do you believe homework helps students learn

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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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?

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Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?

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Educators should be thrilled by these numbers. Pleasing a majority of parents regarding homework and having equal numbers of dissenters shouting "too much!" and "too little!" is about as good as they can hope for.

But opinions cannot tell us whether homework works; only research can, which is why my colleagues and I have conducted a combined analysis of dozens of homework studies to examine whether homework is beneficial and what amount of homework is appropriate for our children.

The homework question is best answered by comparing students who are assigned homework with students assigned no homework but who are similar in other ways. The results of such studies suggest that homework can improve students' scores on the class tests that come at the end of a topic. Students assigned homework in 2nd grade did better on math, 3rd and 4th graders did better on English skills and vocabulary, 5th graders on social studies, 9th through 12th graders on American history, and 12th graders on Shakespeare.

Less authoritative are 12 studies that link the amount of homework to achievement, but control for lots of other factors that might influence this connection. These types of studies, often based on national samples of students, also find a positive link between time on homework and achievement.

Yet other studies simply correlate homework and achievement with no attempt to control for student differences. In 35 such studies, about 77 percent find the link between homework and achievement is positive. Most interesting, though, is these results suggest little or no relationship between homework and achievement for elementary school students.

Why might that be? Younger children have less developed study habits and are less able to tune out distractions at home. Studies also suggest that young students who are struggling in school take more time to complete homework assignments simply because these assignments are more difficult for them.

These recommendations are consistent with the conclusions reached by our analysis. Practice assignments do improve scores on class tests at all grade levels. A little amount of homework may help elementary school students build study habits. Homework for junior high students appears to reach the point of diminishing returns after about 90 minutes a night. For high school students, the positive line continues to climb until between 90 minutes and 2½ hours of homework a night, after which returns diminish.

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.

Opponents of homework counter that it can also have negative effects. They argue it can lead to boredom with schoolwork, since all activities remain interesting only for so long. Homework can deny students access to leisure activities that also teach important life skills. Parents can get too involved in homework -- pressuring their child and confusing him by using different instructional techniques than the teacher.

My feeling is that homework policies should prescribe amounts of homework consistent with the research evidence, but which also give individual schools and teachers some flexibility to take into account the unique needs and circumstances of their students and families. In general, teachers should avoid either extreme.

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Does homework really work?

by: Leslie Crawford | Updated: December 12, 2023

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You know the drill. It’s 10:15 p.m., and the cardboard-and-toothpick Golden Gate Bridge is collapsing. The pages of polynomials have been abandoned. The paper on the Battle of Waterloo seems to have frozen in time with Napoleon lingering eternally over his breakfast at Le Caillou. Then come the tears and tantrums — while we parents wonder, Does the gain merit all this pain? Is this just too much homework?

However the drama unfolds night after night, year after year, most parents hold on to the hope that homework (after soccer games, dinner, flute practice, and, oh yes, that childhood pastime of yore known as playing) advances their children academically.

But what does homework really do for kids? Is the forest’s worth of book reports and math and spelling sheets the average American student completes in their 12 years of primary schooling making a difference? Or is it just busywork?

Homework haterz

Whether or not homework helps, or even hurts, depends on who you ask. If you ask my 12-year-old son, Sam, he’ll say, “Homework doesn’t help anything. It makes kids stressed-out and tired and makes them hate school more.”

Nothing more than common kid bellyaching?

Maybe, but in the fractious field of homework studies, it’s worth noting that Sam’s sentiments nicely synopsize one side of the ivory tower debate. Books like The End of Homework , The Homework Myth , and The Case Against Homework the film Race to Nowhere , and the anguished parent essay “ My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me ” make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers.

One Canadian couple took their homework apostasy all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. After arguing that there was no evidence that it improved academic performance, they won a ruling that exempted their two children from all homework.

So what’s the real relationship between homework and academic achievement?

How much is too much?

To answer this question, researchers have been doing their homework on homework, conducting and examining hundreds of studies. Chris Drew Ph.D., founder and editor at The Helpful Professor recently compiled multiple statistics revealing the folly of today’s after-school busy work. Does any of the data he listed below ring true for you?

• 45 percent of parents think homework is too easy for their child, primarily because it is geared to the lowest standard under the Common Core State Standards .

• 74 percent of students say homework is a source of stress , defined as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems.

• Students in high-performing high schools spend an average of 3.1 hours a night on homework , even though 1 to 2 hours is the optimal duration, according to a peer-reviewed study .

Not included in the list above is the fact many kids have to abandon activities they love — like sports and clubs — because homework deprives them of the needed time to enjoy themselves with other pursuits.

Conversely, The Helpful Professor does list a few pros of homework, noting it teaches discipline and time management, and helps parents know what’s being taught in the class.

The oft-bandied rule on homework quantity — 10 minutes a night per grade (starting from between 10 to 20 minutes in first grade) — is listed on the National Education Association’s website and the National Parent Teacher Association’s website , but few schools follow this rule.

Do you think your child is doing excessive homework? Harris Cooper Ph.D., author of a meta-study on homework , recommends talking with the teacher. “Often there is a miscommunication about the goals of homework assignments,” he says. “What appears to be problematic for kids, why they are doing an assignment, can be cleared up with a conversation.” Also, Cooper suggests taking a careful look at how your child is doing the assignments. It may seem like they’re taking two hours, but maybe your child is wandering off frequently to get a snack or getting distracted.

Less is often more

If your child is dutifully doing their work but still burning the midnight oil, it’s worth intervening to make sure your child gets enough sleep. A 2012 study of 535 high school students found that proper sleep may be far more essential to brain and body development.

For elementary school-age children, Cooper’s research at Duke University shows there is no measurable academic advantage to homework. For middle-schoolers, Cooper found there is a direct correlation between homework and achievement if assignments last between one to two hours per night. After two hours, however, achievement doesn’t improve. For high schoolers, Cooper’s research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in a class with no homework.

Many schools are starting to act on this research. A Florida superintendent abolished homework in her 42,000 student district, replacing it with 20 minutes of nightly reading. She attributed her decision to “ solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students .”

More family time

A 2020 survey by Crayola Experience reports 82 percent of children complain they don’t have enough quality time with their parents. Homework deserves much of the blame. “Kids should have a chance to just be kids and do things they enjoy, particularly after spending six hours a day in school,” says Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth . “It’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.”

By far, the best replacement for homework — for both parents and children — is bonding, relaxing time together.

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What’s the Right Amount of Homework?

Decades of research show that homework has some benefits, especially for students in middle and high school—but there are risks to assigning too much.

Many teachers and parents believe that homework helps students build study skills and review concepts learned in class. Others see homework as disruptive and unnecessary, leading to burnout and turning kids off to school. Decades of research show that the issue is more nuanced and complex than most people think: Homework is beneficial, but only to a degree. Students in high school gain the most, while younger kids benefit much less.

The National PTA and the National Education Association support the “ 10-minute homework guideline ”—a nightly 10 minutes of homework per grade level. But many teachers and parents are quick to point out that what matters is the quality of the homework assigned and how well it meets students’ needs, not the amount of time spent on it.

The guideline doesn’t account for students who may need to spend more—or less—time on assignments. In class, teachers can make adjustments to support struggling students, but at home, an assignment that takes one student 30 minutes to complete may take another twice as much time—often for reasons beyond their control. And homework can widen the achievement gap, putting students from low-income households and students with learning disabilities at a disadvantage.

However, the 10-minute guideline is useful in setting a limit: When kids spend too much time on homework, there are real consequences to consider.

Small Benefits for Elementary Students

As young children begin school, the focus should be on cultivating a love of learning, and assigning too much homework can undermine that goal. And young students often don’t have the study skills to benefit fully from homework, so it may be a poor use of time (Cooper, 1989 ; Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). A more effective activity may be nightly reading, especially if parents are involved. The benefits of reading are clear: If students aren’t proficient readers by the end of third grade, they’re less likely to succeed academically and graduate from high school (Fiester, 2013 ).

For second-grade teacher Jacqueline Fiorentino, the minor benefits of homework did not outweigh the potential drawback of turning young children against school at an early age, so she experimented with dropping mandatory homework. “Something surprising happened: They started doing more work at home,” Fiorentino writes . “This inspiring group of 8-year-olds used their newfound free time to explore subjects and topics of interest to them.” She encouraged her students to read at home and offered optional homework to extend classroom lessons and help them review material.

Moderate Benefits for Middle School Students

As students mature and develop the study skills necessary to delve deeply into a topic—and to retain what they learn—they also benefit more from homework. Nightly assignments can help prepare them for scholarly work, and research shows that homework can have moderate benefits for middle school students (Cooper et al., 2006 ). Recent research also shows that online math homework, which can be designed to adapt to students’ levels of understanding, can significantly boost test scores (Roschelle et al., 2016 ).

There are risks to assigning too much, however: A 2015 study found that when middle school students were assigned more than 90 to 100 minutes of daily homework, their math and science test scores began to decline (Fernández-Alonso, Suárez-Álvarez, & Muñiz, 2015 ). Crossing that upper limit can drain student motivation and focus. The researchers recommend that “homework should present a certain level of challenge or difficulty, without being so challenging that it discourages effort.” Teachers should avoid low-effort, repetitive assignments, and assign homework “with the aim of instilling work habits and promoting autonomous, self-directed learning.”

In other words, it’s the quality of homework that matters, not the quantity. Brian Sztabnik, a veteran middle and high school English teacher, suggests that teachers take a step back and ask themselves these five questions :

• How long will it take to complete?
• Have all learners been considered?
• Will an assignment encourage future success?
• Will an assignment place material in a context the classroom cannot?
• Does an assignment offer support when a teacher is not there?

More Benefits for High School Students, but Risks as Well

By the time they reach high school, students should be well on their way to becoming independent learners, so homework does provide a boost to learning at this age, as long as it isn’t overwhelming (Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). When students spend too much time on homework—more than two hours each night—it takes up valuable time to rest and spend time with family and friends. A 2013 study found that high school students can experience serious mental and physical health problems, from higher stress levels to sleep deprivation, when assigned too much homework (Galloway, Conner, & Pope, 2013 ).

Homework in high school should always relate to the lesson and be doable without any assistance, and feedback should be clear and explicit.

Teachers should also keep in mind that not all students have equal opportunities to finish their homework at home, so incomplete homework may not be a true reflection of their learning—it may be more a result of issues they face outside of school. They may be hindered by issues such as lack of a quiet space at home, resources such as a computer or broadband connectivity, or parental support (OECD, 2014 ). In such cases, giving low homework scores may be unfair.

Since the quantities of time discussed here are totals, teachers in middle and high school should be aware of how much homework other teachers are assigning. It may seem reasonable to assign 30 minutes of daily homework, but across six subjects, that’s three hours—far above a reasonable amount even for a high school senior. Psychologist Maurice Elias sees this as a common mistake: Individual teachers create homework policies that in aggregate can overwhelm students. He suggests that teachers work together to develop a school-wide homework policy and make it a key topic of back-to-school night and the first parent-teacher conferences of the school year.

Parents Play a Key Role

Homework can be a powerful tool to help parents become more involved in their child’s learning (Walker et al., 2004 ). It can provide insights into a child’s strengths and interests, and can also encourage conversations about a child’s life at school. If a parent has positive attitudes toward homework, their children are more likely to share those same values, promoting academic success.

But it’s also possible for parents to be overbearing, putting too much emphasis on test scores or grades, which can be disruptive for children (Madjar, Shklar, & Moshe, 2015 ). Parents should avoid being overly intrusive or controlling—students report feeling less motivated to learn when they don’t have enough space and autonomy to do their homework (Orkin, May, & Wolf, 2017 ; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008 ; Silinskas & Kikas, 2017 ). So while homework can encourage parents to be more involved with their kids, it’s important to not make it a source of conflict.

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Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think

For decades, there has been evidence that classroom techniques designed to get students to participate in the learning process produces better educational outcomes at virtually all levels.

And a new Harvard study suggests it may be important to let students know it.

The study , published Sept. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that, though students felt as if they learned more through traditional lectures, they actually learned more when taking part in classrooms that employed so-called active-learning strategies.

Lead author Louis Deslauriers , the director of science teaching and learning and senior physics preceptor, knew that students would learn more from active learning. He published a key study in Science in 2011 that showed just that. But many students and faculty remained hesitant to switch to it.

“Often, students seemed genuinely to prefer smooth-as-silk traditional lectures,” Deslauriers said. “We wanted to take them at their word. Perhaps they actually felt like they learned more from lectures than they did from active learning.”

In addition to Deslauriers, the study is authored by director of sciences education and physics lecturer Logan McCarty , senior preceptor in applied physics Kelly Miller, preceptor in physics Greg Kestin , and Kristina Callaghan, now a physics lecturer at the University of California, Merced.

The question of whether students’ perceptions of their learning matches with how well they’re actually learning is particularly important, Deslauriers said, because while students eventually see the value of active learning, initially it can feel frustrating.

“Deep learning is hard work. The effort involved in active learning can be misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning,” he said. “On the other hand, a superstar lecturer can explain things in such a way as to make students feel like they are learning more than they actually are.”

To understand that dichotomy, Deslauriers and his co-authors designed an experiment that would expose students in an introductory physics class to both traditional lectures and active learning.

For the first 11 weeks of the 15-week class, students were taught using standard methods by an experienced instructor. In the 12th week, half the class was randomly assigned to a classroom that used active learning, while the other half attended highly polished lectures. In a subsequent class, the two groups were reversed. Notably, both groups used identical class content and only active engagement with the material was toggled on and off.

Following each class, students were surveyed on how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I feel like I learned a lot from this lecture” and “I wish all my physics courses were taught this way.” Students were also tested on how much they learned in the class with 12 multiple-choice questions.

When the results were tallied, the authors found that students felt as if they learned more from the lectures, but in fact scored higher on tests following the active learning sessions. “Actual learning and feeling of learning were strongly anticorrelated,” Deslauriers said, “as shown through the robust statistical analysis by co-author Kelly Miller, who is an expert in educational statistics and active learning.”

Those results, the study authors are quick to point out, shouldn’t be interpreted as suggesting students dislike active learning. In fact, many studies have shown students quickly warm to the idea, once they begin to see the results. “In all the courses at Harvard that we’ve transformed to active learning,” Deslauriers said, “the overall course evaluations went up.”

Co-author Kestin, who in addition to being a physicist is a video producer with PBS’ NOVA, said, “It can be tempting to engage the class simply by folding lectures into a compelling ‘story,’ especially when that’s what students seem to like. I show my students the data from this study on the first day of class to help them appreciate the importance of their own involvement in active learning.”

McCarty, who oversees curricular efforts across the sciences, hopes this study will encourage more of his colleagues to embrace active learning.

“We want to make sure that other instructors are thinking hard about the way they’re teaching,” he said. “In our classes, we start each topic by asking students to gather in small groups to solve some problems. While they work, we walk around the room to observe them and answer questions. Then we come together and give a short lecture targeted specifically at the misconceptions and struggles we saw during the problem-solving activity. So far we’ve transformed over a dozen classes to use this kind of active-learning approach. It’s extremely efficient — we can cover just as much material as we would using lectures.”

A pioneer in work on active learning, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Eric Mazur hailed the study as debunking long-held beliefs about how students learn.

“This work unambiguously debunks the illusion of learning from lectures,” he said. “It also explains why instructors and students cling to the belief that listening to lectures constitutes learning. I recommend every lecturer reads this article.”

Dean of Science Christopher Stubbs , Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, was an early convert. “When I first switched to teaching using active learning, some students resisted that change. This research confirms that faculty should persist and encourage active learning. Active engagement in every classroom, led by our incredible science faculty, should be the hallmark of residential undergraduate education at Harvard.”

Ultimately, Deslauriers said, the study shows that it’s important to ensure that neither instructors nor students are fooled into thinking that lectures are the best learning option. “Students might give fabulous evaluations to an amazing lecturer based on this feeling of learning, even though their actual learning isn’t optimal,” he said. “This could help to explain why study after study shows that student evaluations seem to be completely uncorrelated with actual learning.”

This research was supported with funding from the Harvard FAS Division of Science.

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The learning network | does your homework help you learn.

Does Your Homework Help You Learn?

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

• See all Student Opinion »

New research suggests that a lot of assigned homework amounts to pointless busy work that doesn’t help students learn, while more thoughtful assignments can help them develop skills and acquire knowledge. How would you characterize the homework you get?

In the Sunday Review article “The Trouble With Homework,” Annie Murphy Paul reviews the research on homework:

The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of international academic rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last December. In a 2008 survey, one-third of parents polled rated the quality of their children’s homework assignments as fair or poor, and 4 in 10 said they believed that some or a great deal of homework was busywork. A new study, coming in the Economics of Education Review, reports that homework in science, English and history has “little to no impact” on student test scores. (The authors did note a positive effect for math homework.) Enriching children’s classroom learning requires making homework not shorter or longer, but smarter.

She goes on to enumerate some of the aspects of effective independent assignments, like “retrieval practice,” which basically means doing practice tests to reinforce learning and commit it to memory, and “interleaving,” in which problems are not grouped into sets by type, but rather scattered throughout an assignment, which makes the brain work harder to grasp the material.

Students: Tell us how effective you think your homework is. What kinds of assignments seem pointless? Which ones are confusing or frustrating? Which ones are most engaging and interesting? Which ones are you fairly sure help you learn and grow?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

“I see homework as a big part that helps me learn and grow” that’s what I always said up till I was moved to a different math class. My old math teacher made math easy and fun as well as understandable. But when I was moved I got confused easily, I found it boring, and I even found paying attention hard. Then there’s my English class. I love English with all my heart but my teacher makes me feel like I’m in Preschool! She has hand signs for every rule and if we don’t do them we get more homework! She always puts us into groups and so far every group I’ve been placed in I can’t get along in. One group wouldn’t let me talk and when I gave my opion they scolded me and said I was wrong though it was an opion lesson… Another group was lazy and since I ran out of my medicine that helps me focus, I was lost and told them I need their help to help me keep up with what’s going on yet they let me drag along! History was never my strong point from the start even though my dad is a History teacher. But when I got into a certain class I couldn’t stand it! I was miles behind in homework and around every corner was either homework or projects! I asked for help and I got yelled at! I’m sorry but sometimes homework feels like slave work since I don’t get anything out of good grades except a smile and/or a pat on the back and that’s it. Yes homework can be good for you but there is a limit of how much a student can handle before they collaspe underneath all of that work! But I love it when teachers make homework fun or competive (which we normally do now and days)! Cause that’s when I’m having a blast! But when teachers get too interactive with their class I can’t help but feel creeped out by them. (Cough, Cough, English teacher, Cough, Cough) I do love school but right now…its like they don’t want us going out and enjoying life…

Back at my old school I was drowning in homework! I just couldn’t get the chance to sit back and be young! It was just too much! In every class I had homework! Study this, learn that, solve this, and every where in between! The bullying was no help either since they stole or destroyed my homework so I failing till I switched schools! My suggestion to all you kids who don’t like homework….DON’T GO TO [name of school removed]!!!!!!!! Especially if you’re like me and are considered one of the special kids since the teachers don’t flex to your needs!

At my school , we all think that homework helps people learn in so many different ways. You do your homework to get better grades on test scores because some of the homework you get will have some stuff that can be on test. Another reason is that homework can get you better grades if you just hand it in. You can learn from homework. In my opinion.For example, I had to take notes in algebra yesterday for homework and only took 10 minutes it really help a lot the next day because we had a little mini quiz on it !

Doing my homework every night helps me learn because it helps me remember the lesson gone over in class that day. It also makes it easier to follow the next lesson, which is usually an extension from the lesson the day before.

Homework helps me learn because it’s a review of what we learned in class. Sometimes they give too much work though.

I feel like it all depends on if you understand the work. If a teacher taught you a new topic in class and you didn’t understand it, I dont think you would understand it if you did it again. If you understood it, It would help you because you are repeating the problems.

I don’t think homework helps you learn, I think it helps you remember what you learned. Homework is more of a review of what you did in school during the day, rather than a new subject to learn on a whole.

I personally am not a big fan of homework though, I think that some teachers don’t really realize that we have several other classes which also give us homework, and we sometimes end up with a large amount by the end of the day.

But I’m sure that my procrastination has a lot to do with it as well.

Homework definitely helps me learn. By the time i get home from school some subjects become unfamiliar and homework help reinforce what i learned in class. Better students do their homework and teachers recognize that frequently. Repetition of your homework also helps memorize which you could benefit from on tests and other classwork activities.

Depending on the subject or the assigment, homework can either be redundant or effective. Assignments which make you copy straight out of a textbook are redundant. These assignments are redundant because students hardly put all that much effort into it. By copying a textbook, people aren’t focused on the material, because they are just focusing on getting the assigment done. Straight copying is seen as boring or even in some cases ‘annoying’ by students, which translates into them not learning what they need to learn. Assigments where students are interactive and aren’t just being taught the textbook are interesting and that’s when students learn the most. Writing samples when students are asked for their opinion and to have their voice heard are deemed the most interesting. Thus, being because students then have the ability to share what they’ve learned in their own words and also get to apply their knowledge in their own voice.

On the other hand, when homework is done effectively, the end product will be better grades. If a student neglects to do homework, whether interesting or boring, it will show in their grades. Students who do apply their strongest efforts into their homework will ultimately contribute to better grades.

I think that homework is pointless when the teachers give us homework that is for fun and we have to waist our time doing little projects when we can be doing other more important things like studying. I think that most homework is important I just don’t like it when teachers give too much and it becomes over whelming and I can’t have time to study because it would be too late and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep. If anything I think teachers should give us homework but give us one big homework a week and we work on it for the whole week which it would be due on Friday and then get a test grade for it since it was a big homework. If teachers wouldn’t do that I would love if teachers would give us only three days of homework a week and Fridays we would get a test.

Homework is assigned so that students can practice what they have learned in school and see if they can remember what happened in class. Personally, the homework that has been assigned to me lately has been nothing but busy work that I feel is pointless. The truth is most of the modern day students don’t see the value in doing homework but the discipline and the practice for the real world really are fundamental. The most confusing type of homework assignments that we have come with little to no instructions. When teachers give assignments on things that they haven’t covered yet seems pointless to me since it really isn’t evaluating anything at all. Another type of pointless homework would be the ones in which there is so much repetition that it becomes pointless. In my personal life ive been faced with all types of homework. I believe homework is fundamental to the development of the mind and I will keep doing my homework.

I go to an American school in Bogota, Colombia. Recently in my school I have been getting exaggerated amounts of homework, and most of it has no impact on my learning. I say this because the homework I am assigned is just “busywork” and keeps me up until late hours in the night. The homework I am given is also extremely long and not smart, it is just a very basic review of what we did in class that day. Homework like that is a waste of time since if the student is good and pays attention in class he should know all of the material and shouldn’t be forced to demonstrate it through homework. I believe that what should be improved in not the quantity but the quality of the homework we are assigned. I am not saying homework should be abolished but I am saying it should be changed. If a student is overwhelmed with homework his academic development would also be affected. For example if a student has allot of homework he will probably stay up at night doing it. Maybe he will finish his homework around 10 or 11 in the night. The next day he will have to wake up very early and will only get about 5-6 hours of sleep. In order for the teenage brain to develop correctly a kid needs 8 hours of sleep. So. excessive amount of homework leads to a very tired, unmotivated and less active student. In my school I think the only homework assignments that help me learn are the math ones.

Each subject is different and each grade in school requires a different amount of practice. For example, Math is a subject that I believe needs out-of-classroom practice no matter what grade you are in, or what topic you are covering. It is one of the most essential aptitudes one must acquire in order to be successful in life. Language, whether it be english, spanish, or etc, is also a subject that is vital for an accomplished life. I believe that one must practice in order to become and eloquent speaker and writer, but i only think that a small amount of homework should be given, especially once one reaches the ends of high school. A subject that I feel doesn’t need practice outside of school is history. For me, history is more like a gossip story with dates that “should” be remembered than anything else; therefore, I don’t believe that homework would be necessary to enforce a subject like that.

The idea of having to work all night, studying for a billion exams the next day, getting the college applications going, and practicing a sport isn’t something strange for the average senior at CNG. It seems as if the need to excel at everything might just be the COD of many high school students. As college admissions become more competitive, as more and more people take AP exams and admissions tests there is a greater weight on our shoulders. But is it really worth it? I mean, even if everything goes the way we want it to, was it really worth all our time and energy? There are just better things to do with my life. I would prefer to go deeper into the sciences, write of some philosophical tendency I’m being carried into, do more social work, etc. But I need to commit to an organized agenda, learn the Standards I’m supposed to be learning and show my progress through time. These are fancy ways of creating a level playing field so students can be compared. Is this really what learning has become?

Practice makes perfect some might say. There is no arguing about that. Success in those specific tasks, such as doing homework or working on a particular project that requires zero creativity clearly needs those levels of repetitive practice and great memory. But are we supposed to do this the rest of our lives? I don’t think so. Harris Cooper, a professor from Duke University dedicated to homework research states that “even for high school students, overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades” (Cooper). I’m sorry, so isn’t homework even doing what its supposed to be doing? The counter-productivity of too much homework, especially in such a critical moment as in college application season, makes the whole educational system lose credibility. Are we being trained to do something we aren’t going to really do or even need in the future? What is the real purpose of doing homework when we aren’t truly learning from it?

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe homework is critical in developing certain skills. How were we supposed to learn basic arithmetic operations without those tons of worksheets and problem sets? Yes, homework is a useful tool but only when used consciously. Statistical evidence seems to agree with this: “teachers in many of the nations that outperform the U.S. on student achievement tests–such as Japan, Denmark and the Czech Republic–tend to assign less homework than American teachers, but instructors in low-scoring countries like Greece, Thailand and Iran tend to pile it on” (Wallis). The need to assign homework, to put a million grades in is too antiquated in my opinion. What’s the problem with guiding classes to a true educational experience and leave behind the limitations of grading, of classifying students, of making them lose all interest, worse yet lose passion for learning and generate hatred towards certain areas of knowledge while capturing valuable time that is needed to explore others?

It depends on what type of homework and the time that it takes to finish it. The homework that I get from English, history, science, and math benefit me and my grades a lot. From my three band classes, and P.E. class, I usually do busy work. I love how the school is run… I learn a lot from the class just itself, and from school assemblies, etc. First, I have to learn before I get my grades… meaning, I don’t care what my grades are like until I actually know and understand the material and knowledge that I learned at school. What we learn from school and from homework are is different. We learn more at school and then apply what we learned in our homework. So most of the time we don’t learn anything that much from homework.

Homework assignments should be provided, but once a month. It allows children to have freedom, and actually feel like life is not all about study and going to a prestigious university.

Homework wastes our time, and in recent articles they say that school’s are killing creativity, and now there is an uproar about homework not providing learning material.

What homework should be is a subjet, say history, and children can choose one that interests them, and they could research it for a month. And after the month is up children can present in class, so that means the child knows thoroughly about their topic and can explain well to their friends, and also they will have an opportunity to listen to other peoples’ research.

I wish we didn’t have homework, because the learning network is providing us with a great amount of resources that homework, in a year, can’t accomplish.

40 hours per week, 8 hours a day, is the legal limit of hours an adult can work in California without being payed overtime. An employee must be payed 150% their usual salary for every hour they work past 8 hours a day. I spend between 34 and 39 hours per week at school, not counting homework (aprox. 10-15 hours per week). My suggestion is that any work assigned to students requiring them to spend more than 40 hours a week on academics be graded with a bonus of 50% the student’s grade. This would encourage students to do well in order to have a higher bonus, and would discourage teachers from assigning so much work (since we all how much giving out bonus points pains them!) As for the questions: I think that homework is effective as long as it will help improve a student’s understanding and execution of course material. As a general rule, I don’t think it’s very useful to be assigned more than one assignment in each category of homework to a class (1 chapter to read, 1 exercise, 1 essay). 5 math exercises is 5 too many if I understand the lesson, and 4 too many if it is the teacher’s goal to find out whether or not I do. As a student, I have a limited amount of time and love to divide up into my work. I find work that leaves the thinking up to the student to be the most engaging and helpful to my understanding: the fewer details on how I should do the assignment, the more I work to make it reflect my understanding of the topic.

It is interesting to write your homework in your free time at home. Homework and assignments are important for innovation and elaboration. Take your time in doing your homework because this will help you understand the lesson more.

i think this is the best amendment ever.

Sense at my school , school just started we do not have that much homework. But I’ve hear a lot of people say that towards the middle of the year is when everyone’s backpack’s become really heavy. Teacher’s start giving more than one homework assignment per class. So I think that homework does not help you learn because you do work at school why do you need to do it again at home? I think teacher’s do that because they want to figure out if you are capable to do the same thing at home and also because they just want us to have some type of work to do at home. Once again I do no think that homework helps you learn.

I personally don’t think homework helps a student learn. I feel if you don’t get what the teacher teaches in class then I personally don’t get the homework at all. If I don’t get the subject then I personally to the homework wrong and I’m sure that other people do it wrong too. My teachers all say that they don’t give so much homework and they really don’t, but since they all give about 20-30 minutes of homework each subject, it piles up.I think that homework is effective as long as it will help improve a student’s understanding and execution of course material. I personally don’t think that homework always helps, but it does.

I think that homework is useful sometimes, but not always. Most of the time, it is just the same thing we did in class, and if we didn’t get it then we still won’t get it at home, primarily because our parents have no clue about how to do it either.

i think that homework should not in are school systems because homework is just practice and i know that practice makes perfect but when you got 5 subjects it add to a lot. I also i believe that all homework (practice) is just studying and unless we have i don’t want to take the time for nothing but another school day

1) What kinds of assignments seem pointless?

I don’t believe that any assignments are pointless, because teachers always have a reason for giving homework. However, teachers often give homework where the effort on the part of the student outweighs the teacher’s goal. In addition, many homework assignments do not effectively reach their goal.

2) Which ones are confusing or frustrating?

Assignments are usually not confusing, although sometimes, when given very easy assignments, I do not understand what the point is (which does not mean that the assignments are pointless — the point is simply mysterious to me). I get most frustrated by homework when I receive virtually identical assignments at regular intervals, but never get feedback from the teacher. When this happens, I cannot improve because I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. For example, our French teacher has given us this assignment three times this year: Comment on a predetermined stanza of a Baudelaire poem. The first two stanzas earned me 17 (out of 20) with no corrections other than grammatical mistakes. For the third assignment, I have written a very similar analysis and I expect to get a very similar grade. If there are 20 possible points and I didn’t get all of them, why did the teacher not provide any comments?

3) Which ones are most engaging and interesting?

Honestly, although I understand the value of homework, I do not enjoy doing it (unless it involves creativity, but with no art, music or creative writing classes in high school, this is extremely rare).

Which ones are you fairly sure help you learn and grow?

I believe all homework helps me learn and grow — the question is whether the amount of growth induced by the homework is worth the effort involved.

Yes, some homework are important. Like learning rhetoric at home to be able to talk about it in class. Doing a math problem to make sure the lesson is understood. But is doing ten exercises on a lesson we did not fully go over because the teacher did not manage to end the lesson on time and now needs us to try to figure it out on our own useful? Is doing forty little problems with the same math equation over and over again necessary? I believe it is not. I believe some teachers are using a lot of useless homework because they must think in some way that it will be beneficent one day or another. They are often wrong. Unless a whole class of twenty students decided they want to be physician, i do not understand why learning what is the kind of relation between the Earth and the Moon, over a dozen of exercises, is in anyway useful. Also, a teacher might think they are doing the right thing, making us practice something that is already learned in class, by giving its students five exercises. Sure, it is not a bad idea. But since all the teachers, or most of them, are looking to do the right thing, five teachers that wants you to practice with some homework exercises, becomes twenty-five exercises for the students. Over something they either understood, or not understood. In any case it’s frustrating. If you understand what it is about then you are just wasting your time doing those exercises. If you did not understand it, you are going to spend ten minutes on each question, usually ending by guessing wrong, when all it could have taken was another clear explanation from the teacher. So yes, homework can be useful, and it often is, but not always.

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The Cult of Homework

America’s devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it’s what today’s parents and teachers grew up with themselves.

America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed , which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.

The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s . Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study , for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.

But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work—and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject.

Read: My daughter’s homework is killing me

Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.

“The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.”

Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.

Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.

Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.”

Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. “They don’t need it,” Schneider says, “so they’re not advocating for it.”

That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they’re working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.

As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it’s worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there’s some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.

In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s , and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.

This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it’s compatible with “the 10-minute rule,” a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level—that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.

In Cooper’s eyes, homework isn’t overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found “little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student”; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with “concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities.”

According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing , considers homework to be a “reliable extinguisher of curiosity,” and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper’s 2006 meta-analysis doesn’t establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children’s (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn’s prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)

In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn’t help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork , while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students’ success.)

Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. “If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores,” he says. “But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive.”

His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. “The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough,” Kohn says. What about homework’s effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.

Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.

Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs—things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.

Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it’s important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. “The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system,” he says. “Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing.” In other words, many parents’ own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn’t rigorous enough. (This dovetails with—and complicates—the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)

Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. “They could do it, but they’re afraid to do it, because they’re getting pressure every day about test scores,” Stengel says.

Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. “Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching,” she says.

“In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework,” Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. “If we had kids reading—anything, the sports page, anything that they’re able to read—that’s the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they’re not. They’re going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about.”

“Exploratory” is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he’d like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. “We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago,” Simpson says, “so it’s been easy to say we aren’t going to assign worksheets, we aren’t going assign regurgitative problem sets.” For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus.

Simpson says he thinks it’s a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: “When our students can’t make the connection between the work they’re doing at 11 o’clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot.”

When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she’s pleased with the results, but she’s noticed something funny. “Some kids,” she says, “really do like homework.” She’s started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily—whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home.

Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It’s usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they’ve managed their time.

In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they’re particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. “They’re making meaningful decisions about their time that I don’t think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing,” Bronke said.

The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it—to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it’s actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class—to start with nothing, and add as necessary.

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Student Opinion

Should We Get Rid of Homework?

Some educators are pushing to get rid of homework. Would that be a good thing?

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

Do you like doing homework? Do you think it has benefited you educationally?

Has homework ever helped you practice a difficult skill — in math, for example — until you mastered it? Has it helped you learn new concepts in history or science? Has it helped to teach you life skills, such as independence and responsibility? Or, have you had a more negative experience with homework? Does it stress you out, numb your brain from busywork or actually make you fall behind in your classes?

Should we get rid of homework?

In “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong, ” published in July, the Times Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that homework may be imperfect, but it still serves an important purpose in school. The essay begins:

Do students really need to do their homework? As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?” I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.” The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Mr. Kang argues:

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility. A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Should we get rid of homework? Why, or why not?

Is homework an outdated, ineffective or counterproductive tool for learning? Do you agree with the authors of the paper that homework is harmful and worsens inequalities that exist between students’ home circumstances?

Or do you agree with Mr. Kang that homework still has real educational value?

When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Do you think the amount is appropriate, too much or too little? Is homework, including the projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or, in your opinion, is it not a good use of time? Explain.

In these letters to the editor , one reader makes a distinction between elementary school and high school:

Homework’s value is unclear for younger students. But by high school and college, homework is absolutely essential for any student who wishes to excel. There simply isn’t time to digest Dostoyevsky if you only ever read him in class.

What do you think? How much does grade level matter when discussing the value of homework?

Is there a way to make homework more effective?

If you were a teacher, would you assign homework? What kind of assignments would you give and why?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

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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.

Copyright © 2006 by Alfie Kohn. Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this chapter in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.

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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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Here’s what you need to know about homework and how to help your child

Professor of Education, University of Florida

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Many parents and educators view homework as an important indicator of classroom rigor. The Back-to-Basic movement , which emphasizes the need for schools to teach basic academic skills in particular, has increased the emphasis on homework as a measure of a school’s success.

In fact, many parents and students judge the difficulty of a course or teacher by the amount of homework assigned. Furthermore, many educators believe that asking parents to help their children with homework is a particularly effective strategy for enhancing children’s achievement.

Many parents, too, agree that their involvement will make a positive difference. In a 2014 study conducted by the US Department of Education, 90% of parents reported that they set aside a place at home for their child to do homework, and 85% reported that they checked to see that homework had been completed.

But does helping with homework really improve student achievement? As a high school and college teacher who has assigned homework, and a mother of two sons who were not always too enthusiastic about completing homework, I have studied the many ways that families from different income levels support their children’s academic success.

I have come to believe that homework can not only enhance children’s achievement but can be a powerful opportunity for parent-child nurturing. But research also tells us that it is not just any homework assignment that will have that kind of impact.

Here is what we are learning about homework.

When parent involvement helps

Despite a widespread belief that parent involvement in homework is good for kids, researchers are discovering that it can have both positive and negative effects.

In 2008, three researchers – Erika A Patall , Harris Cooper and Jorgianne Civey Robinson – conducted an extensive review of research on the effects on students of parent involvement in homework. They found that the effects of parent involvement appear to be strongly influenced by four factors:

• the nature of the homework assignment
• the particular involvement strategy used by the parent
• the child’s age and ability level
• the time and skill resources in the home.

The researchers found that homework assignments in which students are expected to memorize facts, and the parent is expected to teach school skills, provide less meaningful opportunities for parent and student interaction in the learning process.

In contrast, homework assignments in which students choose a project that requires in-depth investigation, thought and some creative license enable meaningful parent participation. Parents can play supportive roles in discussing the project with their child, which is more enjoyable both for the child and parent.

For example, students may demonstrate math skills; share ideas and obtain reactions to written work; conduct surveys or interviews; gather parents’ memories and experiences; apply school skills to real life; or work with parents or other family partners in new ways.

Strategies for parents

In addition, how parents help their child with homework appears to have distinct effects on student achievement.

Most parents engage in a wide variety of involvement strategies, such as creating “school-like routines” in which they make rules about when, where or how homework is done. They also interact with the teacher about homework and provide general oversight or monitoring of homework completion.

In some instances, parents control these structures; in others, parents follow the student’s lead.

For instance, parents may engage in the learning processes with the child (eg, engage in homework tasks with the child or in processes that support the child’s understanding of homework). Parents may also help their child learn self-management skills (eg, coping with distractions).

The strategies that parents use may vary depending on their beliefs about child-rearing and broader cultural values. Yet these different parent involvement strategies appear to have distinct effects on student achievement.

Strategies that support a child’s autonomy and also provide structure in the form of clear and consistent guidelines appear to be the most beneficial.

For example, in a 2001 study , researchers reported that parent homework involvement that supported autonomy was associated with higher standardized test scores, class grades and homework completion.

In contrast, direct aid (doing the homework for the student) was associated with lower test scores and class grades.

In another study , parent involvement in homework was reported by students to have a detrimental effect if the parent tried to help without a request from the child or was perceived as intrusive or controlling by the child.

Age matters

Researchers have also noted that the age and ability level of a child strongly influenced the amount of help with homework that parents provided and its subsequent benefits to the child.

Parents reported spending more time helping their elementary-age children with homework than their secondary school-age children. Parents of low-ability students reported spending more time helping with homework than did parents of high-ability students.

While teachers and parents of elementary-aged children were more likely to work together to help students complete their assignments, parents of secondary school students often did not monitor their adolescents’ homework as faithfully as when their children were younger. This, in part, is because they were not expected or asked to do so by secondary teachers.

As a result, low-ability students in middle and high school were less likely to complete homework or to achieve academically.

Another factor was that parents of older students often reported feeling increasingly less able to help with homework.

What can educators do?

These research findings have important implications for how teachers design homework assignments and how parents and teachers might participate in the homework process.

First, students (and parents) need to know why they should be doing a particular homework assignment. What skill is to be practiced/reinforced? Why does this skill matter?

Teachers need to explicitly communicate the purpose of a particular homework assignment and emphasize how the skills they are learning in a homework assignment can be applied in the real world.

Second, educators should design homework assignments that are more meaningful and allow for creativity. Students should be able to have a choice in how they carry out an assignment.

Third, students have different learning styles, and educators need to consider how they might need to express their learning differently (via audiotapes, videotapes, posters and oral presentations rather than the standard written report).

Fourth, teachers should design interactive homework assignments that involve students in interactions with peers and with family and community members. For example, authors Alma Flor Ada and F Isabel Campoy have developed an approach of creating family storybooks that are used as reading and writing texts in the classroom.

Another group of researchers designed “interactive” homework assignments that guided students on how to conduct conversations with family members in math, science and language arts.

Another team of educators worked with teachers and parents to develop curricular approaches that brought students’ cultural backgrounds and families’ “funds of knowledge” into the classroom. For example, class lessons and homework were based on how parents use math in cooking or sewing or how workers use reading and math to build a house.

Homework is a daily activity for most students that takes time, energy and emotion, not only for students but for their families as well. Given these investments, it is important that homework be a more beneficial learning experience, in which parents too can bring their interesting and enriching skills.

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Should Kids Get Homework?

Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.

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Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful.

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

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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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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.

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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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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.

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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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13 Effective Study Strategies to Help Students Learn

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Between kindergarten and twelfth grade, students are expected to learn how to study, schedule their time and complete sizable assignments without procrastinating. Yet these skills often aren’t taught explicitly. With the increased self-sufficiency necessitated by virtual education, educators and parents can help students learn and manage their goals more effectively by directly teaching study skills.

Daniel Willingham , a psychologist at the University of Virginia, studies the application of cognitive psychology in education. He recently spoke at a Learning and the Brain conference about the science behind study techniques.

“Kids are more on their own now than they typically are,” Willingham told MindShift. Students need to independently log in to class on time and maintain focus in their home environments. By explicitly teaching how to avoid distraction, combat procrastination and study effectively, educators entrust students with the necessary skills for educational challenges faced both virtually and in person. 

STRATEGIES FOR AVOIDING DISTRACTION

When studying or in virtual class, students may keep their phones nearby and subsequently get distracted by notifications. They might decide to respond to a notification, figuring it can be handled quickly, and then be sucked into a digital rabbit hole. This could amount to missing parts of class or wasting time set aside for homework. Coupled with potential noise distractions , at-home learning environments can test students’ attention spans.

TIP 1: Change Your Space

Willingham encourages students to ask themselves: “Have you made your environment as distraction-free as you can?” While many students’ options are limited during virtual learning, selecting the best location in a home comes from carefully considering one’s personal sources of distraction.

If notifications constantly grab students’ attention, they can turn them off on their phones and laptops. Should a phone’s proximity be a temptation, they can place their phone in another room during class or study time. Non-virtual disturbances, like noise, can be curbed through noise-cancelling headphones or inexpensive foam earbuds. Charting their most common sources of distraction encourages students to be more cognizant about their personal obstacles and take more active roles in their learning.

TIP 2: Don’t Choose Distraction

“Multitasking almost always exacts a cost. So if you add a second task, it is going to reduce the efficiency of that first task,” Willingham said. While students likely recognize that they put less effort into their work when they choose to also watch TV, text or play music, they may underestimate the impact of multitasking on their task’s accuracy and duration. “It's very clear that multitasking is not helping them, even though they mostly think it's fine,” he said.

According to Common Sense Media , 51% of teens and 34% of tweens (ages 8 through 12) watch TV while studying. More than 70% of teens and tweens believe that a TV playing in their environment won’t affect their homework. When it comes to social media, 50% of teens use it while studying, and 69% of teens and tweens believe checking social media won’t impact their work.

Among the forms of multitasking, data is more varied when it comes to playing music while studying. Different studies’ results range from no effect to detrimental impacts to benefits. “Listening to music does distract, so it is taking away from cognition. But the other thing listening to music can do is it can energize,” Willingham said.

Music can boost the autonomic nervous system with emotionally uplifting tracks that can increase heart rates and blood pressure. This can be useful for athletic and potentially academic  motivation. The impact of music may be based on the student’s interest in the task and the challenges of the task itself — a student could choose to press play based on their needs and situation.

TIP 3: Ask “Do You Want Social Media, or Enjoy it?”

Though the brain’s dopamine-carrying mesolimbic pathway was initially theorized as related to situations of pleasure or reward, research from the past decade suggests that the pathway has less to do with reward and more with repetition, regardless of the happiness provided by the task. Over the past decade, social media also became more societally ubiquitous, with more people spending more time online — though not necessarily because social media provides pleasure.

Willingham encourages parents and teachers to ask students whether they enjoy social media, or simply want it — and if they find that divide meaningful. When he posed that question to teens and tweens, many said, “ ‘Once I'm on, it's really not that fun. It's just like there's lots of drama. It's a lot of stuff. It's not interesting. It's people posing. And yet I still feel really compelled for some reason to get on there,’” he said.

The suggestion that there’s a difference between wanting to go on social media and actually enjoying being online may be significant to students. The next time a social media notification appears, they may pause. If they recognize that while they feel pulled to scroll, they don’t typically enjoy the time they spend online, they might choose to not pursue that distraction. 

TIP 4: Plan Breaks

If students find themselves constantly distracted, they might just need a break . Data shows that brief breaks rejuvenate students, allowing them to return to schoolwork with heightened concentration.

Planned breaks are more effective than spontaneous ones, however. Scheduling breaks ensures the pause remains brief and that students return to their work. The Pomodoro Technique provides one example for this, though Willingham stated that there’s no need to follow the specific time allotments of Pomodoro precisely.

Knowing when a break is coming up can also influence motivation: when a student feels tempted to give up, seeing that their next break is in five minutes or less may encourage them to keep up their work until that break. Achieving goals improves self-esteem, allowing students to feel positively about their ability to regulate work habits.

TIP 5: It’s Still School

When students arrive at their virtual classes in PJs, under bed covers and in varied states of wakefulness, they might not as easily accept that they’re in a school setting. “For some kids I know, learning at home doesn't feel like school,” Willingham told MindShift.

In-person school environments are structured to allow for effective learning and to minimize distraction. Outside that context, students may find paying attention more difficult. 

When parents and guardians emphasize that virtual school “is still school,” Willingham said, they can help their students structure their mindsets to tune out disturbances. By encouraging students to prepare for virtual school similarly to how they’d prepare for in-person instruction — by eating breakfast, getting dressed and showing respect for their teachers — parents can help achieve that mindset.

A workshop for parents may be helpful to that end, but educators should be mindful that parents might be more willing to hear this message from another parent. Someone who’s also been dealing with the challenges of raising a child during a global pandemic can help foster a dialogue that feels honest and realistic. 

WHY WE PROCRASTINATE — AND HOW TO FIGHT IT

There are three main reasons why students procrastinate: the task is “ boring”; the task seems overwhelming or impossible; the task provokes fears of failure, causing a student to self-sabotage. Willingham suggests these ways to address and prevent procrastination:

TIP 1: Start work in class

Simply beginning the work makes headway against procrastination. Data from exercise studies show that people tend to underestimate how much they’ll enjoy a given task. Once they begin, they often find that task less boring or overwhelming than predicted.

Teachers can initiate this process by devoting the last five to ten minutes of class time to beginning an upcoming project or paper. Starting the project means that a student is more likely to continue outside of class. This also allows students time to directly ask the questions they need answered in order to begin. 

TIP 2: Use a planner — and make it a habit

When students aren’t told to plan out their work – or shown how to schedule — they tend to struggle. Scheduling portions of a hefty task allows the task to feel more manageable, meaning it won’t loom over students’ heads until the last minute. Teaching students to use a planner means not only teaching them to write down the dates of big exams and projects, but also reminders and scheduled work or study times for chipping away at the task. Repetition and enforcement helps planner usage become a habit. 

Much in the way that large-scale construction projects tend to finish over-schedule and over-budget, people tend to underestimate how much time is required and how many resources are needed for a task. This is because humans generally discount roadblocks they find unlikely — but if there are 50 low-probability events for a given task, there’s a higher probability one of those events will occur. 

“Tell students, ‘When you're doing your planning, whatever time estimate you come up with, double it,’” Willingham said. 

By thinking in terms of time, rather than task, students can pace themselves and prepare for the unexpected. Many students may look at their planners, see that no assignment is due the next day and think they get the night off, only to find themselves staying up late the next night with multiple tasks. Instead, if a student commits to working every day for at least 30 minutes, they’ll have a cushion if anything surprising pops up. 

TIP 3: Practice Breaking Down Tasks

Students need to learn how to break up large tasks into bite-sized chunks . While they’re fully capable of doing this, they might not know how to go about it. Demonstrating and teaching this concept directly can help guide students toward success. 

One way students can practice is by working in small groups to brainstorm strategies for dividing up tasks. This allows teachers to give feedback about different strategies’ efficacies and allows students to crowdsource new approaches. “It's the perfect kind of thing you could do in a Zoom breakout room,” Willingham said. 

Self-sabotaging

Self-sabotaging, also known as self-handicapping, “is the idea that you procrastinate knowing that you're setting yourself up for failure,” Willingham said. 

Separate from the other two reasons for procrastination, self-sabotaging comes from a student’s fear that even if they tried their hardest on an assignment or test, they wouldn’t succeed. They procrastinate in order to give themselves an excuse for a failure they fear is inevitable. A bad grade can be blamed on their “choice” to procrastinate, rather than seen as a true metric of their ability or knowledge.

Teachers can likely guess which of their students possess this fear of failure. They can talk with the student one-on-one, telling the student that they will succeed if they put in the effort. 

Invoking a growth mindset might be helpful here, as might working together to develop a new strategy for the task. This may involve breaking tasks down or troubleshooting together, and then monitoring that student’s progress with the new strategies. Providing continual support allows the student to feel as though their teacher is with them for the long haul.

HOW TO KNOW WHEN TO STOP STUDYING

Students think they know when to stop studying for an exam: when they feel like they know the material. Humans generally consider ourselves good judges of what we know and don’t know — but we might be worse at this than we think, said Willingham. 

In one study , many participants were quick to say they knew how a toilet worked. But when asked to explain what makes a toilet flush, they found they couldn’t. This points to a common misunderstanding of memory. We think that if we quickly scan our minds and see a concept, we know that concept and could explain it if we tried. But sometimes, we’re only vaguely familiar with how toilets work.

“People actually are not so good at knowing what they know,” Willingham said. 

TIP 1: Feeling That You Know Something Is Not Reliable

When students assess whether they know a topic, they should consider whether they’re only familiar with it. The scientific definition of familiarity is knowing that one has seen a stimulus before, but possessing few other pieces of knowledge about it. Familiarity allows us to operate quickly — we assume we could say more about the topic if we thought about it. “Partial access” provides a similar fallacy — sometimes when we know a few things about a topic, we assume we know it in full. 

Recollection, conversely, involves deeper mental associations and the ability to explain something rather than simply recognize it. While a student may feel they know a concept when they read a line of their notes, close their eyes and immediately repeat that line back, checking back after time has passed ensures that the knowledge isn’t only stored in short-term memory.  Students can test whether they know a concept by stepping away from their notes for a half-hour or more and then self-testing. 

TIP 2: Studying Until You Know Is Not Enough

Though a student may feel they can stop studying once they receive 100% on a practice test, this score may not ensure success on the actual exam. “What they've forgotten is that forgetting happens,” Willingham said. 

To protect themselves against forgetting, Willingham encourages students to plan their studying so that it includes time to study even after mastering a self-test. By including a buffer between self-test mastery and the actual exam, students can continue practicing the concept, reducing the likelihood of forgetting material during that time. 

This may involve using the scheduling techniques mentioned above. Students can be encouraged to save roughly 20% of their study time for this buffer, meaning that mastery should be achieved by the penultimate night before the exam so that the night before can be used for review.

TIP 3: Creating Study Materials Is Studying

Students might forego creating their own study materials if they find resources online that are similar enough, believing this would allow them to begin studying “sooner.” 

“They don't realize creating their own study materials is actually a really, really effective way of studying,” Willingham said. 

Making their own study guides, flashcards or Quizlets not only allows students to review their notes, but ensures the materials they use are on-topic and accurate — as opposed to a readily accessible Quizlet made by a stranger. 

TIP 4: “Knowing” Means Being Able To Explain

A student might believe they “know” a concept but can’t explain it. Often, this comes from the idea that the student couldn't comprehend the teacher’s first explanation of the concept, but with further review, readings and questions, the concept now makes sense — when the teacher explains it. This student wouldn’t feel able to put the concept in their own words or thoroughly discuss it.

Tell students that “knowledge” doesn’t mean that a concept only makes sense when reading about it or hearing it explained – it means being able to explain it oneself. This ensures that students define knowledge with the correct criterion and can more confidently determine when they know a concept.

TIP 5: Use In-class Queries

Quick tests that require students to produce knowledge allow them to check their understanding of a concept. These can involve clickers, Zoom polls or exit tickets, as well as Zoom breakout rooms or small-group discussions based on producing knowledge or demonstrating specific skills. Interactions like this allow a student to see if they actually know a concept or require more studying. They allow teachers to take note of their classes’ levels of understanding, too.

These management techniques can help bolster students working with heightened autonomy during virtual learning. When teachers, parents and caregivers directly explain and model these strategies, they provide students with tools to use the next time they feel distracted, pulled to procrastinate or unsure if they’re ready for an exam. With these tools, students can learn how to address these situations independently — and how to ask for the specific support they need.