4. Homework Opens A Bridge Of Communication
Homework creates a connection between the student, the teacher, the school, and the parents. It allows everyone to get to know each other better, and parents can see where their children are struggling. In the same sense, parents can also see where their children are excelling. Homework in turn can allow for a better, more targeted educational plan for the student.
5. Homework Allows For More Learning Time
Homework allows for more time to complete the learning process. School hours are not always enough time for students to really understand core concepts, and homework can counter the effects of time shortages, benefiting students in the long run, even if they can’t see it in the moment.
6. Homework Reduces Screen Time
Many students in North America spend far too many hours watching TV. If they weren’t in school, these numbers would likely increase even more. Although homework is usually undesired, it encourages better study habits and discourages spending time in front of the TV. Homework can be seen as another extracurricular activity, and many families already invest a lot of time and money in different clubs and lessons to fill up their children’s extra time. Just like extracurricular activities, homework can be fit into one’s schedule.
The Other Side: Why Homework Is Bad
1. homework encourages a sedentary lifestyle.
Should students have homework? Well, that depends on where you stand. There are arguments both for the advantages and the disadvantages of homework.
While classroom time is important, playground time is just as important. If children are given too much homework, they won’t have enough playtime, which can impact their social development and learning. Studies have found that those who get more play get better grades in school , as it can help them pay closer attention in the classroom.
Children are already sitting long hours in the classroom, and homework assignments only add to these hours. Sedentary lifestyles can be dangerous and can cause health problems such as obesity. Homework takes away from time that could be spent investing in physical activity.
2. Homework Isn’t Healthy In Every Home
While many people that think homes are a beneficial environment for children to learn, not all homes provide a healthy environment, and there may be very little investment from parents. Some parents do not provide any kind of support or homework help, and even if they would like to, due to personal barriers, they sometimes cannot. Homework can create friction between children and their parents, which is one of the reasons why homework is bad .
3. Homework Adds To An Already Full-Time Job
School is already a full-time job for students, as they generally spend over 6 hours each day in class. Students also often have extracurricular activities such as sports, music, or art that are just as important as their traditional courses. Adding on extra hours to all of these demands is a lot for children to manage, and prevents students from having extra time to themselves for a variety of creative endeavors. Homework prevents self discovery and having the time to learn new skills outside of the school system. This is one of the main disadvantages of homework.
4. Homework Has Not Been Proven To Provide Results
Endless surveys have found that homework creates a negative attitude towards school, and homework has not been found to be linked to a higher level of academic success.
The positive effects of homework have not been backed up enough. While homework may help some students improve in specific subjects, if they have outside help there is no real proof that homework makes for improvements.
It can be a challenge to really enforce the completion of homework, and students can still get decent grades without doing their homework. Extra school time does not necessarily mean better grades — quality must always come before quantity.
Accurate practice when it comes to homework simply isn’t reliable. Homework could even cause opposite effects if misunderstood, especially since the reliance is placed on the student and their parents — one of the major reasons as to why homework is bad. Many students would rather cheat in class to avoid doing their homework at home, and children often just copy off of each other or from what they read on the internet.
5. Homework Assignments Are Overdone
The general agreement is that students should not be given more than 10 minutes a day per grade level. What this means is that a first grader should be given a maximum of 10 minutes of homework, while a second grader receives 20 minutes, etc. Many students are given a lot more homework than the recommended amount, however.
On average, college students spend as much as 3 hours per night on homework . By giving too much homework, it can increase stress levels and lead to burn out. This in turn provides an opposite effect when it comes to academic success.
The pros and cons of homework are both valid, and it seems as though the question of ‘‘should students have homework?’ is not a simple, straightforward one. Parents and teachers often are found to be clashing heads, while the student is left in the middle without much say.
It’s important to understand all the advantages and disadvantages of homework, taking both perspectives into conversation to find a common ground. At the end of the day, everyone’s goal is the success of the student.
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Homework – Top 3 Pros and Cons
Pro/Con Arguments | Discussion Questions | Take Action | Sources | More Debates
From dioramas to book reports, from algebraic word problems to research projects, whether students should be given homework, as well as the type and amount of homework, has been debated for over a century. [ 1 ]
While we are unsure who invented homework, we do know that the word “homework” dates back to ancient Rome. Pliny the Younger asked his followers to practice their speeches at home. Memorization exercises as homework continued through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment by monks and other scholars. [ 45 ]
In the 19th century, German students of the Volksschulen or “People’s Schools” were given assignments to complete outside of the school day. This concept of homework quickly spread across Europe and was brought to the United States by Horace Mann , who encountered the idea in Prussia. [ 45 ]
In the early 1900s, progressive education theorists, championed by the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal , decried homework’s negative impact on children’s physical and mental health, leading California to ban homework for students under 15 from 1901 until 1917. In the 1930s, homework was portrayed as child labor, which was newly illegal, but the prevailing argument was that kids needed time to do household chores. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 45 ] [ 46 ]
Public opinion swayed again in favor of homework in the 1950s due to concerns about keeping up with the Soviet Union’s technological advances during the Cold War . And, in 1986, the US government included homework as an educational quality boosting tool. [ 3 ] [ 45 ]
A 2014 study found kindergarteners to fifth graders averaged 2.9 hours of homework per week, sixth to eighth graders 3.2 hours per teacher, and ninth to twelfth graders 3.5 hours per teacher. A 2014-2019 study found that teens spent about an hour a day on homework. [ 4 ] [ 44 ]
Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the very idea of homework as students were schooling remotely and many were doing all school work from home. Washington Post journalist Valerie Strauss asked, “Does homework work when kids are learning all day at home?” While students were mostly back in school buildings in fall 2021, the question remains of how effective homework is as an educational tool. [ 47 ]
Is Homework Beneficial?
Pro 1 Homework improves student achievement. Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicated that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” [ 6 ] Students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework on both standardized tests and grades. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take-home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school. [ 10 ] Read More
Pro 2 Homework helps to reinforce classroom learning, while developing good study habits and life skills. Students typically retain only 50% of the information teachers provide in class, and they need to apply that information in order to truly learn it. Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer, co-founders of Teachers Who Tutor NYC, explained, “at-home assignments help students learn the material taught in class. Students require independent practice to internalize new concepts… [And] these assignments can provide valuable data for teachers about how well students understand the curriculum.” [ 11 ] [ 49 ] Elementary school students who were taught “strategies to organize and complete homework,” such as prioritizing homework activities, collecting study materials, note-taking, and following directions, showed increased grades and more positive comments on report cards. [ 17 ] Research by the City University of New York noted that “students who engage in self-regulatory processes while completing homework,” such as goal-setting, time management, and remaining focused, “are generally more motivated and are higher achievers than those who do not use these processes.” [ 18 ] Homework also helps students develop key skills that they’ll use throughout their lives: accountability, autonomy, discipline, time management, self-direction, critical thinking, and independent problem-solving. Freireich and Platzer noted that “homework helps students acquire the skills needed to plan, organize, and complete their work.” [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 49 ] Read More
Pro 3 Homework allows parents to be involved with children’s learning. Thanks to take-home assignments, parents are able to track what their children are learning at school as well as their academic strengths and weaknesses. [ 12 ] Data from a nationwide sample of elementary school students show that parental involvement in homework can improve class performance, especially among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students. [ 20 ] Research from Johns Hopkins University found that an interactive homework process known as TIPS (Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork) improves student achievement: “Students in the TIPS group earned significantly higher report card grades after 18 weeks (1 TIPS assignment per week) than did non-TIPS students.” [ 21 ] Homework can also help clue parents in to the existence of any learning disabilities their children may have, allowing them to get help and adjust learning strategies as needed. Duke University Professor Harris Cooper noted, “Two parents once told me they refused to believe their child had a learning disability until homework revealed it to them.” [ 12 ] Read More
Con 1 Too much homework can be harmful. A poll of California high school students found that 59% thought they had too much homework. 82% of respondents said that they were “often or always stressed by schoolwork.” High-achieving high school students said too much homework leads to sleep deprivation and other health problems such as headaches, exhaustion, weight loss, and stomach problems. [ 24 ] [ 28 ] [ 29 ] Alfie Kohn, an education and parenting expert, said, “Kids should have a chance to just be kids… it’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.” [ 27 ] Emmy Kang, a mental health counselor, explained, “More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies.” [ 48 ] Excessive homework can also lead to cheating: 90% of middle school students and 67% of high school students admit to copying someone else’s homework, and 43% of college students engaged in “unauthorized collaboration” on out-of-class assignments. Even parents take shortcuts on homework: 43% of those surveyed admitted to having completed a child’s assignment for them. [ 30 ] [ 31 ] [ 32 ] Read More
Con 2 Homework exacerbates the digital divide or homework gap. Kiara Taylor, financial expert, defined the digital divide as “the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology and those that don’t. Though the term now encompasses the technical and financial ability to utilize available technology—along with access (or a lack of access) to the Internet—the gap it refers to is constantly shifting with the development of technology.” For students, this is often called the homework gap. [ 50 ] [ 51 ] 30% (about 15 to 16 million) public school students either did not have an adequate internet connection or an appropriate device, or both, for distance learning. Completing homework for these students is more complicated (having to find a safe place with an internet connection, or borrowing a laptop, for example) or impossible. [ 51 ] A Hispanic Heritage Foundation study found that 96.5% of students across the country needed to use the internet for homework, and nearly half reported they were sometimes unable to complete their homework due to lack of access to the internet or a computer, which often resulted in lower grades. [ 37 ] [ 38 ] One study concluded that homework increases social inequality because it “potentially serves as a mechanism to further advantage those students who already experience some privilege in the school system while further disadvantaging those who may already be in a marginalized position.” [ 39 ] Read More
Con 3 Homework does not help younger students, and may not help high school students. We’ve known for a while that homework does not help elementary students. A 2006 study found that “homework had no association with achievement gains” when measured by standardized tests results or grades. [ 7 ] Fourth grade students who did no homework got roughly the same score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam as those who did 30 minutes of homework a night. Students who did 45 minutes or more of homework a night actually did worse. [ 41 ] Temple University professor Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek said that homework is not the most effective tool for young learners to apply new information: “They’re learning way more important skills when they’re not doing their homework.” [ 42 ] In fact, homework may not be helpful at the high school level either. Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, stated, “I interviewed high school teachers who completely stopped giving homework and there was no downside, it was all upside.” He explains, “just because the same kids who get more homework do a little better on tests, doesn’t mean the homework made that happen.” [ 52 ] Read More
Discussion Questions
1. Is homework beneficial? Consider the study data, your personal experience, and other types of information. Explain your answer(s).
2. If homework were banned, what other educational strategies would help students learn classroom material? Explain your answer(s).
3. How has homework been helpful to you personally? How has homework been unhelpful to you personally? Make carefully considered lists for both sides.
Take Action
1. Examine an argument in favor of quality homework assignments from Janine Bempechat.
2. Explore Oxford Learning’s infographic on the effects of homework on students.
3. Consider Joseph Lathan’s argument that homework promotes inequality .
4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.
5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives .
More School Debate Topics
Should K-12 Students Dissect Animals in Science Classrooms? – Proponents say dissecting real animals is a better learning experience. Opponents say the practice is bad for the environment.
Should Students Have to Wear School Uniforms? – Proponents say uniforms may increase student safety. Opponents say uniforms restrict expression.
Should Corporal Punishment Be Used in K-12 Schools? – Proponents say corporal punishment is an appropriate discipline. Opponents say it inflicts long-lasting physical and mental harm on students.
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More From Forbes
Why homework doesn't seem to boost learning--and how it could.
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Some schools are eliminating homework, citing research showing it doesn’t do much to boost achievement. But maybe teachers just need to assign a different kind of homework.
In 2016, a second-grade teacher in Texas delighted her students—and at least some of their parents—by announcing she would no longer assign homework. “Research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance,” she explained.
The following year, the superintendent of a Florida school district serving 42,000 students eliminated homework for all elementary students and replaced it with twenty minutes of nightly reading, saying she was basing her decision on “solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students.”
Many other elementary schools seem to have quietly adopted similar policies. Critics have objected that even if homework doesn’t increase grades or test scores, it has other benefits, like fostering good study habits and providing parents with a window into what kids are doing in school.
Those arguments have merit, but why doesn’t homework boost academic achievement? The research cited by educators just doesn’t seem to make sense. If a child wants to learn to play the violin, it’s obvious she needs to practice at home between lessons (at least, it’s obvious to an adult). And psychologists have identified a range of strategies that help students learn, many of which seem ideally suited for homework assignments.
For example, there’s something called “ retrieval practice ,” which means trying to recall information you’ve already learned. The optimal time to engage in retrieval practice is not immediately after you’ve acquired information but after you’ve forgotten it a bit—like, perhaps, after school. A homework assignment could require students to answer questions about what was covered in class that day without consulting their notes. Research has found that retrieval practice and similar learning strategies are far more powerful than simply rereading or reviewing material.
One possible explanation for the general lack of a boost from homework is that few teachers know about this research. And most have gotten little training in how and why to assign homework. These are things that schools of education and teacher-prep programs typically don’t teach . So it’s quite possible that much of the homework teachers assign just isn’t particularly effective for many students.
Even if teachers do manage to assign effective homework, it may not show up on the measures of achievement used by researchers—for example, standardized reading test scores. Those tests are designed to measure general reading comprehension skills, not to assess how much students have learned in specific classes. Good homework assignments might have helped a student learn a lot about, say, Ancient Egypt. But if the reading passages on a test cover topics like life in the Arctic or the habits of the dormouse, that student’s test score may well not reflect what she’s learned.
The research relied on by those who oppose homework has actually found it has a modest positive effect at the middle and high school levels—just not in elementary school. But for the most part, the studies haven’t looked at whether it matters what kind of homework is assigned or whether there are different effects for different demographic student groups. Focusing on those distinctions could be illuminating.
A study that looked specifically at math homework , for example, found it boosted achievement more in elementary school than in middle school—just the opposite of the findings on homework in general. And while one study found that parental help with homework generally doesn’t boost students’ achievement—and can even have a negative effect— another concluded that economically disadvantaged students whose parents help with homework improve their performance significantly.
That seems to run counter to another frequent objection to homework, which is that it privileges kids who are already advantaged. Well-educated parents are better able to provide help, the argument goes, and it’s easier for affluent parents to provide a quiet space for kids to work in—along with a computer and internet access . While those things may be true, not assigning homework—or assigning ineffective homework—can end up privileging advantaged students even more.
Students from less educated families are most in need of the boost that effective homework can provide, because they’re less likely to acquire academic knowledge and vocabulary at home. And homework can provide a way for lower-income parents—who often don’t have time to volunteer in class or participate in parents’ organizations—to forge connections to their children’s schools. Rather than giving up on homework because of social inequities, schools could help parents support homework in ways that don’t depend on their own knowledge—for example, by recruiting others to help, as some low-income demographic groups have been able to do . Schools could also provide quiet study areas at the end of the day, and teachers could assign homework that doesn’t rely on technology.
Another argument against homework is that it causes students to feel overburdened and stressed. While that may be true at schools serving affluent populations, students at low-performing ones often don’t get much homework at all—even in high school. One study found that lower-income ninth-graders “consistently described receiving minimal homework—perhaps one or two worksheets or textbook pages, the occasional project, and 30 minutes of reading per night.” And if they didn’t complete assignments, there were few consequences. I discovered this myself when trying to tutor students in writing at a high-poverty high school. After I expressed surprise that none of the kids I was working with had completed a brief writing assignment, a teacher told me, “Oh yeah—I should have told you. Our students don’t really do homework.”
If and when disadvantaged students get to college, their relative lack of study skills and good homework habits can present a serious handicap. After noticing that black and Hispanic students were failing her course in disproportionate numbers, a professor at the University of North Carolina decided to make some changes , including giving homework assignments that required students to quiz themselves without consulting their notes. Performance improved across the board, but especially for students of color and the disadvantaged. The gap between black and white students was cut in half, and the gaps between Hispanic and white students—along with that between first-generation college students and others—closed completely.
There’s no reason this kind of support should wait until students get to college. To be most effective—both in terms of instilling good study habits and building students’ knowledge—homework assignments that boost learning should start in elementary school.
Some argue that young children just need time to chill after a long day at school. But the “ten-minute rule”—recommended by homework researchers—would have first graders doing ten minutes of homework, second graders twenty minutes, and so on. That leaves plenty of time for chilling, and even brief assignments could have a significant impact if they were well-designed.
But a fundamental problem with homework at the elementary level has to do with the curriculum, which—partly because of standardized testing— has narrowed to reading and math. Social studies and science have been marginalized or eliminated, especially in schools where test scores are low. Students spend hours every week practicing supposed reading comprehension skills like “making inferences” or identifying “author’s purpose”—the kinds of skills that the tests try to measure—with little or no attention paid to content.
But as research has established, the most important component in reading comprehension is knowledge of the topic you’re reading about. Classroom time—or homework time—spent on illusory comprehension “skills” would be far better spent building knowledge of the very subjects schools have eliminated. Even if teachers try to take advantage of retrieval practice—say, by asking students to recall what they’ve learned that day about “making comparisons” or “sequence of events”—it won’t have much impact.
If we want to harness the potential power of homework—particularly for disadvantaged students—we’ll need to educate teachers about what kind of assignments actually work. But first, we’ll need to start teaching kids something substantive about the world, beginning as early as possible.
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Infographic: How Does Homework Actually Affect Students?
Homework is an important part of engaging students outside of the classroom.
It carries educational benefits for all age groups, including time management and organization. Homework also provides students with the ability to think beyond what is taught in class.
The not-so-good news is these benefits only occur when students are engaged and ready to learn. But, the more homework they get, the less they want to engage.
THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF HOMEWORK ON STUDENTS
Homework can affect students’ health, social life and grades. The hours logged in class, and the hours logged on schoolwork can lead to students feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated. Navigating the line between developing learning skills and feeling frustrated can be tricky.
Homework is an important part of being successful inside and outside of the classroom, but too much of it can actually have the opposite effect. Students who spend too much time on homework are not always able to meet other needs, like being physically and socially active. Ultimately, the amount of homework a student has can impact a lot more than his or her grades.
Find out how too much homework actually affects students.
How Does Homework Affect Students’ Health?
Homework can affect both students’ physical and mental health. According to a study by Stanford University, 56 per cent of students considered homework a primary source of stress. Too much homework can result in lack of sleep, headaches, exhaustion and weight loss. Excessive homework can also result in poor eating habits, with families choosing fast food as a faster alternative.
How Does Homework Affect Students’ Social Life?
Extracurricular activities and social time gives students a chance to refresh their minds and bodies. But students who have large amounts of homework have less time to spend with their families and friends. This can leave them feeling isolated and without a support system. For older students, balancing homework and part-time work makes it harder to balance school and other tasks. Without time to socialize and relax, students can become increasingly stressed, impacting life at school and at home.
How Does Homework Affect Students’ Grades?
After a full day of learning in class, students can become burnt out if they have too much homework. When this happens, the child may stop completing homework or rely on a parent to assist with homework. As a result, the benefits of homework are lost and grades can start to slip.
Too much homework can also result in less active learning, a type of learning that occurs in context and encourages participation. Active learning promotes the analysis and application of class content in real world settings. Homework does not always provide these opportunities, leading to boredom and a lack of problem-solving skills.
HOW CAN PARENTS HELP?
Being an active part of children’s homework routine is a major part of understanding feelings and of be able to provide the needed support. As parents, you can help your child have a stress-free homework experience. Sticking to a clear and organized homework routine helps children develop better homework habits as they get older. This routine also comes in handy when homework becomes more difficult and time-consuming.
Learn more about the current world of homework, and how you can help your child stay engaged.
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The Homework Debate: The Case Against Homework
This post has been updated as of December 2017.
It’s not uncommon to hear students, parents, and even some teachers always complaining about homework. Why, then, is homework an inescapable part of the student experience? Worksheets, busy work, and reading assignments continue to be a mainstay of students’ evenings.
Whether from habit or comparison with out-of-class work time in other nations, our students are getting homework and, according to some of them, a LOT of it. Educators and policy makers must ask themselves—does assigning homework pay off?
Is there evidence that homework benefits students younger than high school?
The Scholastic article Is Homework Bad? references Alfie Kohn’s book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing , in which he says, “There is no evidence to demonstrate that homework benefits students below high school age.”
The article goes on to note that those who oppose homework focus on the drawbacks of significant time spent on homework, identifying one major negative as homework’s intrusion into family time. They also point out that opponents believe schools have decided homework is necessary and thus assign it simply to assign some kind of homework, not because doing the work meets specifically-identified student needs.
“Busy work” does not help students learn
Students and parents appear to carry similar critiques of homework, specifically regarding assignments identified as busy work—long sheets of repetitive math problems, word searches, or reading logs seemingly designed to make children dislike books.
When asked how homework can negatively affect children, Nancy Kalish, author of The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It , says that many homework assignments are “simply busy work” that makes learning “a chore rather than a positive, constructive experience.”
Commenters on the piece, both parents and students, tended to agree. One student shared that on occasion they spent more time on homework than at school, while another commenter pointed out that, “We don’t give slow-working children a longer school day, but we consistently give them a longer homework day.”
Without feedback, homework is ineffective
The efficacy of the homework identified by Kalish has been studied by policy researchers as well. Gerald LeTendre, of Penn State’s Education Policy Studies department points out that the shotgun approach to homework, when students all receive the same photocopied assignment which is then checked as complete rather than discussed individually with the student, is “not very effective.” He goes on to say that, “If there’s no feedback and no monitoring, the homework is probably not effective.”
Researchers from the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia had similar findings in their study, “ When Is Homework Worth The Time ?” According to UVAToday, these researchers reported no “substantive difference” in the grades of students related to homework completion.
As researcher Adam Maltese noted, “Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be.” The report further suggested that while not all homework is bad, the type and quality of assignments and their differentiation to specific learners appears to be an important point of future research.
If homework is assigned, it should heighten understanding of the subject
The Curry School of Education report did find a positive association between standardized test performance and time spent on homework, but standardized test performance shouldn’t be the end goal of assignments—a heightened understanding and capability with the content material should.
As such, it is important that if/when teachers assign homework assignments, it is done thoughtfully and carefully—and respectful of the maximum times suggested by the National Education Association, about 10 minutes per night starting in the first grade, with an additional 10 minutes per year after.
Continue reading — The Homework Debate: How Homework Benefits Students
Monica Fuglei is a graduate of the University of Nebraska in Omaha and a current adjunct faculty member of Arapahoe Community College in Colorado, where she teaches composition and creative writing.
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The Benefits Of Homework: How Homework Can Help Students Succeed
Homework is a vital part of the educational process . It teaches students to take responsibility for their own learning, to work independently, and to persevere when faced with challenges. It also allows teachers to assess students’ understanding of material and provide feedback to help them improve. Homework has been shown to be beneficial for students at all levels of education, from elementary school to college. In one study, fourth and fifth graders who did homework scored higher on standardized tests than those who did not (Cooper, 1989). Homework has also been linked to better grades, higher test scores, and more engaged students (Kralovec & Buell, 2000). Despite these benefits, there is still much debate about whether homework is necessary or beneficial. Some opponents argue that homework takes away from valuable family time and puts unnecessary stress on students. Others argue that homework is an essential part of learning and that students who do not do their homework are at a disadvantage. The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of whether or not homework is beneficial. It depends on the individual student, the type of homework, and the amount of homework. Some students may thrive with nightly homework, while others may do better with less frequent assignments. The key is to find what works best for each individual student.
How do homework help with learning? This is a conversation between a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher. If homework is greatly reduced or eliminated in elementary schools, children and parents will be deprived of the opportunity to instill important learning habits and skills. I find it disturbing that people claim homework punishes poor people. Do you think parents should help their children with homework completion? The decision to eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much homework is hurting low-income children. Children need homework to connect with their parents and teachers, to keep them informed of what is going on in school and to show them that teachers are committed to the students’ education.
I make a joke out of teaching life skills. A student’s homework should be understood to indicate that the teacher cares about him or her and that what he or she believes matters. Students use homework to connect with their parents and teachers, allowing them to feel more at ease in the classroom. However, can’t it lead to parents being too involved in their children’s lives? When parents recognize that their child is having a difficult time, they should ask questions about it instead of pointing out the problems.
Homework is an important part of learning and is critical to a student’s success in school, according to teachers and schools. Homework has even been linked to higher performance in studies. Homework, in general, is an out-of- class activity or assignment assigned to students to supplement or review their classwork.
Homework improves students’ learning by allowing them to learn better. It is necessary to assign homework for a variety of educational purposes. is a type of intellectual discipline that assists students in meeting academic objectives while also assisting them in developing self- study habits .
Homework is one of the most important methods of teaching children what they have learned in school. As a result, they will be better prepared to learn study material.
While some students enjoy working on homework, many others do not. Homework, which aids in the study of facts, is required by students. It improves students’ problem-solving and thinking skills by assisting them in their problem-solving abilities. Furthermore, it assists students in developing the habit of regularly revising what they are learning in the classroom.
How Does Homework Promote Learning?
Homework can help with self-esteem as well as character development. Furthermore, it enables parents to understand what is going on in school and express their appreciation for their children’s academic success. The proponents of homework counter that it can be harmful.
A child’s bedtime tantrum can be compared to homework time , which is a feared word in many households and has resulted in some parents fearful of sending their children to school. Homework is a topic that is currently being debated. How can homework help children improve their study habits? According to a study conducted by Vidyashilp Academy in Bangalore, homework assignments have a positive correlation with average class grades. According to a recent survey, a majority of students want to skip homework. As a result, there were still some students who supported homework. Is there a limit to how much homework you can take on?
Children may be given more freedom in the future to motivate themselves to complete homework. Students may complete homework assignments in a variety of ways, including filling out the blank worksheets or taking multiple-choice quizzes and projects. If your child finds homework boring, make it a game by making it a fun topic. Choose a well-lit area with plenty of room to work and minimal distractions to complete your homework. If a child wishes to play in the evening, he or she may need to complete his or her homework in the afternoon. If homework is followed by an activity, such as a trip to the park, watching television, or playing with you, he may find that it motivates him to complete it. You can assist your child with their homework right away by sitting with them and doing your own work while you are nearby. You may also be able to get learning apps that will assist him in learning concepts that he may be struggling with. Homework should, instead, be structured to be brief and interesting in order to avoid becoming a burden on the child.
Homework has been shown to benefit students by teaching them how to manage their time, prioritize tasks, and solve problems. According to a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, homework spending does not make a significant difference in students’ grades at the end of the school year. According to the findings of this study, homework has no significant impact on grades.
Does Homework Improve Skills?
According to research, homework not only increases a student’s learning, but it also helps them hone important life skills like organization, problem solving, goal-setting, and perseverance.
Is Homework Beneficial For Elementary Students
There is a lot of debate about whether or not homework is beneficial for elementary students. Some research suggests that it can help students to develop time management and organizational skills. It can also help them to learn how to work independently. However, other research suggests that homework can actually be detrimental to elementary students. It can lead to students feeling overwhelmed and stressed, and can interfere with their social lives and extracurricular activities . Ultimately, whether or not homework is beneficial for elementary students depends on the individual student and the type of homework that they are given.
Homework has been shown to have a positive effect on academic achievement in high school and middle school. The findings of this study do not appear to be significant for elementary school students. It has been discovered that spending more time on homework is associated with lower test scores and an increased risk of anxiety and depression. A student who studies well is likely to succeed in school because they develop good habits as a result of doing homework. However, excessive homework time has been linked to lower test scores and increased anxiety and depression in children. To ensure that students achieve the best results from their homework, it is critical to provide students with accurate expectations, helpful resources, and rewards for good work.
How Does Homework Help Students Work Independently
Homework can help students work independently by teaching them how to find resources and information on their own. It can also help them learn how to manage their time and work on tasks independently.
Homework is essential in assisting students in the learning process as well as in preparing them for a career in education. It allows parents and teachers to assess each child’s strengths and weaknesses. We want students to be able to work independently and confidently because doing so is a key step toward independence and self-assuredness. Students must develop responsibility and independence in order to live a fulfilling life in adulthood. Students who are responsible and perform well in school can do so without relying on the assistance of their parents or teachers. Most of the tasks in their daily lives can be handled by them, and they can plan ahead of time and complete homework on time. The three pillars of good citizenship are responsibility, independence, and employability.
Homework is an excellent tool for students to foster responsibility and independence. Students who are organized are responsible, independent, and trustworthy in all aspects. Students with this background are capable of taking charge of their studies and other responsibilities in the workplace. Homework is essential to all of these achievements.
The Benefits Of Homework
A review of the findings indicates that homework provides some benefits to students. You can improve your academic performance , motivation, and confidence as a result of it. Furthermore, it helps teachers provide differentiated tasks for students, as well as help them manage their time more effectively. Homework appears to be a useful tool for students in a variety of ways.
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Why homework is important: Get The Most Genuine Reasons
- Post author By admin
- October 4, 2022
Why homework is important? As you know that every student goes to school and college, and every student has homework.
Homework has been a topic of interest for a long time. Many students believe that homework is not beneficial for them.
And some students think that without homework they can’t remember what they learn in class. If you have enough amount of homework, it is very beneficial for you.
You should do homework because it will help you to learn life skills and also help you master a skill.
Homework should be a positive experience for all students that help them to learn properly and improve their final grades. Why homework is important for students?
In this blog, we will learn what is homework and why homework is important. So, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
What is homework?
Homework can be defined as the task assigned to students by the teacher extra from the classwork. For exploring new things regarding a subject or topic. If we learn something in the classroom. We need to revise the topic otherwise we will forget. So homework is the best practice to learn new things and it helps to remind us. To move forward we need to understand a few things like what is the difference between Homework and Assignment.
Why Do Teachers Give Homework To The Students?
Here are some reasons why teachers give homework to the students:
- It helps to understand how to do work independently.
- With homework, students can learn to make schedules for all work.
- It helps students to solve the problem on their own.
- It helps students to find, and organize good information.
- Homework can help to develop a good sense of personal responsibility for learning.
- It also helps to learn using libraries and other resources.
Importance Of Doing Homework
Why homework is important? This is a very popular question. Many students think that homework is not fun to do.
You should do more research to get more information about the basic reason why homework is good for students.
When you do your homework it teaches you how to work and study on your own. With homework, you can learn using different resources like text, libraries, book chapters and other resources.
It will also help you to deal with difficult challenges. Students can take benefit from homework because it helps to develop their learning beyond the classroom. You should also read this (2022) Best Homework Songs to Listen While Study .
Reason Why Homework Is Important?
Here is some reason why homework is important:
Improve Thinking
It can help students to improve their memory and thinking.
Use Time Wisely
With the help of homework, students learn to utilize time wisely.
Work Independently
While doing homework, students can work independently. They can do their work on their own.
Responsible For Work
It helps students to take responsibility for work on their own.
Get Ready For The Next Day In Class
With the help of homework, students can get ready for the next day’s class.
Learn To Use Resources
It helps students to learn using resources such as websites to find information, libraries, reference materials, and others. Also, read this Is Homework Illegal AnyWhere? .
Help Students Explore The Subject
Homework help students to explore the topic more carefully than class time permits.
Homework Increases a Student’s Confidence
Homework improves knowledge. This always results in improving confidence also.
The more you learn, understand, and practice, the more you will improve your confidence. This is also important for your exams too as it can help you to remember the concepts.
As a result, you can easily write the answers on your exam sheet. This will increase your confidence to score good grades in exams.
Homework Helps Parents Know What Their Children Are Learning
Homework is the best opportunity for teachers and parents to connect with their children.
While doing homework it is the best way to observe students about their strengths and weaknesses. Like in which subject they are good or poor.
Parents can track their performance easily. Also, read this Who Invented Homework And Why? Best Facts You Should Know .
Enhance Problem-Solving Skills
Whenever any student does their homework there are so many hard questions they have to encounter so it is helpful for brainstorming the solutions.
They make every effort to complete it, whether it is taking help from the internet or from their parents.
Due to this, the problem-solving skills of the students increase and they can easily solve any problem in their life.
Help Us Prioritize The Topics/Time Management Skill
As we know that if we complete any task it is a pleasurable moment for us.
So when the student completes their homework sometimes it is difficult to solve any problem. Sometimes students are stuck after finding the solution. It is an achievement for them.
It motivates us to do more work and boosts our confidence.
Regular basis homework makes the student capable of grabbing more knowledge which is beneficial for scoring well in exams.
Increases The Concentration Of Students In The Classroom
When the teacher reads a topic in the class, then the students think that this topic will be very easy.
Due to this, the students do not study the topic carefully. But when the teachers give homework based on the same topic to the students, they understand how important it is to listen to the teacher in the class.
In this way, the students feel their responsibility. That’s why homework is important for students.
How To Do Homework In An Interesting Way?
Follow the strategy to complete your homework effectively How to do homework in an interesting way:
- Group Study: Do work together with your friends.
- Make it visual: Use videos and animation for learning.
- Don’t cram, try to learn from the basics.
- Give a Reward to yourself by completing targets.
- Create a homework space.
- Set a Proper schedule for work.
- Don’t hesitate to ask questions.
- Try different learning applications or websites.
- Set a goal for achievements.
- Take a short break between homework tasks to refresh your mind.
- Arrange all books and supplies in advance to save your time.
Why Is Homework Useful For Teachers?
If teachers use homework correctly, it can be very effective for determining what they understand from the lesson.
It gives teachers a clear idea of which topics may require more attention because some students find them difficult. It goes further than that.
Homework should be assigned by experienced teachers who can provide specific feedback.
They should only give students assignments that are beneficial to their learning needs. And they should utilise them as a tool to address specific areas where they are struggling.
sometimes not only the students but their parents also start wondering why the teachers of the school and coaching institute give homework to their children.
They think that homework is a burden for students but once they understand why homework is important, they start paying more attention to it.
Also, they encourage their loved ones or kids to do homework.
Every coin has two faces. Similarly, some students consider homework as a burden while others take it as an interesting way to improve their knowledge.
So, what do you think about the same? Let us know your answer through your comments. I hope it will help you to learn why homework is important for us.
FAQs Related To Why Homework Is Important?
Is homework only beneficial for students.
No, it is not only beneficial for students. It also helps parents and teachers to cooperate with the students. This will help students to develop successfully.
Is homework mandatory?
The majority of schools have made homework a requirement of their curriculum. It was implemented as part of reforms and modernization policies designed to provide the best possible outcomes to the students.
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Recent Posts
Nix Homework to Help Students? What the Science Says
A Texas teacher's note to parents about her newly implemented "no formal homework policy" in her second-grade class went viral last week, opening up the floodgates for parents, teachers and school administrators to weigh in on this controversial topic.
In the note, teacher Brandy Young told parents that her students' only homework would be work that they did not finish during the school day.
Instead of having kids spend time on homework , parents should "spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success," Young said. She recommended that parents " eat dinner as a family , read together, play outside and get your child to bed early," strategies that she suggests are more closely tied to a child's success in the classroom than doing homework.
Young's rationale for her new policy, as she explained in her note, was that "research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance." [ 10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids ]
Live Science spoke with three educators who have conducted research on homework and student performance to fact-check this statement, and to find out what studies have shown about homework's positive and negative effects.
Keys to student success
It's accurate to suggest that studies have found no correlation between homework in elementary school and a student's academic performance , but there is one important exception worth mentioning, said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
Research has shown that free reading , or allowing students to read whatever books they want, does improve their academic performance, Pope said. Some elementary school teachers assign free reading as homework, but kids and parents do not always perceive these assignments as true homework that must be completed, she explained. [ Best Science-y Books for Kids ]
In middle school, the evidence shows a slight correlation between doing homework and academic achievement , but further improvement fades after a middle-school student has spent 60 to 90 minutes a night doing homework, said Pope, who is also the co-founder of Challenge Success, an organization that works with schools and families to develop research-based strategies that engage kids and keep them healthy.
But it's tricky to draw conclusions from homework studies, because these studies use such varied ways of measuring a student's academic performance, Pope said. Some researchers use standardized test scores to measure achievement, while others use students' grade-point averages, she said.
Another variable that can complicate the results of homework studies is that it's hard to know who is actually doing the assignment when it's taken home, Pope said. For example, a student could get help from a parent , tutor, sibling or classmate to complete the work.
In high school, there is a strong correlation between students who do 2 hours of homework a night and higher levels of academic achievement, but again, this improvement fades when students exceed the 2-hour threshold, Pope told Live Science. [ Top 5 Benefits of Play ]
Pope said she considers the advice that the viral note offered to parents —to eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside and get a child to bed early — to be "spot on." She added that there is "really good research" to correlate these four variables with student success.
Studies suggest that to perform at their best in school, kids in second grade need sufficient sleep , playtime with their siblings and friends, and downtime, meaning time to transition from school to home. Kids also benefit from regular family time, which ideally takes place five times a week for at least 25 minutes and could take the form of a family meal, Pope said. Making time for reading is also important for a child's success in the classroom, she said.
Learning through practice
But not all educators share Pope's opinions of a no-homework policy for second graders.
The contention that "research is unable to prove that homework improves student performance" is an overstatement, said Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has been researching homework and student performance for 30 years.
"Even in kids as young as age 7, research shows that homework in particular areas can help students learn, especially things children need to learn through practice," said Cooper, the author of "The Battle Over Homework" (Corwin, 2006).
Even when looking at levels as early as second grade, studies have found that kids who study a little bit at home may do better on spelling, vocabulary and math tests given in the classroom, Cooper told Live Science. However, he noted that the correlation between doing homework and higher academic achievement is not as strong in elementary students, who generally don't get much homework, as it is in middle-school and high-school students.
Rather than a no-homework policy for second graders, Cooper said he would recommend that homework for kids at this age be kept short and simple. It should take no more than about 20 minutes a night for second graders to complete their homework, he said.
To estimate an appropriate amount of time for students to spend doing homework, educators may use "the 10-minute rule" which means multiplying a child's grade level by 10 minutes of homework a night, Cooper explained. That means first graders get 10 minutes of homework, second graders get 20 and so on.
Besides just the skills in math, reading or other subjects themselves, homework can have positive effects on children's time-management and study skills, Cooper said. It can also help keep parents informed of what children are learning at school, and help make Mom and Dad aware of their child's strengths and weaknesses, he said.
But too much homework in second grade or assignments that are too hard can have a negative impact on young learners, Cooper said. "The last thing you want is for a 7-year-old to be bored [or] frustrated, or think that he or she is not good in school," he added.
Some parents who are extremely concerned about ensuring that their children achieve to their maximal ability may put pressure on educators, and this has led some teachers to assign students too much homework, especially at the high-school level, Cooper said.
But the key is for students to get the right amount of homework — not too much of it and not too little — so that it can have positive effects on learning and school performance, Cooper said.
Homework and family life
But other educators are steadfast that the right amount of homework in elementary school may be little to none.
Research suggests that homework in elementary school does not have a positive effect on student achievement, and could even have a negative impact, said Etta Kralovec, an associate professor of teacher education at the University of Arizona South, and the author of "The End of Homework" (Beacon Press, 2001).
The findings are more complex in middle- and high-school students, with many studies finding a correlation between classroom grades and homework, Kralovec said. But these results could also raise additional questions, because tracking students — separating them into lower-level and advanced-level classes, for example — also begins at these grades, and kids in the higher-track classes are often assigned more homework.
It may not be that homework actually causes students to get better grades in high school or middle school, it could be that students who do more homework were better students to begin with, Kralovec said.
It's also hard to know how much actual time students truly spend on homework, because most research relies on self-reported data from students, parents or teachers, Kralovec said. The amount of time a student reports spending on homework can differ from a parent's report of it, and it can also differ from the amount of time a teacher estimates students will need in order to complete the assignment, Kralovec explained.
Despite the research, the amount of time students spend doing homework remains a highly contentious topic in education, Kralovec told Live Science. And when a teacher's short note to parents about a no-homework policy goes viral, it shows that this topic has hit a very important nerve in the American family experience, she said.
Family life today is really challenging compared with decades past — with more working mothers and some parents working two or three jobs to make ends meet — and homework can add yet another stressor to the mix, Kralovec said.
If parents feel that the amount of homework students receive is too much and may be encroaching on family time, one strategy they may try is to get organized with other parents, Kralovec suggested.
Each school district may set its own policies about the amount of homework given to students. When parents have banded together in their communities, they have often been successful at having public discussions with administrators and teachers, and even moving assignment levels back to healthier levels, she said.
Originally published on Live Science .
Cari Nierenberg has been writing about health and wellness topics for online news outlets and print publications for more than two decades. Her work has been published by Live Science, The Washington Post, WebMD, Scientific American, among others. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in nutrition from Cornell University and a Master of Science degree in Nutrition and Communication from Boston University.
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Should Students Have Homework?
by Suzanne Capek Tingley, Veteran Educator, M.A. Degree
Look before you leap at giving to much or to little homework.
It used to be that students were the only ones complaining about the practice of assigning homework. For years, teachers and parents thought that homework was a necessary tool when educating children. But studies about the effectiveness of homework have been conflicting and inconclusive, leading some adults to argue that homework should become a thing of the past.
What Research Says about Homework
According to Duke professor Harris Cooper, it's important that students have homework. His meta-analysis of homework studies showed a correlation between completing homework and academic success, at least in older grades. He recommends following a "10 minute rule" : students should receive 10 minutes of homework per day in first grade, and 10 additional minutes each subsequent year, so that by twelfth grade they are completing 120 minutes of homework daily.
But his analysis didn't prove that students did better because they did homework; it simply showed a correlation . This could simply mean that kids who do homework are more committed to doing well in school. Cooper also found that some research showed that homework caused physical and emotional stress, and created negative attitudes about learning. He suggested that more research needed to be done on homework's effect on kids.
Further reading: Get Homework Done and Turned In
Some researchers say that the question isn't whether kids should have homework. It's more about what kind of homework students have and how much. To be effective, homework has to meet students' needs. For example, some middle school teachers have found success with online math homework that's adapted to each student's level of understanding. But when middle school students were assigned more than an hour and a half of homework, their math and science test scores went down .
Researchers at Indiana University discovered that math and science homework may improve standardized test grades, but they found no difference in course grades between students who did homework and those who didn't. These researchers theorize that homework doesn't result in more content mastery, but in greater familiarity with the kinds of questions that appear on standardized tests. According to Professor Adam Maltese, one of the study's authors, "Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be."
So while many teachers and parents support daily homework, it's hard to find strong evidence that the long-held practice produces positive results.
Problems with Homework
In an article in Education Week Teacher , teacher Samantha Hulsman said she's frequently heard parents complain that a 30-minute homework assignment turns into a three-hour battle with their kids. Now, she's facing the same problem with her own kids, which has her rethinking her former beliefs about homework. "I think parents expect their children to have homework nightly, and teachers assign daily homework because it's what we've always done," she explained. Today, Hulsman said, it's more important to know how to collaborate and solve problems than it is to know specific facts.
Child psychologist Kenneth Barish wrote in Psychology Today that battles over homework rarely result in a child's improvement in school . Children who don't do their homework are not lazy, he said, but they may be frustrated, discouraged, or anxious. And for kids with learning disabilities, homework is like "running with a sprained ankle. It's doable, but painful."
Barish suggests that parents and kids have a "homework plan" that limits the time spent on homework. The plan should include turning off all devices—not just the student's, but those belonging to all family members.
One of the best-known critics of homework, Alfie Kohn , says that some people wrongly believe "kids are like vending machines—put in an assignment, get out learning." Kohn points to the lack of evidence that homework is an effective learning tool; in fact, he calls it "the greatest single extinguisher of children's curiosity that we have yet invented."
Homework Bans
Last year, the public schools in Marion County, Florida, decided on a no-homework policy for all of their elementary students . Instead, kids read nightly for 20 minutes. Superintendent Heidi Maier said the decision was based on Cooper's research showing that elementary students gain little from homework, but a lot from reading.
Orchard Elementary School in South Burlington, Vermont, followed the same path, substituting reading for homework. The homework policy has four parts : read nightly, go outside and play, have dinner with your family, and get a good night's sleep. Principal Mark Trifilio says that his staff and parents support the idea.
But while many elementary schools are considering no-homework policies, middle schools and high schools have been reluctant to abandon homework. Schools say parents support homework and teachers know it can be helpful when it is specific and follows certain guidelines. For example, practicing solving word problems can be helpful, but there's no reason to assign 50 problems when 10 will do. Recognizing that not all kids have the time, space, and home support to do homework is important, so it shouldn't be counted as part of a student's grade.
Further reading: Balancing Extracurriculars with Homework in High School
So Should Students Have Homework?
Should you ban homework in your classroom? If you teach lower grades, it's possible. If you teach middle or high school, probably not. But all teachers should think carefully about their homework policies. By limiting the amount of homework and improving the quality of assignments, you can improve learning outcomes for your students.
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{{article.topic}}, {{article.title}}, suzanne capek tingley.
Suzanne Capek Tingley started as a high school English/Spanish teacher, transitioned to middle school, and eventually became a principal, superintendent, and adjunct professor in education administration at the State University of New York. She is the author of the funny, but practical book for teachers, How to Handle Difficult Parents (Prufrock Press). Her work has appeared in many publications including Education Week, and her blog, Practical Leadership, was featured on the Scholastic website. She has been a presenter and consultant, and with Magna Publications she developed videos on demand highlighting successful strategies for classroom teachers. Among her honors is a Woman of Distinction Award from the New York State Senate. She is a strong believer that all kids can learn and that teaching requires art, skill, and a good sense of humor.
Study: Homework Doesn’t Mean Better Grades, But Maybe Better Standardized Test Scores
Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at UVA's Curry School of Education
The time students spend on math and science homework doesn’t necessarily mean better grades, but it could lead to better performance on standardized tests, a new study finds.
“When Is Homework Worth The Time?” was recently published by lead investigator Adam Maltese, assistant professor of science education at Indiana University, and co-authors Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education , and Xitao Fan, dean of education at the University of Macau. Maltese is a Curry alumnus, and Fan is a former Curry faculty member.
The authors examined survey and transcript data of more than 18,000 10th-grade students to uncover explanations for academic performance. The data focused on individual classes, examining student outcomes through the transcripts from two nationwide samples collected in 1990 and 2002 by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Contrary to much published research, a regression analysis of time spent on homework and the final class grade found no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not. But the analysis found a positive association between student performance on standardized tests and the time they spent on homework.
“Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be,” Maltese said.
Tai said that homework assignments cannot replace good teaching.
“I believe that this finding is the end result of a chain of unfortunate educational decisions, beginning with the content coverage requirements that push too much information into too little time to learn it in the classroom,” Tai said. “The overflow typically results in more homework assignments. However, students spending more time on something that is not easy to understand or needs to be explained by a teacher does not help these students learn and, in fact, may confuse them.
“The results from this study imply that homework should be purposeful,” he added, “and that the purpose must be understood by both the teacher and the students.”
The authors suggest that factors such as class participation and attendance may mitigate the association of homework to stronger grade performance. They also indicate the types of homework assignments typically given may work better toward standardized test preparation than for retaining knowledge of class material.
Maltese said the genesis for the study was a concern about whether a traditional and ubiquitous educational practice, such as homework, is associated with students achieving at a higher level in math and science. Many media reports about education compare U.S. students unfavorably to high-achieving math and science students from across the world. The 2007 documentary film “Two Million Minutes” compared two Indiana students to students in India and China, taking particular note of how much more time the Indian and Chinese students spent on studying or completing homework.
“We’re not trying to say that all homework is bad,” Maltese said. “It’s expected that students are going to do homework. This is more of an argument that it should be quality over quantity. So in math, rather than doing the same types of problems over and over again, maybe it should involve having students analyze new types of problems or data. In science, maybe the students should write concept summaries instead of just reading a chapter and answering the questions at the end.”
This issue is particularly relevant given that the time spent on homework reported by most students translates into the equivalent of 100 to 180 50-minute class periods of extra learning time each year.
The authors conclude that given current policy initiatives to improve science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education, more evaluation is needed about how to use homework time more effectively. They suggest more research be done on the form and function of homework assignments.
“In today’s current educational environment, with all the activities taking up children’s time both in school and out of school, the purpose of each homework assignment must be clear and targeted,” Tai said. “With homework, more is not better.”
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November 20, 2012
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This article was published more than 2 years ago
Does homework work when kids are learning all day at home?
The value of homework has long been debated in the education world — but now, the discussion has become even more complicated in the era of the coronavirus pandemic.
Researchers have long found that there is less to homework than many might think; they have found that it has little to no effect on test scores in elementary school and a marginal positive effect in the later grades. That was when kids were in school for classes and went home to do homework.
But now, school for millions of students means working at home doing school work all day, because school buildings are closed to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus and its disease, covid-19. That raises the question: How feasible is it to ask kids to do even more work in the same environment, especially for kids who live in environments not conducive to studying?
The closing of schools this past spring as the pandemic hit put a new focus on issues of equity, racism and access to education technology and the Internet. Now that many, if not most, school districts are not holding in-person teaching for the start of the 2020-21 school year, or not for all students, those issues are ever more urgent.
ASCD, an education organization of more than 110,000 members — superintendents, teachers and others from countries around the world — looked at the homework issue in its newsletter, ASCD Express. Below is one of the pieces in the package.
(ASCD, founded as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, now focuses not just on curriculum but also on other parts of the educational process, including professional development, leadership and capacity building.)
The post below was written by Denise Pope, a co-founder of Challenge Success and a senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, where she specializes in student engagement, curriculum studies, qualitative research methods and service learning.
(Challenge Success is a nonprofit organization that works with teams of educators, parents and students at schools to identify problems and implement best practices and policies in areas such as curriculum, assessment, homework, school schedule, and a healthy school climate.)
Pope is the author of “ Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students ,” and co-author of “ Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids .”
Pope’s article was originally published in the Aug. 27 issue of ASCD Express that focused on whether and how homework works today. ASCD Express is a free email publication for K-12 educators. I am using the article with permission.
Why this superintendent banned homework -- and asked kids to read instead
By Denise Pope
For students and educators participating in distance learning these days, it may be hard to distinguish homework assignments from any kind of school-assigned work that is done at home.
In fact, between March and June 2020, “homework” varied considerably: Some schools assigned weekly packets of work to be completed at home in lieu of any online lessons, while other schools decided to eliminate “homework” altogether for students who participated in online lessons for several hours each day. Though we conducted the following research on homework prior to the pandemic, our findings offer implications for all kinds of assignments done at home — both during remote learning and once students return to classrooms.
In a student survey conducted over the last decade (from 2009 to 2020) by Challenge Success , a nonprofit that I co-founded based on my research at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, we asked over 200,000 middle and high school students from high-performing schools, “Right now in your life, what, if anything, causes you the most stress?”
One of the most common responses was one word: “Homework.”
The cultural narrative about homework generally focuses on how much homework students are doing. It's treated as a Goldilocks problem: When is it too little? When is it too much? When is it just right?
Having too much homework is certainly part of the problem when it comes to student stress levels. In fact, of the more than 50,000 high school students that Challenge Success surveyed from October 2018 to January 2020, 56 percent of students said they had too much homework . In that same sample, students reported doing an average of 2.7 hours of homework per weeknight and 3.0 hours on weekends.
However, the amount of homework alone doesn't tell the whole story. The type of homework students receive can also be a source of stress, our survey shows. For instance, when students perceive homework to be boring or repetitive, or if they feel it is too advanced or confusing, they are likely to be stressed, regardless of the amount of assigned work. In addition, students are often stressed about how well they do on their homework, particularly because homework completion and quality are usually factored into students' course grades.
Given the stress from homework that so many students report, we updated our previous homework white paper with an extensive review of the current literature on homework and its benefits. Based on this review, we found that the relationship between time spent on homework and academic achievement is nuanced and complex.
In elementary school, there is very little, if any, evidence that time spent on homework in most subject areas has a positive effect on achievement. (A notable exception is reading for pleasure, which is associated with achievement. One 2013 study found that the influence of reading for pleasure is powerful for children’s cognitive development , especially in terms of vocabulary.)
In middle and high school, there is a slight positive relationship between time spent on homework and grades and test scores in the recent research. However, those benefits are complicated by various factors and limitations, including whether the homework was interesting to the students, how much effort they put into it, and the level of difficulty and purpose of the assignment. Furthermore, several studies found diminishing returns on the value of homework once a student exceeds a certain amount of time spent on it.
To make homework work for students and educators, we recommend taking a close look at the quality and purpose of the assignments by asking five questions. These questions apply whether learning is happening primarily at school, at home, or a hybrid of the two.
- Do students understand the purpose and value of the assignment? When students perceive homework as busy work, meaningless, or of little value to the teacher, they are less likely to complete it and may become less interested in learning and in school in general. Educators can increase engagement by clarifying the purpose of the work and allowing students to choose which problems to do or which topics to research. Teachers can also allow students to stop when they believe they understand the concept.
- Will all students be able to do the task independently? It is challenging to design homework assignments that meet every child’s academic and developmental needs, but students are more likely to disengage when an assignment feels either too hard or too easy. Teachers can use a variety of formative assessment strategies, such as student check-ins and daily exit tickets to strive for the “just-right” challenge for each student and ensure that homework can be done without help from parents or tutors — especially because not all students have the resources to get outside help.
- Is this assignment better done in class versus as homework? Some activities can't be done effectively or efficiently in class or during synchronous online learning, such as reading a book chapter to prepare for class discussion or interviewing a community member for an oral history project. These tasks might be better to assign as homework or during asynchronous learning. Skill practice, such as learning when and how to apply algorithms in math or parsing difficult text passages, might be more effective during class, where teachers can clarify misunderstandings and provide feedback and coaching.
- How much time should this assignment take? If you are going to assign homework, consider how much time the assignment should take and recommend an appropriate cut-off time for students without penalty. Suggested time limits should be based on the purpose of the assignment as well as student age and ability. Having students start the assignment in class or during synchronous learning will help you estimate how long it may take different students to do and if they need help. Remember that students may have homework from several classes each night, so try to coordinate large assignments and assessments with other teachers when possible and offer lenient late policies or “homework passes” when workload or home obligations are heavy.
- What kind of feedback should I provide on the homework? Grading homework is tricky. Some students who don't turn it in or do it incorrectly may have organizational issues or other reasons beyond their control, and others may have relied on outside help to correct the work. If you do choose to grade the homework, make sure you provide actionable and timely feedback on assignments and offer students opportunities to revise and resubmit. Aim to return graded assignments prior to an upcoming assessment so students can learn from their mistakes, and make sure your comments are specific enough for students to make corrections. For example, instead of just marking something as incorrect, add a comment asking a student to show their work, or explain that they need to add more supporting evidence to a paragraph to strengthen their claim.
As educators consider the changes they need to make to their curriculum and pedagogy this fall, particularly how to make up for lost learning over the spring and summer and how to prioritize essential skills and understandings, the questions above can help streamline assignments, increase student engagement, and alleviate some of the stress that so many students are experiencing right now.
To further explore the research mentioned above and to see more tips for designing effective homework, [teachers] can download the Challenge Success homework white paper.
Cooper, H. (1989). Synthesis of research on homework. Educational Leadership , 47 (3), 85–91.
Cooper, H. (2007). The battle over homework: Common ground for administrators, teachers, and parents . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Sullivan, A. & Brown, M. (2013). Social inequalities in cognitive scores at age 16: The role of reading . Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Retrieved from https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CLS-WP-2013-10.pdf
The pandemic school year
Students, guardians and teachers experience a very different school year as the coronavirus disrupts the country’s education system..
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How Is Homework Helping Students Learn?
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Practice, or reinforcement of a skill, is part of the educational process. Practice in classwork and homework is an important part of guaranteeing students are learning what is being taught. Skilled, targeted practice is what is planned but the art of practice is both complex and simple.
In sports, theatre, and music programs, a model for how to develop expertise lives right in front of us. To acquire a skill, practice is necessary. Yet, when practice is unsupervised and lacks immediate feedback, frustration can arise, motivation can wane, and bad form can be embedded. Learning is either limited or non-existent without the practice feedback loop ongoing. In sports, a targeted skill is focused on and the coach gives consistent feedback as the player practices that one skill. In the arts the same is true. Skills are identified, modeled, and the students or players or actors, or musicians are given feedback on the skill(s) identified so that practice becomes both targeted and informed. Feedback is key. Encouragement is essential.
Homework is the best example of how educators can improve the use of practice. No matter whether as an educator or a parent, homework as practice remains a standard that might serves many purposes. Teachers use homework to offer students a chance to reinforce what they have learned and what they complete contributes, most often, to a grade. Parents use homework to see what their children are learning and some use it to become partners in the learning experience. Interesting, if it happens that way. Homework has the intention of reinforcement but often lacks the narrow focus for practice. In addition it sends children home without the teacher’s knowledge or confidence that the practice is based on knowledge attained. It can become reinforcement of doubt, frustration, or worse, reinforcement of incorrect information or skills. Doing something over and over is good if it is targeted and informed; if feedback is timely and consistent.
How Teachers Are Taught
After teachers gain their degrees and certification, they rely on professional development opportunities throughout their careers to continue their learning. Often these opportunities have been what has become known as ‘one and done’ professional development opportunities. These were usually selected to impact the broadest sweep of faculty at once. However, the follow-up, reinforcement, and support varies depending on the amount of attention school leaders give following the ‘one and done’. Other ways teachers continue learning is individual. They apply to go to a conference or training, are approved, attend, and return. Whether what is learned is embedded in their future practice is often left up to the teacher. After all, how many new things can a leader keep track of, follow up, and support?
Ericcson and Pool argue that “deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance” (p.98). Deliberate practice is informed practice, guided by “the best performers’ accomplishments and by understanding of what these expert performers do to excel” (p.98).
How do we know for certain, that all homework, particularly in the early grades, teaches what we want it to and what Ericcson and Pool describe? Some might say it teaches responsibility. But for those students who left the classroom without an adequate grasp of the material, it may undermine its intention. Instead it develops frustration and kills motivation. It has the potential of reinforcing the wrong way to do something, or even a belief that ‘I can’t do this’. These happening in the early years can stop students from pushing forward, developing grit, and finding success.
Change the Environment for Teachers’ Learning
Change how we work with teachers so they can change the way they work with their students. No matter the behavior or skill targeted, might we be able to change the environment to be one of learning, continuous learning, for the adults in which targeted practice and feedback are valued and excellence is recognized? The shift in thinking that this can put in motion requires that the leader remain constant in their role that focuses on the agreed upon skills and behaviors that are being practiced. It required consistency and dedication. It invites the development of professional collegiality where those learning new skills practice together and give feedback to each other.
Before shifting the manner in which teachers plan for practice for their students, consider implementing it with the teachers first. Teaching and learning is not an exact science, like playing an instrument or playing tennis. However, we, in education do know the complicated factors that affect learning. Taking that into consideration, isn’t there a way to use deliberate practice where it applies? Rather than assigning independent work because we always have, assign it with the knowledge that the practice will be correct and effective and supported with immediate feedback. Discussions and feedback about what is being implemented and how it will affect the practice of the teacher are essential. Changing the way teachers receive feedback and are asked to practice new, targeted skills offers the model for what you ask them to do with their students. Consider being a model of the change.
A nn Myers and Jill Berkowicz are the authors of The STEM Shift (2015, Corwin) a book about leading the shift into 21st century schools. Ann and Jill welcome connecting through Twitter & Email .
Resource: Ericsson, A. & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Photo courtesy of Pixabay
The opinions expressed in Leadership 360 are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.
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Does Homework Improve Learning?
Chapter 2 of the homework myth (da capo press, 2006) copyright © 2006 by alfie kohn, by alfie kohn.
Because the question that serves as the title of this chapter doesn’t seem all that complicated, you might think that after all this time we’d have a straightforward answer. You might think that open-minded people who review the evidence should be able to agree on whether homework really does help.
When you think about it, any number of issues could complicate the picture and make it more or less likely that homework would appear to be beneficial in a given study: What kind of homework are we talking about? Fill-in-the-blank worksheets or extended projects? In what school subject(s)? How old are the students? How able and interested are they? Are we looking at how much the teacher assigned or at how much the kids actually did? How careful was the study and how many students were investigated?
Even when you take account of all these variables, the bottom line remains that no definite conclusion can be reached, and that is itself a significant conclusion. The fact that there isn’t anything close to unanimity among experts belies the widespread assumption that homework helps. It demonstrates just how superficial and misleading are the countless declarations one hears to the effect that “studies find homework is an important contributor to academic achievement.”
Taken as a whole, the available research might be summarized as inconclusive. But if we look more closely, even that description turns out to be too generous. The bottom line, I’ll argue in this chapter, is that a careful examination of the data raises serious doubts about whether meaningful learning is enhanced by homework for most students. Of the eight reasons that follow, the first three identify important limitations of the existing research, the next three identify findings from these same studies that lead one to question homework’s effectiveness, and the last two introduce additional data that weaken the case even further.
Limitations of the Research
1. At best, most homework studies show only an association, not a causal relationship. Statistical principles don’t get much more basic than “correlation doesn’t prove causation.” The number of umbrellas brought to a workplace on a given morning will be highly correlated with the probability of precipitation in the afternoon, but the presence of umbrellas didn’t make it rain. Also, I’d be willing to bet that kids who ski are more likely to attend selective colleges than those who don’t ski, but that doesn’t mean they were accepted because they ski, or that arranging for a child to take skiing lessons will improve her chances of being admitted. Nevertheless, most research purporting to show a positive effect of homework seems to be based on the assumption that when students who get (or do) more homework also score better on standardized tests, it follows that the higher scores were due to their having had more homework.
There are almost always other explanations for why successful students might be in classrooms where more homework is assigned – let alone why these students might take more time with their homework than their peers do. Even Cooper, a proponent of homework, concedes that “it is equally plausible,” based on the correlational data that comprise most of the available research on the topic, “that teachers assign more homework to students who are achieving better . . . or that better students simply spend more time on home study.”[13] In still other cases, a third variable – for example, being born into a more affluent and highly educated family – might be associated with getting higher test scores and with doing more homework (or attending the kind of school where more homework is assigned). Again, it would be erroneous to conclude that homework is responsible for higher achievement. Or that a complete absence of homework would have any detrimental effect at all.
Sometimes it’s not easy to spot those other variables that can separately affect achievement and time spent on homework, giving the impression that these two are causally related. One of the most frequently cited studies in the field was published in the early 1980s by a researcher named Timothy Keith, who looked at survey results from tens of thousands of high school students and concluded that homework had a positive relationship to achievement, at least at that age. But a funny thing happened ten years later when he and a colleague looked at homework alongside other possible influences on learning such as quality of instruction, motivation, and which classes the students took. When all these variables were entered into the equation simultaneously, the result was “puzzling and surprising”: homework no longer had any meaningful effect on achievement at all.[14] In other words, a set of findings that served – and, given how often his original study continues to be cited, still serves – as a prominent basis for the claim that homework raises achievement turns out to be spurious.
Several studies have actually found a negative relationship between students’ achievement (or their academic performance as judged by teachers) and how much time they spend on homework (or how much help they receive from their parents).[15] But researchers who report this counterintuitive finding generally take pains to explain that it “must not be interpreted as a causal pattern.”[16] What’s really going on here, we’re assured, is just that kids with academic difficulties are taking more time with their homework in order to catch up.
That sounds plausible, but of course it’s just a theory. One study found that children who were having academic difficulties actually didn’t get more homework from their teachers,[17] although it’s possible they spent longer hours working on the homework that they did get. But even if we agreed that doing more homework probably isn’t responsible for lowering students’ achievement, the fact that there’s an inverse relationship seems to suggest that, at the very least, homework isn’t doing much to help kids who are struggling. In any event, anyone who reads the research on this topic can’t help but notice how rare it is to find these same cautions about the misleading nature of correlational results when those results suggest a positive relationship between homework and achievement. It’s only when the outcome doesn’t fit the expected pattern (and support the case for homework) that they’re carefully explained away.
In short, most of the research that’s cited to show that homework is academically beneficial really doesn’t prove any such thing.
2. Do we really know how much homework kids do? The studies claiming that homework helps are based on the assumption that we can accurately measure the number and length of assignments. But many of these studies depend on students to tell us how much homework they get (or complete). When Cooper and his associates looked at recent studies in which the time spent on homework was reported by students, and then compared them with studies in which that estimate was provided by their parents, the results were quite different. In fact, the correlation between homework and achievement completely disappeared when parents’ estimates were used.[18] This was also true in one of Cooper’s own studies: “Parent reports of homework completion were . . . uncorrelated with the student report.”[19] The same sort of discrepancy shows up again in cross-cultural research — parents and children provide very different accounts of how much help kids receive[20] — and also when students and teachers are asked to estimate how much homework was assigned.[21] It’s not clear which source is most accurate, by the way – or, indeed, whether any of them is entirely reliable.
3. Homework studies confuse grades and test scores with learning. Most researchers, like most reporters who write about education, talk about how this or that policy affects student “achievement” without questioning whether the way that word is defined in the studies makes any sense. What exactly is this entity called achievement that’s said to go up or down? It turns out that what’s actually being measured – at least in all the homework research I’ve seen — is one of three things: scores on tests designed by teachers, grades given by teachers, or scores on standardized exams. About the best thing you can say for these numbers is that they’re easy for researchers to collect and report. Each is seriously flawed in its own way.
In studies that involve in-class tests, some students are given homework – which usually consists of reviewing a batch of facts about some topic – and then they, along with their peers who didn’t get the homework, take a quiz on that very material. The outcome measure, in other words, is precisely aligned to the homework that some students did and others didn’t do — or that they did in varying amounts. It’s as if you were told to spend time in the evening learning the names of all the vice presidents of the United States and were then tested only on those names. If you remembered more of them after cramming, the researcher would then conclude that “learning in the evening” is effective.
Here’s one example. Cooper and his colleagues conducted a study in 1998 with both younger and older students (from grades 2 through 12), using both grades and standardized test scores to measure achievement. They also looked at how much homework was assigned by the teacher as well as at how much time students spent on their homework. Thus, there were eight separate results to be reported. Here’s how they came out:
Younger students
Effect on grades of amount of homework assigned No sig. relationship
Effect on test scores of amount of homework assigned No sig. relationship
Effect on grades of amount of homework done Negative relationship
Effect on test scores of amount of homework done No sig. relationship
Older students
Effect on grades of amount of homework done Positive relationship
Of these eight comparisons, then, the only positive correlation – and it wasn’t a large one – was between how much homework older students did and their achievement as measured by grades.[26] If that measure is viewed as dubious, if not downright silly, then one of the more recent studies conducted by the country’s best-known homework researcher fails to support the idea of assigning homework at any age.
The last, and most common, way of measuring achievement is to use standardized test scores. Purely because they’re standardized, these tests are widely regarded as objective instruments for assessing children’s academic performance. But as I’ve argued elsewhere at some length,[27] there is considerable reason to believe that standardized tests are a poor measure of intellectual proficiency. They are, however, excellent indicators of two things. The first is affluence: Up to 90 percent of the difference in scores among schools, communities, or even states can be accounted for, statistically speaking, without knowing anything about what happened inside the classrooms. All you need are some facts about the average income and education levels of the students’ parents. The second phenomenon that standardized tests measure is how skillful a particular group of students is at taking standardized tests – and, increasingly, how much class time has been given over to preparing them to do just that.
In my experience, teachers can almost always identify several students who do poorly on standardized tests even though, by more authentic and meaningful indicators, they are extremely talented thinkers. Other students, meanwhile, ace these tests even though their thinking isn’t particularly impressive; they’re just good test-takers. These anecdotal reports have been corroborated by research that finds a statistically significant positive relationship between a shallow or superficial approach to learning, on the one hand, and high scores on various standardized tests, on the other. What’s more, this association has been documented at the elementary, middle, and high school level.
Standardized tests are even less useful when they include any of these features:
* If most of the questions are multiple-choice, then students are unable to generate, or even justify, their responses. To that extent, students cannot really demonstrate what they know or what they can do with what they know. Multiple-choice tests are basically designed so that many kids who understand a given idea will be tricked into picking the wrong answer.
* If the test is timed, then it places a premium not on thoughtfulness but on speed.
* If the test is focused on “basic skills,” then doing well is more a function of cramming forgettable facts into short-term memory than of really understanding ideas, making connections and distinctions, knowing how to read or write or analyze problems in a sophisticated way, thinking like a scientist or historian, being able to use knowledge in unfamiliar situations, and so on.
* If the test is given to younger children, then, according to an overwhelming consensus on the part of early-education specialists, it is a poor indicator of academic skills. Many children under the age of eight or nine are unable to demonstrate their proficiency on a standardized test just because they’re tripped up by the format.
* If the test is “norm-referenced” (like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, Terra Nova, Stanford Achievement Test, and others used widely in classrooms and also by researchers), then it was never designed to evaluate whether students know what they should. Instead, its primary purpose is to artificially spread out the scores in order to facilitate ranking students against each other. The question these tests are intended to answer is not “How well are our kids – or our schools – doing?” but “Who’s beating whom?” We know nothing about academic competence in absolute terms just from knowing what percentage of other test-takers a given child has bested. Moreover, the selection of questions for these tests is informed by this imperative to rank. Thus, items that a lot of students answer correctly (or incorrectly) are typically eliminated – regardless of whether the content is important – and replaced with questions that about half the kids will get right. This is done in order to make it easier to compare students to one another.
I’m unaware of any studies that have even addressed the question of whether homework enhances the depth of students’ understanding of ideas or their passion for learning. The fact that more meaningful outcomes are hard to quantify does not make test scores or grades any more valid, reliable, or useful as measures. To use them anyway calls to mind the story of the man who looked for his lost keys near a streetlight one night not because that was where he dropped them but just because the light was better there.
If our children’s ability to understand ideas from the inside out is what matters to us, and if we don’t have any evidence that giving them homework helps them to acquire this proficiency, then all the research in the world showing that test scores rise when you make kids do more schoolwork at home doesn’t mean very much. That’s particularly true if the homework was designed specifically to improve the limited band of skills that appear on these tests. It’s probably not a coincidence that, even within the existing test-based research, homework appears to work better when the assignments involve rote learning and repetition rather than real thinking.[29] After all, “works better” just means “produces higher scores on exams that measure these low-level capabilities.”
Overall, the available homework research defines “beneficial” in terms of achievement, and it defines achievement as better grades or standardized test scores. It allows us to conclude nothing about whether children’s learning improves.
Cautionary Findings
Assume for the moment that we weren’t concerned about basing our conclusions on studies that merely show homework is associated with (as opposed to responsible for) achievement, or studies that depend on questionable estimates of how much is actually completed, or studies that use deeply problematic outcome measures. Even taken on its own terms, the research turns up some findings that must give pause to anyone who thinks homework is valuable.
4. Homework matters less the longer you look. The longer the duration of a homework study, the less of an effect the homework is shown to have.[30] Cooper, who pointed this out almost in passing, speculated that less homework may have been assigned during any given week in the longer-lasting studies, but he offered no evidence that this actually happened. So here’s another theory: The studies finding the greatest effect were those that captured less of what goes on in the real world by virtue of being so brief. View a small, unrepresentative slice of a child’s life and it may appear that homework makes a contribution to achievement; keep watching and that contribution is eventually revealed to be illusory.
6. There is no evidence of any academic benefit from homework in elementary school. Even if you were untroubled by the methodological concerns I’ve been describing, the fact is that after decades of research on the topic, there is no overall positive correlation between homework and achievement (by any measure) for students before middle school – or, in many cases, before high school. More precisely, there’s virtually no research at all on the impact of homework in the primary grades – and therefore no data to support its use with young children – whereas research has been done with students in the upper elementary grades and it generally fails to find any benefit.
The absence of evidence supporting the value of homework before high school is generally acknowledged by experts in the field – even those who are far less critical of the research literature (and less troubled by the negative effects of homework) than I am. But this remarkable fact is rarely communicated to the general public. In fact, it’s with younger children, where the benefits are most questionable, if not altogether absent, that there has been the greatest increase in the quantity of homework!
In 2005, I asked Cooper if he knew of any newer studies with elementary school students, and he said he had come across exactly four, all small and all unpublished. He was kind enough to offer the citations, and I managed to track them down.
The first was a college student’s term paper that described an experiment with 39 second graders in one school. The point was to see whether children who did math homework would perform better on a quiz taken immediately afterward that covered exactly the same content as the homework. The second study, a Master’s thesis, involved 40 third graders, again in a single school and again with performance measured on a follow-up quiz dealing with the homework material, this time featuring vocabulary skills. The third study tested 64 fifth graders on social studies facts.
All three of these experiments found exactly what you would expect: The kids who had drilled on the material – a process that happened to take place at home — did better on their respective class tests. The final study, a dissertation project, involved teaching a lesson contained in a language arts textbook. The fourth graders who had been assigned homework on this material performed better on the textbook’s unit test, but did not do any better on a standardized test. And the third graders who hadn’t done any homework wound up with higher scores on the standardized test.[36] Like the other three studies, the measure of success basically involved memorizing and regurgitating facts.
Such a correlation would be a prerequisite for assuming that homework provides academic benefits but I want to repeat that it isn’t enough to justify that conclusion. A large correlation is necessary, in other words, but not sufficient. Indeed, I believe it would be a mistake to conclude that homework is a meaningful contributor to learning even in high school. Remember that Cooper and his colleagues found a positive effect only when they looked at how much homework high school students actually did (as opposed to how much the teacher assigned) and only when achievement was measured by the grades given to them by those same teachers. Also recall that Keith’s earlier positive finding with respect to homework in high school evaporated once he used a more sophisticated statistical technique to analyze the data.
All of the cautions, qualifications, and criticisms in this chapter, for that matter, are relevant to students of all ages. But it’s worth pointing out separately that absolutely no evidence exists to support the practice of assigning homework to children of elementary-school age – a fact that Cooper himself rather oddly seems to overlook (see chapter 4). No wonder “many Japanese elementary schools in the late 1990s issued ‘no homework’ policies.”[39] That development may strike us as surprising – particularly in light of how Japan’s educational system has long been held out as a model, notably by writers trying to justify their support for homework.[40] But it’s a development that seems entirely rational in light of what the evidence shows right here in the United States.
Additional Research
7. The results of national and international exams raise further doubts about homework’s role. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is often called the nation’s report card. Students who take this test also answer a series of questions about themselves, sometimes including how much time they spend on homework. For any number of reasons, one might expect to find a reasonably strong association between time spent on homework and test scores. Yet the most striking result, particularly for elementary students, is precisely the absence of such an association. Even students who reported having been assigned no homework at all didn’t fare badly on the test.
International comparisons allow us to look for correlations between homework and test scores within each country and also for correlations across countries. Let’s begin with the former. In the 1980s, 13-year-olds in a dozen nations were tested and also queried about how much they studied. “In some countries more time spent on homework was associated with higher scores; in others, it was not.”[43] In the 1990s, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) became the most popular way of assessing what was going on around the world, although of course its conclusions can’t necessarily be generalized to other subjects. Again, the results were not the same in all countries, even when the focus was limited to the final years of high school (where the contribution of homework is thought to be strongest). Usually it turned out that doing some homework had a stronger relationship with achievement than doing none at all, but doing a little homework was also better than doing a lot. [44] This is known as a “curvilinear” relationship; on a graph it looks sort of like an upside-down U.
What about correlations across cultures? Here we find people playing what I’ll later argue is a pointless game in which countries’ education systems are ranked against one another on the basis of their students’ test scores. Pointless or not, “a common explanation of the poor performance of American children in cross-cultural comparisons of academic achievement is that American children spend little time in study.”[46] The reasoning, in other words, goes something like this:
Premise 1: Our students get significantly less homework than their counterparts across the globe.
Premise 2: Other countries whup the pants off us in international exams.
Conclusion: Premise 1 explains Premise 2.
Additional conclusion: If U.S. teachers assigned more homework, our students would perform better.
Every step of this syllogism is either flawed or simply false. We’ve already seen that Premise 1 is no longer true, if indeed it ever was (see chapter 1). Premise 2 has been debunked by a number of analysts and for a number of different reasons.[47] Even if both premises were accurate, however, the conclusions don’t necessarily follow; this is another example of confusing correlation with causation.
But in fact there is now empirical evidence, not just logic, to challenge the conclusions. Two researchers looked at TIMSS data from both 1994 and 1999 in order to be able to compare practices in 50 countries. When they published their findings in 2005, they could scarcely conceal their surprise:
8. Incidental research raises further doubts about homework. Reviews of homework studies tend to overlook investigations that are primarily focused on other topics but just happen to look at homework, among several other variables. Here are two examples:
Second, back in the late 1970s, New Jersey educator Ruth Tschudin identified about three hundred “A+ teachers” on the basis of recommendations, awards, or media coverage. She then set out to compare their classroom practices to those of a matched group of other teachers. Among her findings: the exceptional teachers not only tended to give less homework but also were likely to give students more choices about their assignments.
It’s interesting to speculate on why this might be true. Are better teachers more apt to question the conventional wisdom in general? More likely to notice that homework isn’t really doing much good? More responsive to its negative effects on children and families? More likely to summon the gumption to act on what they’ve noticed? Or perhaps the researchers who reviewed the TIMMS data put their finger on it when they wrote, “It may be the poorest teachers who assign the most homework [because] effective teachers may cover all the material in class.”[52] (Imagine that quotation enlarged and posted in a school’s main office.)
This analysis rings true for Steve Phelps, who teaches math at a high school near Cincinnati. “In all honesty,” he says, “the students are compelled to be in my class for 48 minutes a day. If I can’t get done in 48 minutes what I need to get done, then I really have no business intruding on their family time.”[53] But figuring out how to get it done isn’t always easy. It certainly took time for Phil Lyons, the social studies teacher I mentioned earlier who figured out that homework was making students less interested in learning for its own sake – and who then watched as many of them began to “seek out more knowledge” once he stopped giving them homework. At the beginning of Lyons’s teaching career, he assigned a lot of homework “as a crutch, to compensate for poor lessons. . . . But as I mastered the material, homework ceased to be necessary. A no-homework policy is a challenge to me,” he adds. “I am forced to create lessons that are so good that no further drilling is required when the lessons are completed.”
Lyons has also conducted an informal investigation to gauge the impact of this shift. He gave less and less homework each year before finally eliminating it completely. And he reports that
The results observed by a single teacher in an uncontrolled experiment are obviously not conclusive. Nor is the Harvard physics study. Nor is Tschudin’s survey of terrific teachers. But when all these observations are combined with the surprising results of national and international exams, and when these, in turn, are viewed in the context of a research literature that makes a weak, correlational case for homework in high school – and offers absolutely no support for homework in elementary school – it gradually becomes clear that we’ve been sold a bill of goods.
People who never bought it will not be surprised, of course. “I have a good education and a decent job despite the fact that I didn’t spend half my adolescence doing homework,” said a mother of four children whose concern about excessive homework eventually led to her becoming an activist on the issue.[55] On the other hand, some will find these results not only unexpected but hard to believe, if only because common sense tells them that homework should help. But just as a careful look at the research overturns the canard that “studies show homework raises achievement,” so a careful look at popular beliefs about learning will challenge the reasons that lead us to expect we will find unequivocal research support in the first place. The absence of supporting data actually makes sense in retrospect, as we’ll see in chapter 6 when we examine the idea that homework “reinforces” what was learned in class, along with other declarations that are too readily accepted on faith.
Most proponents, of course, aren’t saying that all homework is always good in all respects for all kids – just as critics couldn’t defend the proposition that no homework is ever good in any way for any child. The prevailing view — which, even if not stated explicitly, seems to be the premise lurking behind our willingness to accept the practice of assigning homework to students on a regular basis — might be summarized as “Most homework is probably good for most kids.” I’ve been arguing, in effect, that even that relatively moderate position is not supported by the evidence. I’ve been arguing that any gains we might conceivably identify are both minimal and far from universal, limited to certain ages and to certain (dubious) outcome measures. What’s more, even studies that seem to show an overall benefit don’t prove that more homework – or any homework, for that matter — has such an effect for most students. Put differently, the research offers no reason to believe that students in high-quality classrooms whose teachers give little or no homework would be at a disadvantage as regards any meaningful kind of learning.
But is there some other benefit, something other than academic learning, that might be cited in homework’s defense? That will be the subject of the following chapter…
For full citations, please see the reference section of The Homework Myth .
1. Cooper et al., p. 70.
2. This early study by Joseph Mayer Rice is cited in Gill and Schlossman 2004, p. 175.
3. Goldstein.
5. Paschal et al.; Walberg et al.
6. Barber, p. 56. Two of the four studies reviewed by Paschal et al. found no benefit to homework at all. The third found benefits at two of three grade levels, but all of the students in this study who were assigned homework also received parental help. The last study found that students who were given math puzzles (unrelated to what was being taught in class) did as well as those who got traditional math homework.
7. Jongsma, p. 703.
8. There is reason to question whether this technique is really appropriate for a topic like homework, and thus whether the conclusions drawn from it would be valid. Meta-analyses may be useful for combining multiple studies of, say, the efficacy of a blood pressure medication, but not necessarily studies dealing with different aspects of complex human behavior. Mark Lepper (1995), a research psychologist at Stanford University, has argued that “the purely statistical effect sizes used to compare studies in a meta-analysis completely and inappropriately ignore the crucial social context in which the conduct and interpretation of research in psychology takes place.” The real-world significance of certain studies is lost, he maintains, when they are reduced to a common denominator. “The use of purely statistical measures of effect size” – overlooking what he calls the “psychological size of effects” – “promotes a[n] illusion of comparability and quantitative precision that is subtly but deeply at odds with the values that define what makes a study or a finding interesting or important.” This concern would seem to apply in the case of distinctive investigations of homework. (Quotations from pp. 414, 415, 420.)
9. Cooper 1999a, 2001. The proportion of variance that can be attributed to homework is derived by squaring the average correlation found in the studies, which Cooper reports as +.19.
10. Cooper et al. 2006.
12. Hofferth and Sandberg, p. 306.
13. Cooper 1999a, p. 100. It’s also theoretically possible that the relationship is reciprocal: Homework contributes to higher achievement, which then, in turn, predisposes those students to spend more time on it. But correlations between the two leave us unable to disentangle the two effects and determine which is stronger.
14. Cool and Keith. Interestingly, Herbert Walberg, an avid proponent of homework, discovered that claims of private school superiority over public schools proved similarly groundless once other variables were controlled in a reanalysis of the same “High School and Beyond” data set (Walberg and Shanahan).
15. For example, see Chen and Stevenson; Epstein; Georgiou; Gorges and Elliott.
16. Epstein and Van Voorhis, pp. 183-84. Also see Walberg et al., pp. 76-77.
17. Muhlenbruck et al. In Cooper et al. 1998, “there was some evidence that teachers in Grades 2 and 4 reported assigning more homework to classes with lower achievement, but students and parents reported that teachers assigned more homework to higher achieving students, especially when grades were the measure of achievement” (p. 80).
18. Cooper et al. 2006, p. 44.
19. Cooper et al. 2001, pp. 190-91.
20. Chen and Stevenson, p. 558.
21. “Several surveys have found that students consistently report their homework time to be higher than teachers’ estimates” (Ziegler 1986, p. 21).
22. Ziegler 1992, p. 602. Cooper (1989a, p. 161), too, describes the quality of homework research as “far from ideal” for a number of reasons, including the relative rarity of random-assignment studies.
23. Dressel, p. 6.
24. For a more detailed discussion about (and review of research regarding) the effects of grades, see Kohn 1999a, 1999b.
25. Cooper 1999a, p. 72. That difference shrank in the latest batch of studies (Cooper et al. 2006), but still trended in the same direction.
26. Cooper et al. 1998. The correlation was .17.
27. See Kohn 1999b, 2000, which includes analysis and research to support the claims made in the following paragraphs.
28. Nevertheless, Cooper criticizes studies that use only one of these measures and argues in favor of those, like his own, that make use of both (see Cooper et al. 1978, p. 71). The problems with tests and grades may be different, but they don’t cancel each other out when the two variables are used at the same time.
29. Cooper 1989a, p. 99. On the other hand, a study reporting a modest correlation between achievement test scores and the amount of math homework assigned also found that “repetitive exercises” of the type intended to help students practice skills actually “had detrimental effects on learning” (Trautwein et al., p. 41).
30. Cooper 1999a, p. 72; 2001, p. 16. The studies he reviewed lasted anywhere from two to thirty weeks.
31. Natriello and McDill. “An additional hour of homework each night results in an increase in English [grade point average] of 0.130” (p. 27).
32. Tymms and Fitz-Gibbon. Quotation appears on p. 8. If anything, this summary understates the actual findings. When individual students’ scores on the English A-level exams were examined, those who worked for more than seven hours a week in a particular subject “tended to get a third of a grade better than students of the same gender and ability who worked less than [two hours] a week, and if students with similar prior achievement are considered, the advantage only amounted to about a fifth of a grade.” When the researchers compared classes rather than individuals – which is probably the more appropriate unit of analysis for a homework study — the average A-level grades in heavy-homework classes were no different than those in light-homework classes, once other variables were held constant (pp. 7-8).
33. Barber, p. 55.
34. Cooper 1989a, p. 109. Why this might be true is open to interpretation. Cooper (2001, p. 20) speculates that it’s because younger children have limited attention spans and poor study skills, but this explanation proceeds from – and seems designed to rescue — the premise that the problem is not with the homework itself. Rather, it’s the “cognitive limitations” of children that prevent them from taking advantage of the value that’s assumed to inhere in homework. While it wouldn’t be sufficient to substantiate this account, it would certainly be necessary to show that homework usually is valuable for older students. If there’s any reason to doubt that claim, then we’d have to revisit some of our more fundamental assumptions about how and why students learn.
35. The unpublished study by C. Bents-Hill et al. is described in Cooper 2001, p. 26.
36. The four, in order, are Finstad; Townsend; Foyle; and Meloy.
37. When Cooper and his colleagues reviewed a new batch of studies in 2006, they once again found that “the mean correlation between time spent on homework and achievement was not significantly different from zero for elementary school students” (Cooper et al. 2006, p. 43).
38. Cooper 1989a, p. 100. The correlations were .02, .07, and .25, respectively.
39. Baker and Letendre, p. 118.
40. For example, see any number of writings by Herbert Walberg. Another possible reason that “elementary achievement is high” in Japan: teachers there “are free from the pressure to teach to standardized tests” (Lewis, p. 201). Until they get to high school, there are no such tests in Japan.
41. See the table called “Average Mathematics Scores by Students’ Report on Time Spent Daily on Mathematics Homework at Grades 4, 8, and 12: 2000,” available from the National Center for Education Statistics at: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/mathematics/results/ homework.asp. As far as I can tell, no data on how 2004 NAEP math scores varied by homework completion have been published for nine- and thirteen-year-olds. Seventeen-year-olds were not asked to quantify the number of hours devoted to homework in 2004, but were asked whether they did homework “often,” “sometimes,” or “never” – and here more homework was correlated with higher scores (U.S. Department of Education 2005, p. 63).
42. In 2000, fourth graders who reported doing more than an hour of homework a night got exactly same score as those whose teachers assigned no homework at all. Those in the middle, who said they did 30-60 minutes a night, got slightly higher scores. (See http://nces.ed.gov/ nationsreportcard/reading/results/homework.asp). In 2004, those who weren’t assigned any homework did about as well as those who got either less than one hour or one to two hours; students who were assigned more than two hours a night did worse than any of the other three groups. For older students, more homework was correlated with higher reading scores (U.S. Department of Education 2005, p. 50).
43. Ziegler 1992, p. 604.
44. Mullis et al. 1998, p. 114.
45. Chen and Stevenson, pp. 556-57.
46. Ibid., p. 551.
47. Even at a first pass, TIMSS results suggest that the U.S. does poorly in relative terms only at the high school level, not with respect to the performance of younger students. But TIMSS results really don’t support the proposition that our seniors are inferior. That’s true, first, because, at least on the science test, the scores among most of the countries are actually pretty similar in absolute terms (Gibbs and Fox, p. 87). Second, the participating countries “had such different patterns of participation and exclusion rates, school and student characteristics, and societal contexts that test score rankings are meaningless as an indicator of the quality of education” (Rotberg, p. 1031). Specifically, the students taking the test in many of the countries were older, richer, and drawn from a more selective pool than those in the U.S. Third, when one pair of researchers carefully reviewed half a dozen different international achievement surveys conducted from 1991 to 2001, they found that “U.S. students have generally performed above average in comparisons with students in other industrialized nations” (Boe and Shin; quotation appears on p. 694). Also see the many publications on this subject by Gerald Bracey.
48. Baker and Letendre, pp. 127-28, 130. Emphasis in original.
49. Mullis et al. 2001, chap. 6.
50. Tsuneyoshi, p. 375.
51. Sadler and Tai; personal communication with Phil Sadler, August 2005. The larger study also found that students who took Advanced Placement science courses – and did well on the test – didn’t fare much better in college science courses than those who didn’t take the A.P. classes at all.
52. Baker and Letendre, p. 126.
53. Phelps, personal communication, March 2006.
54. Lyons, personal communication, December 2005.
55. Quoted in Lambert.
56. This New Jersey principal is quoted in Winerip, p. 28.
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Teaching & Learning
Will chatgpt make students turn away from homework-help services, by daniel mollenkamp feb 27, 2023.
Photo By kriangkrainetnangrong/ Shutterstock
The emergence of ChatGPT provoked widespread concern that the AI chatbot is the ultimate tool for students cheating on homework, since it can answer just about any question in paragraph form.
As companies race to come out with tools they claim can detect when prose was written by a bot, some are wondering whether a previous generation of homework-help tools might soon be rendered obsolete.
The homework-help business — led by giants like Chegg and Course Hero — has long been both profitable and controversial. The popularity of Chegg’s subscription service even became a verb: “Chegging.” It’s a form of question and answer business that some believe plays to students' worst instincts . (Need answers to homework — or a test? Chegg it.) Though, the company denies that its services are meant to allow cheating. The cost of the subscription service currently starts at $15.95 per month, according to the site.
Some instructors have opposed companies like Chegg and Course Hero, as trying to get content related to the courses they teach removed can cause a headache . The chatbots represent a new headache, for teachers and possibly also for homework-help companies.
That whole business could be threatened by free tools like ChatGPT, argues Derek Newton, who runs The Cheat Sheet , a newsletter that covers academic dishonesty.
For Newton, the primary motivation of a student using homework-help services is laziness or a lack of preparedness. And so having a free alternative that can give answers to questions — like ChatGPT — could shrink the number of students who are willing to pay, even if the answers are slightly worse or riskier, either because there’s a chance of getting caught by one of those AI detectors or of the information just being wrong. (In their current form, AI chatbots are prone to giving incorrect information.)
Bad for Business?
It's not just homework-help. Even online tutoring companies like Tutor.com may see a decline in business thanks to the arrival of algorithm-generated writing, says edtech columnist Phill Hill.
Why? It’s disruptive: The danger — in addition to the possibility noted by Newton, that students will stop paying for these services — is that startups will develop specialized services, Hill argues.
But Chegg says it isn’t worried: “We do not expect ChatGPT to materially impact our business,” a Chegg spokesperson said in an email to EdSurge.
The company already uses an older version of ChatGPT’s technology, GPT-2, to support students in their writing products with grammar, paraphrasing and sentence structure, said Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig in a statement . “We also use it to increase speed and quality, while reducing the costs of content development,” he added.
Not everyone is satisfied that AI will be a good thing for the company and others in the sector, however.
“I think that's a naively optimistic take,” Hill says of the notion that AI will help rather than hurt Chegg. “[But] investors didn't really press hard on the subject the way I would have expected.” That may simply be because of how new this all is, he says.
Others think Chegg may deserve more credit.
Chegg might actually become a lucrative customer for ChatGPT, says Matt Tower, an education industry analyst who writes a newsletter about edtech .
These AI tools are probability models, and so they don’t supply the correct answer to questions but the highest probability answer to a question, Tower says. For a student using it for answers, this introduces a risk that the information isn’t correct. Being able to refine those answers is an area where Chegg theoretically has a strong advantage, Tower adds.
What might that look like for students? In the future, getting answers to tests may look less like typing a question in a search bar and more like talking with a chatbot, which can use personalized cues to tailor answers specifically to students, Tower predicts. It’s the difference between getting a generic answer to a question and getting an answer to the question based on the fact the algorithm knows you’re in a specific course. But the precise way that develops will depend on companies like Chegg and how they adjust to the shifting nature of homework help, he notes.
Whether that’s a radical shift for students is also unclear. For Newton, of The Cheat Sheet, the underlying motivation of students hasn’t changed, only the form that it’s taking. It means that what’s at stake is not whether students are being dishonest, but how: “People are now using ChatGPT that they weren't six months ago, because it didn't exist," Newton says. “And so, they’re using Chegg less. But they're still cheating.”
Daniel Mollenkamp ( @dtmollenkamp ) is a reporter for EdSurge. He can be reached at [email protected]
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Why is Homework Important?
Why is Homework Important? Homework can be a divisive topic. In this article, we will discuss why it’s important and how it helps with your child’s development.
There is a strong connection between regularly completing homework and higher accomplishments in subjects such as English, Maths and Science. The Department of Education in the United Kingdom advises that spending time doing homework brings several benefits, more so for the students who put in two to three hours a night. Understanding the value of homework can help increase motivation and productivity. In this article, we’ll help you understand why homework is important and discuss all its benefits for both children and parents.
Benefits of Homework
Homework is important because it develops core skills in young children that will serve them throughout school and working life. Improved grades, discipline, time management, using resources and improving communication are all vital life skills that will open the door to unique opportunities and help children find success in their careers. Doing regular homework should be considered as an investment in your child’s future.
Through encouraging regular homework and supporting your child with their assignments, you can expect to see the following advantages:
1. Discipline of Practice
Repeating a task multiple times can feel arduous, but it’s necessary to help increase your child’s skill and understanding of a subject. Regular homework will make certain concepts easier to understand and put them in an advantageous position should they seek a vocational career.
2. Time Management Skills
Homework goes beyond just the task itself; it helps children take control of their workload and increase their time management skills. Homework is set with a deadline and taking ownership of this deadline helps them think independently and develop problem-solving skills. This is a prime example of why homework is important because time management is a vital life skill that helps children throughout higher education and their careers.
3. Communication Network
Homework acts as a bridge and can help teachers and parents learn more about how students like to learn, providing a deeper understanding of how to approach their learning and development. Many parents also want their child to receive homework so they can understand what they’re learning at school.
4. Comfortable Work Environment
Some children struggle to learn outside of their comfort zone, and while classrooms are designed to be warm and welcoming, there is often no place like home. Homework is an opportunity to learn and retain information in an environment where they feel most comfortable, which can help accelerate their development.
5. Using Learning Materials
Throughout a child’s education, understanding how to use resources such as libraries and the internet is important. Homework teaches children to actively search for information using these resources to complete tasks, and this is a skill that will be fundamental throughout their lives.
6. Revision Discipline
Regular homework helps children discover a pattern that will help them when they’re required to study for important tests and exams. Children who are familiar with a routine of completing homework will find it easy to adapt to a schedule of doing regular revision at home. Skills such as accessing learning materials, time management, and discipline will help improve how children revise, and ultimately, improve their grades.
7. Additional Time to Learn
Children learn at different paces, and the time spent in the classroom might not be enough for some students to fully grasp the key concepts of a subject. Having additional time for learning at home can help children gain a deeper understanding than they would if they were solely reliant on their time in school. Homework is important because it gives parents and children the freedom and the time to focus on subjects that they may be struggling with. This extra time can make a big difference when it comes to exams and grades.
Helping Your Child With Homework
We’ve discussed why it is important to do regular homework, but children may still find it difficult to stay motivated. Parents can play an important role in supporting their child with homework, so here are some of the ways you can help.
1. Homework-friendly Area
Having a dedicated space for children to do homework will help them stay focused. Make sure it is well-lit and stocked with everything they’ll need for their assignments.
2. Routine Study Time
A regular routine helps children get used to working at home. Some children work best in the morning, while others may prefer the afternoon. Work out a routine where your child is their most productive.
3. Make Sure They’re Learning
Homework is important, but only if children use this time to learn. If you do the work for them, they’re not going to see any of the benefits we listed above. It’s important you’re there to support and help them understand the work, so they can do it themselves.
4. Praise Work and Effort
Recognising the hard work that they’re putting in and praising them for it is a great way to get children to respond positively to homework. Pin their impressive test grades up in their homeworking space or around the house for extra motivation.
5. Make a Plan
Children can get overwhelmed if they have a lot of work to do. On homework-heavy nights, help them make a plan and break down the work into sections. This will help make the work more manageable. If your child responds well to this, you could do this each time they sit down to do work at home.
Understanding why homework is important and oftentimes necessary helps improve both motivation and productivity in young children. It also makes parents aware of the role they can play in supporting them. At Nord Anglia Education, we focus on bringing children, parents, and teachers together in a common effort to improve student learning through homework. You can learn more about our schools and the curriculum we teach by exploring our schools .
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And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students. But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When...
Parents don't actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.
It can promote student independence and self-discipline. It can provide a connection between what is learned in school and the outside world. It can provide opportunities for parents to be engaged ...
5 Ways to Help Students Focus on Learning Rather Than Grades When teachers give retakes and shift the way they talk about grades, students concentrate on the skills they're gaining—not their scores. By Crystal Frommert June 30, 2021 PhotoAlto / Alamy Stock Photo
Create a homework schedule. A homework schedule can help kids set a specific time and place for studying. Find a time of day when they concentrate best and when you're available to help. Choose a time when neither of you are in a hurry to get somewhere else. Also think about creating a designated homework space or homework station.
While homework may help some students improve in specific subjects, if they have outside help there is no real proof that homework makes for improvements. It can be a challenge to really enforce the completion of homework, and students can still get decent grades without doing their homework.
Homework also helps students develop key skills that they'll use throughout their lives: accountability, autonomy, discipline, time management, self-direction, critical thinking, and independent problem-solving. Freireich and Platzer noted that "homework helps students acquire the skills needed to plan, organize, and complete their work."
A homework assignment could require students to answer questions about what was covered in class that day without consulting their notes. Research has found that retrieval practice and similar...
Homework can affect students' health, social life and grades. The hours logged in class, and the hours logged on schoolwork can lead to students feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated. Navigating the line between developing learning skills and feeling frustrated can be tricky.
"Busy work" does not help students learn Students and parents appear to carry similar critiques of homework, specifically regarding assignments identified as busy work—long sheets of repetitive math problems, word searches, or reading logs seemingly designed to make children dislike books.
The effects of homework are mixed. While adolescents across middle and high school have an array of life situations that can make doing homework easier or harder, it's well known that homework magnifies inequity.However, we also know that learning how to manage time and work independently outside of the school day is valuable for lifelong learning.
Homework, which aids in the study of facts, is required by students. It improves students' problem-solving and thinking skills by assisting them in their problem-solving abilities. Furthermore, it assists students in developing the habit of regularly revising what they are learning in the classroom.
With homework, you can learn using different resources like text, libraries, book chapters and other resources. It will also help you to deal with difficult challenges. Students can take benefit from homework because it helps to develop their learning beyond the classroom. You should also read this (2022) Best Homework Songs to Listen While Study.
"Even in kids as young as age 7, research shows that homework in particular areas can help students learn, especially things children need to learn through practice," said Cooper, the author of ...
By limiting the amount of homework and improving the quality of assignments, you can improve learning outcomes for your students. SHARE FOLLOW Like 32K Beyond the classroom Professional development Teaching moments Classroom innovation
However, students spending more time on something that is not easy to understand or needs to be explained by a teacher does not help these students learn and, in fact, may confuse them. "The results from this study imply that homework should be purposeful," he added, "and that the purpose must be understood by both the teacher and the ...
When students perceive homework as busy work, meaningless, or of little value to the teacher, they are less likely to complete it and may become less interested in learning and in school in...
Homework is the best example of how educators can improve the use of practice. No matter whether as an educator or a parent, homework as practice remains a standard that might serves many...
Nevertheless, most research purporting to show a positive effect of homework seems to be based on the assumption that when students who get (or do) more homework also score better on standardized tests, it follows that the higher scores were due to their having had more homework.
The homework-help business — led by giants like Chegg and Course Hero — has long been both profitable and controversial. The popularity of Chegg's subscription service even became a verb: "Chegging." It's a form of question and answer business that some believe plays to students' worst instincts. (Need answers to homework — or a test?
Online College Assignments and Homework Help by. Free online and in-person tutoring by certified teachers is available in reading, math and science to all K-12 students who live in Miami-Dade County. 1.
Homework acts as a bridge and can help teachers and parents learn more about how students like to learn, providing a deeper understanding of how to approach their learning and development. Many parents also want their child to receive homework so they can understand what they're learning at school. 4.