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Spending Too Much Time on Homework Linked to Lower Test Scores

A new study suggests the benefits to homework peak at an hour a day. After that, test scores decline.

Samantha Larson

Polls show that American public high school teachers assign their students an average of 3.5 hours of homework a day . According to a  recent study from the University of Oviedo in Spain, that’s far too much.

While doing some homework does indeed lead to higher test performance, the researchers found the benefits to hitting the books peak at about an hour a day. In surveying the homework habits of 7,725 adolescents, this study suggests that for students who average more than 100 minutes a day on homework, test scores start to decline. The relationship between spending time on homework and scoring well on a test is not linear, but curved.

This study builds upon previous research that suggests spending too much time on homework leads to higher stress, health problems and even social alienation. Which, paradoxically, means the most studious of students are in fact engaging in behavior that is counterproductive to doing well in school. 

Because the adolescents surveyed in the new study were only tested once, the researchers point out that their results only indicate the correlation between test scores and homework, not necessarily causation. Co-author Javier Suarez-Alvarez thinks the most important findings have less to do with the  amount of homework than with how that homework is done.

From Education Week :

Students who did homework more frequently – i.e., every day – tended to do better on the test than those who did it less frequently, the researchers found. And even more important was how much help students received on their homework – those who did it on their own preformed better than those who had parental involvement. (The study controlled for factors such as gender and socioeconomic status.)

“Once individual effort and autonomous working is considered, the time spent [on homework] becomes irrelevant,” Suarez-Alvarez says. After they get their daily hour of homework in, maybe students should just throw the rest of it to the dog.  

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Samantha Larson is a freelance writer who particularly likes to cover science, the environment, and adventure. For more of her work, visit SamanthaLarson.com

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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Study: Homework Doesn’t Mean Better Grades, But Maybe Better Standardized Test Scores

Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at UVA's Curry School of Education

The time students spend on math and science homework doesn’t necessarily mean better grades, but it could lead to better performance on standardized tests, a new study finds.

“When Is Homework Worth The Time?” was recently published by lead investigator Adam Maltese, assistant professor of science education at Indiana University, and co-authors Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education , and Xitao Fan, dean of education at the University of Macau. Maltese is a Curry alumnus, and Fan is a former Curry faculty member.

The authors examined survey and transcript data of more than 18,000 10th-grade students to uncover explanations for academic performance. The data focused on individual classes, examining student outcomes through the transcripts from two nationwide samples collected in 1990 and 2002 by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Contrary to much published research, a regression analysis of time spent on homework and the final class grade found no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not. But the analysis found a positive association between student performance on standardized tests and the time they spent on homework.

“Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be,” Maltese said.

Tai said that homework assignments cannot replace good teaching.

“I believe that this finding is the end result of a chain of unfortunate educational decisions, beginning with the content coverage requirements that push too much information into too little time to learn it in the classroom,” Tai said. “The overflow typically results in more homework assignments. However, students spending more time on something that is not easy to understand or needs to be explained by a teacher does not help these students learn and, in fact, may confuse them.

“The results from this study imply that homework should be purposeful,” he added, “and that the purpose must be understood by both the teacher and the students.”

The authors suggest that factors such as class participation and attendance may mitigate the association of homework to stronger grade performance. They also indicate the types of homework assignments typically given may work better toward standardized test preparation than for retaining knowledge of class material.

Maltese said the genesis for the study was a concern about whether a traditional and ubiquitous educational practice, such as homework, is associated with students achieving at a higher level in math and science. Many media reports about education compare U.S. students unfavorably to high-achieving math and science students from across the world. The 2007 documentary film “Two Million Minutes” compared two Indiana students to students in India and China, taking particular note of how much more time the Indian and Chinese students spent on studying or completing homework.

“We’re not trying to say that all homework is bad,” Maltese said. “It’s expected that students are going to do homework. This is more of an argument that it should be quality over quantity. So in math, rather than doing the same types of problems over and over again, maybe it should involve having students analyze new types of problems or data. In science, maybe the students should write concept summaries instead of just reading a chapter and answering the questions at the end.”

This issue is particularly relevant given that the time spent on homework reported by most students translates into the equivalent of 100 to 180 50-minute class periods of extra learning time each year.

The authors conclude that given current policy initiatives to improve science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education, more evaluation is needed about how to use homework time more effectively. They suggest more research be done on the form and function of homework assignments.

“In today’s current educational environment, with all the activities taking up children’s time both in school and out of school, the purpose of each homework assignment must be clear and targeted,” Tai said. “With homework, more is not better.”

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Study: Homework linked to better standardized test scores

Researchers who looked at data from more than 18,000 10th-graders found there was little correlation between the time students spent doing homework and better grades in math and science courses. But, according to a study on the researc h, they did find a positive relationship between standardized test performance and the amount of time spent on homework.

The study , called ”When Is Homework Worth the Time?: Evaluating the Association Between Homework and Achievement in High School Science and Math,” was conducted by Adam Maltese, assistant professor of science education at the Indiana University School of Education; Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and Xitao Fan, dean of education at the University of Macau.

According to a news release by Indiana University, the researchers looked at survey and transcript data from the students in an effort to explain their academic performance and concluded that despite earlier research to the contrary, homework time did not correlate to the final course grade that students received in math and science classes.

The value of homework has been the subject of various research studies over the years, yet there is still no conclusive evidence that it makes a big difference in helping students improve achievement. The most often-cited studies are those that conclude that there is virtually no evidence that it helps in elementary school but some evidence that it does improve academic performance in later grades. Yet this newest study looked at 10th graders and found no correlation.

The study did, however, find a positive association between time spent on homework and student scores on standardized tests. It doesn’t directly conclude that the homework actually affected the test scores, but the university release quotes Maltese as saying that “if students are spending more time on homework, they’re getting exposed to the types of questions and the procedures for answering questions that are not so different from standardized tests.”

That, of course, would depend on the kind of homework students receive. Maltese is further quoted as saying, “”We’re not trying to say that all homework is bad. It’s expected that students are going to do homework. This is more of an argument that it should be quality over quantity. So in math, rather than doing the same types of problems over and over again, maybe it should involve having students analyze new types of problems or data. In science, maybe the students should write concept summaries instead of just reading a chapter and answering the questions at the end.”

The co-authors also recommend that education policymakers better evaluate homework — the kinds of assignments that are most useful and the time required to make the work effective.

You may also be interested in this : 3 Healthy Guidelines for Homework

Too Much Homework Can Lower Test Scores, Researchers Say

By: Natalie Wolchover Published: 03/30/2012 09:42 AM EDT on Lifes Little Mysteries

Piling on the homework doesn't help kids do better in school. In fact, it can lower their test scores.

That's the conclusion of a group of Australian researchers, who have taken the aggregate results of several recent studies investigating the relationship between time spent on homework and students' academic performance.

According to Richard Walker, an educational psychologist at Sydney University, data shows that in countries where more time is spent on homework, students score lower on a standardized test called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The same correlation is also seen when comparing homework time and test performance at schools within countries. Past studies have also demonstrated this basic trend.

Inundating children with hours of homework each night is detrimental, the research suggests, while an hour or two per week usually doesn't impact test scores one way or the other. However, homework only bolsters students' academic performance during their last three years of grade school. "There is little benefit for most students until senior high school (grades 10-12)," Walker told Life's Little Mysteries .

The research is detailed in his new book, "Reforming Homework: Practices, Learning and Policies" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

The same basic finding holds true across the globe, including in the U.S., according to Gerald LeTendre of Pennsylvania State University. He and his colleagues have found that teachers typically give take-home assignments that are unhelpful busy work. Assigning homework "appeared to be a remedial strategy (a consequence of not covering topics in class, exercises for students struggling, a way to supplement poor quality educational settings), and not an advancement strategy (work designed to accelerate, improve or get students to excel)," LeTendre wrote in an email. [ Kids Believe Literally Everything They Read Online, Even Tree Octopuses ]

This type of remedial homework tends to produce marginally lower test scores compared with children who are not given the work. Even the helpful, advancing kind of assignments ought to be limited; Harris Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University, has recommended that students be given no more than 10 to 15 minutes of homework per night in second grade, with an increase of no more than 10 to 15 minutes in each successive year.

Most homework's neutral or negative impact on students' academic performance implies there are better ways for them to spend their after school hours than completing worksheets. So, what should they be doing? According to LeTendre, learning to play a musical instrument or participating in clubs and sports all seem beneficial , but there's no one answer that applies to everyone.

"These after-school activities have much more diffuse goals than single subject test scores," he wrote. "When I talk to parents … they want their kids to be well-rounded, creative, happy individuals — not just kids who ace the tests."

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover . Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries , then join us on Facebook .

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Strategizing resources leads to improved exam scores, according to Stanford scholars

A study from Stanford psychology scholars found that college students employing a strategic approach to the use of study resources improved their exam scores by an average of one-third of a letter grade.

Patricia Chen is lead author on a paper that shows that a psychological intervention encouraging students to use available study resources in a strategic way made them more likely to perform better in class. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

Despite access to a trove of learning resources – including textbooks, online references and homework assignments – some students routinely fall short of their performance expectations.

The solution may not be to work harder, but more strategically. That’s the key takeaway from new research led by Stanford scholars, whose study published in Psychological Science found that applying a strategic approach to studying helped college students improve their exam scores by an average of one-third of a letter grade.

Inspiration to strategize

The study was inspired by meetings that lead author Patricia Chen, a postdoctoral research fellow in Stanford’s Department of Psychology , had with less-than-enthused students after they received their exam grades. Many of these students, she noticed, lamented their poor performances despite the great deal of effort that they had put into studying. The classic complaint seemed to be, “I studied really hard, and I’m just as smart as [another student]. I don’t understand why I didn’t do well.”

In response, Chen would ask these students, “Describe to me how you studied for the exam.” From the responses, Chen gleaned the insight that many students – intelligent and willing to work hard – fall short of performing to their potential because they don’t employ a strategic approach to their learning.

“Blind effort alone, without directing that effort in an effective manner, doesn’t always get you to where you want to go,” Chen said.

Power of self-reflection

The research team, which included Desmond Ong, a Stanford doctoral student in psychology, homed in on one important aspect of strategic learning – engaging in self-reflection to identify and use resources wisely. Prior research supports the general use of metacognition, or “thinking about one’s own thinking,” as a successful means to better learning and academic performance. But, before their studies, it remained to be seen whether specifically strategizing about one’s resource use would causally improve students’ academic performance.

The researchers developed a “Strategic Resource Use” intervention that blends educational and social psychological theories. The intervention, according to the study, “prompts students to think deliberately about how to approach their learning effectively with the resources available to them.”

The intervention was administered through brief online surveys sent to college students in an introductory statistics class about one week before their exams.

Students in the control group received a business-as-usual exam reminder. Students in the intervention group received the same exam reminder and a short Strategic Resource Use exercise: They were asked to think about what they expected to be on the upcoming exam and then strategize what kinds of resources they would use to study most effectively. Following this, the students were asked to explain why each resource they chose would be useful to their learning and then describe how they planned on using their chosen resources.

In two studies, students who strategized their resource use before studying outperformed comparable classmates in the control group by an average of one-third of a letter grade in the class. In the first study, students scored an average of 3.45 percentage points higher in the class, and in the second study, the average difference was 4.65 percentage points.

Why was the intervention so effective? The researchers found that the brief intervention exercise made students more self-reflective about how they approached their learning. In turn, this metacognition enabled students to use their resources more effectively, as their self-reports showed.

“It’s not merely about using a greater number of resources for studying. The important point here is using resources more effectively,” stressed Ong.

This strategic thinking also provided students with other psychological benefits, including feelings of empowerment regarding their education. Students who had taken the intervention perceived a greater control over their learning and expressed fewer negative feelings about their upcoming exams.

Chen emphasized it is important to consider the specific class environment before implementing the Strategic Resource Use intervention. The researchers note that the intervention has been tested – and found effective – in resource-rich environments, where students have access to textbooks, lecture notes, online resources, teaching assistants and other tools. But it is still unknown how well the intervention would work in resource-scarce environments. In resource-scarce environments, said Chen, it might be better for educators to focus on providing “a basic repertoire of resources” first.

A strategy for life

Chen proposes that the principle behind Strategic Resource Use can be applied beyond academics, including parenting, losing weight or learning a new skill at work.

“Actively self-reflecting on the approaches that you are taking fosters a strategic stance that is really important in life,” she said. “Strategic thinking distinguishes between people of comparable ability and effort. This can make the difference between people who achieve and people who have the potential to achieve, but don’t.”

Chen offered one more piece of advice: “Strategize how you want to effectively direct your efforts before you pour your energy into it.”

The study, “Strategic Resource Use for Learning: A Self-Administered Intervention That Guides Self-Reflection on Effective Resource Use Enhances Academic Performance,” was also co-authored by Omar Chavez, a graduate student at the University of Texas, and Brenda Gunderson, a senior lecturer at the University of Michigan.

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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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PROTOCOL: The relationship between homework time and academic performance among K‐12 students: A systematic review

1 Evidence‐Based Medicine Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, and Evidence‐based Social Sciences Research Center, School of Public Health, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou China

Xiaoling Hu

2 School of Higher Education, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou China

Chunyan Liu

3 Evidence‐based Social Sciences Research Center, School of Public Health, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou China

Howard White

4 Campbell Collaboration, New Delhi India

Associated Data

This review will synthesize the results from publications focused on homework time and academic performance, and estimate the relationship between the two. Our objectives are: (1) To identify the extent of the relationship between homework time and students' academic performance; (2) To analyze the differences in the effectiveness of homework time across genders, grades, subject and regions; and (3) To identify the potential factors that affect homework time, such as academic subject, task difficulty, type of homework, mode of homework, parental involvement, and feedback on homework.

1. BACKGROUND

1.1. description of the condition.

Homework is defined as “any task assigned by schoolteachers intended for students to carry out during non‐school hours” (Cooper,  1989 ). This definition explicitly excludes (a) in‐school guided study; (b) home study courses delivered through the mail, television, audio or videocassette, or the internet; and (c) extracurricular activities such as sports and participation in clubs (Cooper et al.,  2006 ). With the development of technology, web‐based homework has become more popular among teachers, with online platforms such as Blackboard, WebCT ( www.webct.com ), Homework Service ( https://hw.utexas.edu/bur/overview.html ), WebWorK, Study Island, and PowerSchool (Mendicino et al.,  2009 ), as these allow students to do their homework online, and teachers to give feedback to students immediately (Callahan,  2016 ; Lucas,  2012 ; Mendicino et al.,  2009 ). Therefore, in this systematic review, homework also includes online tasks performed outside the school.

The purpose of homework can be divided into instructional and noninstructional objectives (Lee & Pruitt,  1979 ). The most common instructional purpose of homework includes review, preview, and extension (Becker & Epstein,  1982 ; Lee & Pruitt,  1979 ; Mulhenbruck et al.,  1999 ). The review assignments mainly offer the students an opportunity to practise newly acquired skills or review material learnt in class. The preview assignments introduce new skills or materials to help students prepare for unfamiliar knowledge before the class (Mulhenbruck et al.,  1999 ), and the extension assignments involve the transfer of previously learned skills to new situations (Cooper et al.,  2006 ; Lee & Pruitt,  1979 ). The noninstructional purpose of homework varies. It can be used to form better study habits, increase the students' sense of responsibility, enhance awareness of independent learning, and build communication between parents, children, and teachers (Becker & Epstein,  1982 ; González et al.,  2001 ; Lee & Pruitt,  1979 ; Mulhenbruck et al.,  1999 ; Van Voorhis,  2003 ). Homework can also be used to punish students (Epstein & Van Voorhis,  2001 ).

Homework is a common and widespread educational activity for many students across the world. As an achievement of the educational excellence movement, the level of homework was generalized, which was supported by the parents at the beginning. However, as homework increased more and more, parents and scholars realized the burden of homework on students. They complained that the students lost their childhood and called for less homework (Gill & Schlossman,  2003 ). Similarly, in the United Kingdom homework became common in the mid‐19th century, and was a matter of much debate in the 1880s as levels of homework increased in response to the introduction of payment by results for teachers and other factors (Hallam,  2004 ).

Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) found that students feel the most pressured by the amount of homework (WHO,  2016 ). Meanwhile, parents continued to complain about excessive homework assigned to their children (Gill & Schlossman,  2003 ,  2004 ; Jerrima et al.,  2019 ; Xue & Zhang,  2019 ).

Homework is often argued to improve academic performance. However, the relationship between homework and academic performance has been debated for more than one hundred years (Cheema & Sheridan,  2015 ; Cooper,  1989 ; Cooper et al.,  2006 ; Kitsantas et al.,  2011 ; Kralovec & Buell,  2000 ; Trautwein,  2007 ). Although several meta‐analyses of the relationship between homework and performance have found a positive correlation between homework time and academic performance (Baş et al.,  2017 ; Cooper,  1989 ; Cooper et al.,  2006 ; Fan et al.,  2017 ), it is difficult to establish causality. More academically inclined students, who get better grades regardless, may complete their homework more conscientiously. Conversely, students who are doing badly may study harder at home to catch up.

Still, it may also be the case that the effect is not linear. Some evidence has shown that academic performance increases with the increase in homework time, but begins to decline when homework time exceeds the optimal amount of time (Ackerman et al.,  2011 ; Krzysztof et al.,  2018 ; Reteig et al.,  2019 ). Based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey of 58,000 high school students in grades one and two, Keith ( 1982 ) found that for anyone with any level of ability, increasing the amount of homework will improve their performance. Homework plays a compensatory role; however, the amount of homework cannot be increased indefinitely, only moderately. If it exceeds a certain limit, it will lead to a decline in performance (Keith,  1982 ).

1.2. Description of the intervention

The intervention is the homework assigned by schoolteachers for nonschool hours, and completed independently by students without additional teaching, such as online tasks and activities in study club. The comparison condition is different time spent on the homework, and we plan to divide the comparisons into several groups, such as 0–15, 16–30, 31–45, 46–60, 61–90, 90–120 min, and more than 120 min. Any type of homework will be included, such as written, oral, or practical homework. We excluded homework allocated by other people such as parents or teachers from extracurricular schools, and in‐school guided study, home study courses, and extracurricular activities such as sports and participation in clubs were excluded. Homework related to psychotherapy was also outside our definition of homework.

1.3. Conceptual framework

The conceptual framework for this review is the theory of change that describes how homework may affect academic performance. Figure  1 below demonstrates the conceptual framework through which the interventions are hypothesized to lead to the intended outcomes.

Conceptual framework for intervention and outcomes of homework

As in Figure  1 , the law of readiness reveals that before commencing a certain learning activity, if the learners do well in the preparatory stages (including physiological and psychological) related to the corresponding learning activities, they can grasp the learning content more rapidly (Muhammad,  2015 ). Second, the law of exercise suggests that for a certain kind of connection formed by learners, the correct repetition of this action in practice will effectively enhance this connection. And, third, the law of effect indicates that all kinds of positive or negative feedback that learners get in the process of learning will strengthen or weaken the connection that learners have formed in their mind.

However, there are limits to our ability to stay focused, and when students spend too much time on homework, their cognitive load and mental fatigue increase, and they will feel tired and even lead to mental distress, such as anxiety, which may reduce rather than improve readiness.

Furthermore, if the purpose of homework is to achieve mastery or covering additional material, then when the content of homework has been fully understood by a student, doing more homework won't help. That is there are diminishing returns to the time spent on homework, which can reach zero.

Finally, if the students miss sleep because of long homework hours, they may be tired in school and so do worse in class or tests. Hence readiness is reduced, and the law of effect undermined as the student is not in a good condition to receive feedback or perform well.

In addition, a student's development should be multifaceted, while if they spent too much time on homework, they will lose time to take part in other activities which can contribute to their overall development.

1.4. Why it is important to do this review

Several systematic reviews have explored the effectiveness of homework in improving students' performance, but all the conclusions were based on the assumption of a linear correlation between homework time and performance, and none of them considered the impact of homework time on students' autonomous motivation. A summary of the evidence by Hallam ( 2004 ) makes no recommendation on the time spent on the homework. The UK Education Endowment Foundation's toolkit entry for homework for secondary school students notes quality is more important than quantity but gives no explicit recommendation on the amount of time that should be spent on homework.

Existing reviews leave the important practical question of homework time unanswered.

In 1989, Cooper conducted a review related to the relationship between homework and performance. The results showed that the average correlation for students in primary school, middle school, and high school between the amount of homework and performance was nearly r  = 0; for students in middle school, it was r  = .07; and for high school students, it was r  = .25 (Cooper,  1989 ). In 2006, Cooper et al. ( 2006 ) conducted another systematic review to explore the effectiveness of homework to improve academic performance. The results showed that the correlation between homework time and performance for high school students was still 0.25, but for middle school students, it was nearly 0. However, they did not look explicitly at homework time.

All the above studies assumed that the correlation between homework and performance was linear, that is, that either more or less homework was better. Indeed, their reported effect size is the correlation coefficient, which is a measure of the linearity of a relationship. While homework can be a dull task that requires full mental effort, and there are limits to our ability to stay focused. Therefore, it is important for teachers, school managers, parents, and children themselves to establish the optimum duration of homework to improve its effectiveness.

1.5. The contribution of this review

Regardless of its aims of preparation, practice, extension or application, homework can be an effective means to improve student's academic achievement. Previous reviews indeed testify to the effectiveness of homework in relation to academic performance. More is not always better, and is restricted by students' ability to maintain their attention for a long time. The present systematic review plans to divide the participants into several groups according to the amount of time spent on homework, such as 0–15, 16–30, 31–45, 46–60, 61–90, 90–120 min, and more than 120 min to compare the test scores of different groups to identify the extent of the relationship between homework time and students' academic performance. We aim to investigate the role of homework in academic achievement, and to determine the optimum homework time by comparing the differences in outcomes between different groupings of homework time. This will be helpful for teachers and parents to better understand the role and utility of homework, and provide theoretical support for teachers to arrange homework.

2. OBJECTIVES

This review will synthesize the results from publications focused on homework time and academic performance, and estimate the relationship between the two. Our objectives are:

• 1. To identify the extent of the relationship between homework time and students' academic performance;
• 2. To analyze the differences in the effectiveness of homework time across genders, grades, subject and regions; and
• 3. To identify the potential factors that affect homework time, such as academic subject, task difficulty, type of homework, mode of homework, parental involvement, and feedback on homework.

3.1. Criteria for considering studies for this review

3.1.1. types of studies.

We will include treatment‐control group design or a comparison group design studies, to adequately address the effect of differing homework time on the academic performance of K‐12 students.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that aim to explore the effect of homework time on academic performance by comparing the test score differences between different groups before and after the intervention will be included. In addition, non‐RCTs such as cohort studies (NRCTs), controlled before and after studies, and interrupted time series studies also will be included if they explicitly take homework as intervention, and report the time spent on homework and the mean and standard deviation of academic achievement.

Relevant correlational studies without mean and standard deviation of academic achievement will be excluded. Other study designs such as case studies, narrative reviews, and nonprimary studies such as editorials, book reviews, commentaries, and letters to the editor, will also be excluded. Qualitative evidence is also beyond the inclusion criteria in the present systematic review.

3.1.2. Types of participants

This review will include studies of K‐12 school students. We excluded children with disabilities, since the context and effects may be different for that population group. Students from special education schools are excluded. If the primary study includes mixed samples (e.g., special education and nonspecial education students), we will use the sub sample excluding special needs students if reported.

3.1.3. Types of interventions

In this review, we will explore the relationship between homework time and academic performance by comparing the academic scores with different amounts of time spent on homework. The eligible intervention studies must be clear that the intervention is homework assigned to students to complete during nonschool hours regularly by schoolteachers which aims to improve academic achievement. This does not mean that the intervention must consist of academic activities, but rather that the explicit expectation must be that the homework, regardless of the nature of the homework content, will result in improved academic performance. Furthermore, we will only include school‐based interventions, that is, homework allocated by other people such as parents or teachers from extracurricular schools, study clubs, and extracurricular activities such as sports and participation in clubs are excluded. Homework related to psychotherapy will also be excluded.

The comparison condition is different time spend on the homework, and we plan to divide the comparisons into several groups, such as 0–15, 16–30, 31–45, 46–60, 61–90, 90–120 min, and more than 120 min.

3.1.4. Types of outcome measures

The objective of the review is to explore the impact of homework on students' academic outcomes. We will extract the homework time and academic performance provided in the primary study. The homework time is the exact time or a time frame reported by students or parents. Academic performance will be measured by the teacher, exam results and/or by the research team using any valid standardized test and reported as test scores.

As valid standardized tests, we will consider norm‐referenced tests (e.g., Gates‐MacGinitie Reading Tests and Star Math), state‐wide tests (e.g., Iowa Test of Basic Skills), national tests (e.g., National Assessment of Educational Progress). If it is not clear from the description of outcome measures in the studies, we will use electronic sources to determine whether a test is standardized or not.

3.1.5. Primary outcomes

The primary outcome is academic performance (test score and standard deviation), and studies that have measured academic performance (and homework time) will be included.

3.1.6. Secondary outcomes

Academic motivation and quality of homework will be included as secondary outcomes.

3.2. Search methods for identification of studies

3.2.1. electronic searches.

The following databases will be searched from inception to present:

• Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science)
• ScienceDirect ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/ )
• Taylor & Francis Online Database ( https://www.tandfonline.com/ )
• The Campbell Library ( https://www.campbellcollaboration.org/better-evidence.html )
• ERCI (EBSCOhost)
• EBSCO ( http://search.ebscohost.com/ )
• JSTOR ( https://www.jstor.org/ )
• PsychArticles (ProQuest)
• PsychInfo (EBSCOhost)
• ProQuest Dissertations ( https://www.proquest.com/index )
• OCLC FirstSearch ( https://firstsearch.oclc.org/ )

Below, the search strategy for Web of Science is provided:

#1 TI = homework OR AB = homework

#2 TI = home‐work OR AB = home‐work

#3 #1 OR #2

#4 TS = K‐12 OR TS = preschool student* OR TS = pre‐school student* OR TS = Kindergarten

student* OR TS = middle school student* OR TS = high school student* OR TS = senior school

student* OR TS = primary school student* OR TS = pupil OR TS = schoolchild OR TS = junior

high school student* OR TS = school‐age

#5 TS = achievement OR TS = performance OR TS = grade OR TS = score OR TS = academic

achievement* OR TS = GPA OR TS = academic performance

#6 #3 AND #4 AND #5

3.2.2. Searching other resources

We will consult the following sources of gray literature, and search the websites of organizations devoted to the education research, to identify relevant unpublished studies and reports. The following gray literature resources will be searched with the keyword “homework”:

• What Works Clearinghouse ( https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/ )
• Education Endowment Foundation ( https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/ )
• European Educational Research Association ( http://www.eera-ecer.de/ )
• American Educational Research Association ( http://www.aera.net/ )
• Best Evidence Encyclopedia ( http://www.bestevidence.org/ )
• Open Grey ( http://www.opengrey.eu/ )

We will also search the Google Scholar with the keyword “homework,” and we will stop scan if there are 5 consecutive pages with no relevant studies.

The following international journals will be hand searched for relevant studies with the keyword “homework”:

• American Educational Research Journal
• Educational Psychologist
• Learning and Instruction
• Journal of Educational Research
• Journal of Educational Psychology
• Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness
• Journal of Experimental Education.

Additionally, the primary studies included in the previous systematic reviews on the relationship between homework and academic performance will be scanned, and the reference lists will also be searched. Furthermore, the studies of experts in the research of homework (such as Cooper Harris, Trautwein Ulric, and Xu jianzhong) will be searched systematically to check our search strategy, and they will be contacted to help identify other relevant studies if possible.

3.3. Data collection and analysis

3.3.1. selection of studies.

The selection of studies will be performed independently by the first two reviewers (Guo LP and Jieyun Li) in Rayyan ( https://rayyan.qcri.org/ ). All titles and abstracts of the records identified after retrieval will be screened, the potentially relevant references will be located with full‐text, and the primary studies that meet our criteria will be included for further analysis. Studies that meet the selection criteria and have the outcomes of interest measured, but do not report these outcome data, will be included and described in the results section of the review. Any discrepancies between the two reviewers will be resolved by consensus with another reviewer involved (Kehu Yang). The whole process of study screening will be based on the PRISMA guidelines (Moher et al.,  2009 ).

3.3.2. Data extraction and management

Information extraction and coding will consist of two parts. The first is general information, including the information of primary study (publication, the year of publication, and the year of data collection), sample characteristics (e.g., sample size, gender, grade level, region, family economic status, parental education level), methodological characteristics (e.g., sampling method, measures of homework time, and the measure of academic performance), and the intervention characteristics (e.g., subject, mode of homework and the type of homework). The other is the effect size, including the homework time and the test score (The details are shown in Supporting Information Annex  1 ). This process will be conducted independently by two authors (Zheng Xu and Xing Xin), and disagreements between coders will be resolved by discussions with another author (Xiuxia Li).

• If a study contains multiple interventions (e.g., different homework modalities such as online vs. book‐based), the reviewers will only extract data that are eligible for this review.
• For academic performance, means, standard deviations (or information to estimate standard deviations), and the number of participants in each group will be extracted. If more than one measure is reported, we will extract all of them and analyze the measurement method as a moderator.
• For the homework time, we will extract the homework time interval reported in the primary studies and code the data as presented, either categorical or continuous. We will then create a continuous variable measure data set (using the mid‐point for data reported in categorical form) and at least two categorical data sets. The multiple categorical data sets will be used to test for sensitivity to the chosen thresholds, and then calculate the mean and standard deviations in each group. If the weekly homework time is reported instead of the daily homework time, we divide the total homework time by 5, and if the homework time is in hours, we convert it to minutes.

In case of controlled before and after studies, mean or median change from baseline scores will be extracted or computed by the reviewers if all necessary data are available. If change scores are not available or cannot be computed, post‐intervention values will be extracted by the reviewers.

3.3.3. Assessment of risk of bias in included studies

For RCTs, the Cochrane bias risk tool will be used to assess the quality of the method and potential defects (Higgins & Green,  2011 ). For nonrandomized studies (including cohort studies, controlled before and after studies, and interrupted time series studies), the risk of bias in nonrandomized studies of interventions (ROBINS‐I) will be used to check the quality of the individual study (Sterne et al.,  2016 ). In addition, the grade will be used to rate the overall quality of the evidence included in this review, ranging from high, moderate, low, and very low, based on the assessment to study design, imprecision, inconsistency, indirectness, and publication bias (Atkins et al.,  2004 ; Schünemann et al.,  2013 ). The risk of bias assessment will be conducted by the two authors (Zheng Xu and Xing Xin), and any disaccord will be solved by discussion with another author (Xiuxia Li).

3.3.4. Dealing with missing data

If there are any missing data, we will contact the author at least twice to obtain more information if the correspondence address is available. If these data are unavailable, we will only analyze the available data, and the studies with missing data will be described in the Results section. Besides, the potential impact of missing data on comprehensive estimates will be considered in the Discussion section.

3.3.5. Assessment of heterogeneity

Forest plots will be inspected to visually investigate overlaps in the confidence intervals (CIs) of the results of the individual studies. The χ 2 test will be performed, and the Q statistics, I 2 and τ 2 index will be adopted to evaluate heterogeneity across studies. For Q statistics, a p value of .05 will be used as a threshold for statistical significance. The I 2 index refers to the truly observed variation ratio (Borenstein et al.,  2009 ), and 25%, 50%, and 75% of the I 2 indicate low, medium, and high heterogeneity (Higgins & Thompson,  2002 ). And the parameter τ 2 is the between‐studies variance (the variance of the effect size parameters across the population of studies), that is, the variance of true effect sizes (across an infinite number of studies).

3.3.6. Assessment of reporting biases

Reporting bias, also called publication bias, refers to the potential of the studies with statistically significant findings to be accepted for publication, whilst those with statistically nonsignificant findings would hardly be accepted for publication. These studies would have a higher probability of being left in the “file drawer,” according to the so‐called “file drawer problem.” If 10 or more studies were identified, visual funnel plots and Egger's test of funnel plot symmetry were performed to evaluate potential publication bias (Rosenthal,  1979 ). If there is evidence of funnel plot asymmetry from a test, we will attempt to conduct the comparisons between the effect with that after trim and fill. The possible reasons for this (e.g., nonreporting biases, poor methodological quality leading to spuriously inflated effects in smaller studies, true heterogeneity, artefactual, and chance) will also be considered (Page et al.,  2019 ).

3.3.7. Data synthesis

We will include all intervention studies that meet our inclusion criteria and extract the mean (M) and SD of test scores. We will take the standard mean difference (SMD) and CI as our effect size index. For subgroups, we plan to divide the outcomes into several groups by time spent on the homework, such as 0–15, 16–30, 31–45, 46–60, 61–90, 90–120 min, and more than 120 min, and then compare the difference of SMD between groups to explore the role of homework time on academic achievement.

If two or more studies are identified that have investigated the effect of homework time on academic performance with sufficiently available data, a random‐effects meta‐analysis will be performed to estimate the comprehensive effect due to the expected heterogeneity between groups using the Review Manager 5 software. The pooled estimates will be presented in forest plots. If quantitative synthesis is not suitable, narrative synthesis will be adopted.

3.3.8. Planned moderators

If statistically significant heterogeneity is detected, subgroup analyses with stratification analysis will be conducted to explore the source of heterogeneity based on the available data.

• Gender. Previous studies showed that girls more frequently reported managing their homework than boys (Mau & Lynn,  2000 ; Xu,  2007 ), and zero‐time homework students are most often male (Hagborg,  1991 ). Therefore, it is worth identifying the influence of gender on homework time and academic performance.
• Grade level. Existing reviews on homework suggest that the relationship between homework and performance is mediated by grade level (Baş et al.,  2017 ; Cooper,  1989 ; Cooper et al.,  2006 ; Fan et al.,  2017 ). Thus, we include the grade level as a potential factor that moderates the linkage of homework time and academic performance.
• Region. Numerous studies indicated that there are regional differences in homework policies and practices (Chen & Stevenson,  1989 ; Tam & Chan,  2009 ; Zhu,  2015 ). The samples involved in the primary study on homework are from different regions (e.g., the United States and Asia); thus, we included the sampling region as a potential moderator in the present review.
• Publication year: Education systems are susceptible to influence of societal changes; thus, publication year is likely to be a moderator, as the homework time may change systematically over time (Cooper et al.,  2006 ; Gill & Schlossman,  2004 ; Twenge et al.,  2004 ). Thus, publication year may also potentially affect the effect sizes of homework time on performance.
• Mode of homework. With web‐learning popularized in education, online homework is being adopted by more teachers, and several researchers have argued about the effects of online homework compared to traditional homework (Callahan,  2016 ; Elias et al.,  2017 ; Jonsdottir et al.,  2017 ; Mendicino et al.,  2009 ). In the present review, we will explore whether the relationship between homework time and academic performance is affected by the mode of homework.
• Type of homework. Teachers typically assign different kinds of homework according to their purpose. Such as reading story to parents, writing math exercises, and trying scientific experiments. In this review, we will divide the academic achievement into three groups: oral homework, paper homework and practical homework and explore whether the relationship between homework time and academic performance is different depending on the type of homework.
• The measure of academic performance: The methods used in previous homework studies included standardized tests and unstandardized assessments (Fan et al.,  2017 ). Several studies suggested that the influence of homework on performance is larger with unstandardized assessments than with standardized tests (e.g., Cooper et al., 1998 ); therefore, there is a need to consider the measure of performance as a potential moderator.
• Subject. Several studies showed that time and effort input in homework varies depending on the subject (e.g., Trautwein,  2007 ; Trautwein & Lüdtke,  2009 ), and it is reasonable to suspect that homework may play a different role in different subjects (e.g., Cooper et al.,  2006 ; Fan et al.,  2017 ; Paschal et al.,  1984 ).

3.3.9. Sensitivity analysis

In addition to the implicit sensitivity analysis in both the analysis of heterogeneity and subgroup analysis, the “One‐leave‐out” method is adopted for sensitivity analysis to check for outliers that potentially influence the overall results, and test the robustness of the meta‐analysis.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF AUTHORS

Liping Guo drafted the protocol, and all authors reviewed the draft and approved the final version.

DECLARATIONS OF INTEREST

All authors declare no potential interest.

INTERNAL SOURCES

This review is supported by funding of the Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of China: Research on the Theoretical System, International Experience, and Chinese Path of Evidence‐based Social Science.

Supporting information

Supplementary Information

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This review is supported by funding of the Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of China: Research on the Theoretical System, International Experience, and Chinese Path of Evidence‐based Social Science (No.: 19ZDA142).

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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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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.

What Test Scores Actually Tell Us

• Posted November 6, 2019
• By Jill Anderson

Professor Andrew Ho thinks test scores often simplify how we view student performance, school effectiveness, and really educational opportunity. By taking a more comprehensive look at data like test scores and learning rates in districts, we may be able to better identify and contextualize how well a school is really performing. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Ho discusses his work with the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and how it provides data to help scholars, policymakers, educators, and parents learn to improve educational opportunity for all children.

Jill Anderson: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. We love and perhaps even loathe test scores, but it's how so many of us choose where to send our kids to school. Then how good a job a school might be doing and how we compare schools. Harvard professor Andrew Ho wants us to think more about what test scores actually tell us. He studies how we design educational test scores, use them, and whether there's better ways to judge academic performance and educational opportunity. He's involved in the recently launched Educational Opportunity Project based at Stanford, where people can go to get a more comprehensive look at their school district. I wanted to know more about that project and what educational opportunity really means.

 At edopportunity.org we're measuring test scores and test scores are not the complete measure of what we want for our kids. Nonetheless, if you look at all of these state tests, what do they measure? Mathematics proficiency and reading and those are quantitative reasoning, as well as a kid's ability to read are really important. You need to read to be able to learn. And so they are important measure as well we also recognize they're not the sum total of everything we hope schools to do and hope for our kids. So that's what we mean Ed Opportunity as we operationalize it on the website as test scores, but they are strongly correlated with a number of other measures that we do care about, right? So while recognizing that they're incomplete, we also believe they're important.

Jill Anderson:  What our test scores actually tell us about a school and the students there?

Andrew Ho: I got into this field because I recognized as a teacher in high school and also in middle school and as an observer of schools and particularly in Japan where I spent my junior year abroad, just how powerful test scores were as a lever for policy and curricular change. Everyone was saying, "We have to teach this because it's on the test." And that I realized was both very, very sad and an incredible opportunity to improve test scores and to improve the design of tests, not just to make them more relevant, but to make the results more actionable. And that's how I sort of got into this, this whole enterprise was a belief that we weren't designing tests right and using test scores right and that we could do a better job.

So I, and many other psychometricians, measurement folks, have really mixed feelings about tests. We want to improve them, we believe that they're powerful, but we believe they're also just sort of too powerful sometimes and people simplify what educational quality and opportunity is to a single number that is useful but imperfect. And so it's with that sort of humility but also recognizing this incredible promise that I went into this project thinking, "All right, how can we take the 350 million test scores that we've accumulated over the past 9, 10 years or so, and put them to good use to enable people to understand how complicated and variable educational opportunity as measured by test scores, is in this country?"

And so what I would recommend is for any given subject or grade, every State in this country makes test score items, the questions we ask of kids available. And I think we can be skeptical and should be skeptical of tests, but if you look at most of these questions, you sort of say to yourself, "Actually, I kind of want my kid to be able to answer this correctly. I kind of would like them to be able to understand vocabulary words, use them in context and be able to reason with numbers and algebra and geometry." These are abilities and skills and dispositions that we really do want our kids to have. Are they perfect? Are they everything? Do they encompass social, emotional aspects? No, they are incomplete, but they are still desirable. And so it's with that sort of humility, but also recognizing the importance of being able to communicate, being able to reason that we believe that these are incomplete but important measures.

Jill Anderson:  Do you think the public understands the complexities of this? There's a lot of websites in the world that compare test score results from one community, one school, to another, and that's all you're getting. You might get some other ratios, demographics, that kind of thing, but it's fairly limited information.

Andrew Ho: Right. This is the problem we're trying to solve. The learning goals of this project are to appreciate just how different are test scores from changes in test scores because isn't that what education is about? Not just a score, but how we improve that score, right? Not just my daughter's ability to read, but how she gets better at reading and what I can do to improve that reading. And so that's the story of learning. And for us to be able to distinguish between those two, between test scores and learning changes in test scores, right? Or another way to put it is between proficiency and growth is a key learning goal of the website. And so, no, I don't think we as a society and even among folks in education communities, we are able to distinguish enough between what is good in terms of a level and what is good in terms of progress. So I hope that we can keep both in mind. It's not to say that performance doesn't matter and learning is all that matters, right? We should say that both matter. We can want high levels and we also want progress.

Jill Anderson:  One of the things that is introduced through that Educational Opportunity Project is the learning rate. What is a learning rate?

Andrew Ho: When we say like, "There are good schools there," let's unpack that a bit. There are at least two answers there, 50 that we should consider, but at least two criteria that we want to really drill down in this project. And the first is to get people on the hook with what they already think they know, right? Which is about average test scores. And usually when you say, "There are good schools there," you think to yourself about average test scores. And of course the first thing you see when you click into that chart, we call it the Galaxy Chart because it looks kind of like the Milky Way at night, right? So that scatterplot there that shows that striking strong correlation between socioeconomic status and test scores, right? That's what we want to complexify, they are average test scores.

But now wait, look. Look at that tab over there and all of a sudden you see learning rates. Now what are learning rates? There's a difference between saying kids are above average in third grade, above average in eighth grade and coming in below average in third grade and ending eighth grade above average. So how would we describe those two schools where you come in in third grade above average, leave in eighth grade above average versus a school where you start below average but end above average? How would you describe those? They're both having kids that leave in eighth grade well above average, but wouldn't you say, "Wow, there's really something going on with that school that's bringing in kids at third grade who are below average and they're leaving at eighth grade above average."

So that's what learning is, and I think it's striking to realize that if we were to just to take an average, we would rank that school that's doing such a good job of bringing kids at the third grade who are below average, all the way up to above average, we'd rank that school below the other, right? One school is, you might say it's like polishing bright apples. It's like you get all these kids with high socioeconomic status and you bring them in and you keep them there. Congratulations. And here's another school that's taking students who have not had much early childhood opportunity, or early great opportunity and they're launching them to really high levels.

Shouldn't we recognize that as opposed to penalizing that school for having low third grade test scores? Shouldn't we care that there's a ton of learning happening at one school and not at another? And we have to recognize at a snapshot that if you just look at the districts that are polishing bright apples, should we be giving them credit for that? Or should we also recognize a second criterion, which is how much learning is going on in these schools?

Jill Anderson:  I can imagine people hearing this and Googling this and they're pulling up their community and they're seeing negative 12% learning rates, for the district, for the whole community and hitting the panic button.

Andrew Ho:  What negative means here is below average, right? It does not mean that kids know less this year. In what ways would we want them to be concerned, right? You know that your school has high or low test scores on average, does that mean anything about what you can say about their learning rates? And the answer is you don't know anything. All this knowledge that we have in our heads about what good schools and not so good schools are based on these averages, which don't really tell you about learning. In a way I hope it forces people to reconsider their notion of what a good school is and then ask, "Wait a second, how can we do better? How can we make sure that our kids who are coming in above average and might be leaving more close to average, what can we do about that?" And the answer is that there's a whole bunch of schools and districts out there that have really high learning rates, perhaps we should learn from them.

And so I hope that the panic isn't from this notion that a school that has below average learning will always be such, and the work of anyone who deals with numbers to take an improvement mindset to them. To say that these are not fixed features of schools, these are not fixed features of districts. These are things we can change and all of us at the graduate school of education, whoever all about, it's like, "Learn to change the world," we say. So yeah, let's think about what we can do better. And so I hope the panic is not the paralyzing panic, it's the productive panic, right? It's like, "Okay, let's get to work," and figure out why there's so much variation in achievement and in progress and learning across these schools and districts and learn from the best of them so that that negative 12% becomes positive 12% in the future.

Jill Anderson: So we do want to look at learning rates more?

Andrew Ho: Well, for what purpose? Again, one of the stories in our discoveries is that gaps correlate strongly with segregation. And so one of the things we deeply do not want to do is encourage parents to use this to select the quote best schools on any metric, right? As opposed to saying, "This helps me to discover what every school in every district can do better." Because again, these numbers are malleable, right? We can do something about them. So yes, I think the level one goal is to complexify the notions of school quality, right? And to say that there are actually multiple criteria we might want to consider when we're thinking about how to figure out if a school is doing well.

But then, once we figure out if a school is doing well, the solution isn't to send all the kids to just those schools. That is our sort of darkest fear out of all of this. We do not want to simply resort everybody into high quality schools, however defined, we want to say there are lessons to learn in all of these schools that we could apply broadly so that everyone, to use the Lake Wobegon metaphor, everyone should be above average, right? So everyone should be continuously improving. And if you look under the hood of the data, what we've done is we've managed, again, we described it as like a patchwork quilt where each State and every year is its own little patch. And what we've done is through our methods and statistical and psychometric methods, we've managed to stitch all these different patches together into sort of a big picture.

I think it's only when you have that context, the silos create this kind of... You have these blinders on and you're only looking at Massachusets and you're only looking at 2019. You don't see change and progress and you don't get to contextualize it in a nine year history of spanning grades three through eight. And so what I'm really proud of is that we've managed to the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right? It's like we can see through the stitching the dramatic variability in test scores and in learning rates, and that I think is what we hope along the lines what we've seen is like, "Yeah, we've always known about proficiency and growth, but it's never been presented in a way where you can see all the constellations, all the pieces of the puzzle," and that's what we hope this project does.

Jill Anderson:  Andrew Ho is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

An education podcast that keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and communities

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The impact of homework on student progress

How important is homework to student performance, how can homework influence the academic performance of students read on to find out….

Sep 05, 2018    By Team YoungWonks *

How effective is homework in helping improve a student's performance?

The answer is a not a simple yes or no. The fact of the matter is that today we hear arguments both for and against homework being assigned to students and hence, this subject deserves a closer examination. The debate between the two opposing camps is not exactly new; on one hand, you have people who say that homework will help the student grow and thus positively impact his / her performance and then there are the others who believe the opposite, that is homework is just extra effort for both students and teachers and that it doesn't translate into any positive results.

The homework proponents

Let's look at the first camp that belongs to the homework proponents; this camp believes that there is great benefit to homework and that it is vital to student success. According to this group, homework that isn't an overload - as in homework that follows the standard "10-minute rule" which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level - can actually help the student with life skills such as organization, time management and independent critical thinking. They are of the view that homework can help the student practice and review what they learnt and that it acts as a reinforcement of sorts.

A research commonly cited by this camp is the comprehensive meta-analysis done by Duke University researchers in the year 2006. They reviewed more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and concluded that homework does have a positive effect on student achievement. Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and director of Duke's Program in Education, said the the correlation was stronger for older students - in seventh through 12th grade - than for those in younger grades. His analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement - test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills.

That said, it must be mentioned that Cooper also came across studies that said that homework can fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children. This is why he recommended further study of such potential effects of homework. But all in all, his study concluded that in moderation, homework tends to improve test scores, but not usually at the elementary level. Secondly, he said that teachers should avoid extremes when assigning homework and lastly that instructors will know best about what is best for their students in a given situation, once they have assessed the student's capability.

The homework opponents

This group believes that assigning and grading homework takes up valuable class time. That homework particularly in the lower grades often requires help, so it just encourages these students to hurry and cheat by getting someone else to do it, or simply not turn it in time. They also say that time spent doing homework can be spent reading and that homework can cause stress as it eats into time for family, friends, volunteering, sports, and hobbies.

For example, Alfie Kohn, author of the book The Homework Myth , is a well-known critic of at-home assignments. According to him, homework is frequently the source of frustration, exhaustion and family conflicts. He adds that homework can thus even extinguish a child's curiosity because of its sheer pressure.

What constitutes good, productive homework?

Like in the case of any argument, it's imperative here to look at empirical evidence in the form of research that has been carried out. This, in turn, needs us to look at several concepts that play an important role in helping determine what a good, productive homework assignment is.

Homework in a flipped classroom

To begin with, we need to look at the concept of flipped classroom. Now what is a flipped classroom? It's where the traditional roles of the teacher/ instructor and the student are flipped. In a traditional setting, the teacher delivers the lecture in class and assigns homework to the student. The flipped classroom turns this approach on its head. Here, lectures are typically shared in a video format with the student so he/ she can watch it at home and absorb the lesson; that way, you can pause or rewind the lecture at home and learn it at your own pace. The assignment is then worked upon not at home but in class under the supervision of the teacher. So the classroom time is spent on applying the content rather than direct instruction. At YoungWonks Coding Classes for Kids , the faculty has worked on making videos and animations an essential part of their specially crafted curriculum and students are given access to this material for them to watch it at home.

Homework complemented with assisted practice

A flipped classroom lets the teacher actually assess how much the student has actually grasped from the video lecture at home and the teacher can now assist the student in his/ her assignment. Hence, this method of teaching is called assisted practice as the student gets to practice under the supervision or with the assistance/ aid of the teacher. The teacher has a more hands-on approach here and this approach has shown to yield positive results.

A key element here in this teaching method is for the teacher to not judge the student and put any pressure on him / her. This is why the instructors at YoungWonks acknowledge how each student is different. The idea then is to customise the teaching/ lecture for each student. For instance, there's no point in assigning the homework of solving a quadratic equation to a student who doesn't even know what's a variable, because the student's basics are not yet in place. The instructor here needs to dumb down the concept and facilitate easier learning for the student. Similarly, it is also a waste of time to assign the quadratic equation homework to a student who has already covered this at home or in some other class. This is because the homework, in this case, is adding no value to the student.

Similarly, blended learning is a school of thought that believes in using the right mix of the teacher's strengths - as in the case of traditional learning - and today's technology to provide instruction to students.

Homework in a project-based learning environment  

The whole point of project-based learning is that it makes the lesson interesting as it provides knowledge in the form of a project. So the student has a meaningful purpose he/ she is working towards and that kind of approach always has the kids excited.

Just reading a book or studying a diagram about a circuit can be boring. But if you tell the same kid how he / she can light up an LED with the highest potential in a manner that the current allows maximum light and yet doesn't blow it up, then he / she would be a lot more interested in the lesson. That's when you introduce the Ohm's Law formula and have the kids use them to figure out the solution.

What research says about the new and 'disruptive' teaching and homework concepts

Several thought leaders today believe in ditching the traditional forms of teaching in favor of these methods, i.e. customised learning, project-based learning, assisted practice and flipped classroom. This includes the likes of entrepreneur Elon Musk and Sal Khan of Khan Academy. Shying away from traditional styles of teaching may be described as a disruption of sorts but it has also proven to be highly beneficial to the students. The quality of education imparted in such a setting is way superior to that in a traditional setting and research proves this.

For instance, an online survey of 450 teachers conducted in 2012 by the Flipped Learning Network in conjunction with education startup ClassroomWindow found that teachers associate Flipped Learning with improved student performance and attitudes, and increased job satisfaction. Of the teachers surveyed, 66% reported their students' standardized test scores increased after flipping their classrooms. In the same survey, 80% of teachers perceived an improvement in their students' attitudes towards learning. Nearly nine in ten of the teachers surveyed reported that their job satisfaction also improved, with 46% reporting significant improvement.

Project-based learning too is shown to make classes more engaging for students and thus improve their learning. For example, the Effectiveness of Project Based Learning in Trigonometry was studied at the Department of Mathematics at the Sebelas Maret University in Indonesia and in the semester 2 of the academic year 2016/2017, they found that the mean / average score of students taught under the Project-based learning (PjBL) learning model was 84.5, significantly higher than 76.26, the average score of students taught under the classical learning model.

Implementation is key

It is interesting to note that these unorthodox methods of teaching have met with opposition from parents. Several American schools tried these methods but had to abandon them and revert to the traditional styles. The reason behind this is their flawed implementation. Most of these schools cherry-picked topics/ questions while using the flipped classroom, assisted practice or blended learning approach. And therein lies the problem.

The modern concepts addressed in this blog are designed for the 21st century and hence, require one to make full use of the available technology. So an instructor needs to not just share a few lessons in the video format but instead maintain uniformity by sharing all lessons through videos. And then he or she needs to observe how the student applies knowledge gleaned from each of these lessons in class and share feedback accordingly.

The bottom line is that homework doesn't have to be a negative, dirty word. Assigning homework is fine as long as the instructor knows hows the assigned homework will benefit the concerned student and this can be done only when the homework is in keeping with the learning practices of flipped classroom, assisted practice, self-paced learning, personalised learning, blended learning and project-based learning.

YoungWonks strongly relies on these methods. Each teacher here assesses the student at an individual level and then assigns the homework accordingly. This is what makes YoungWonks distinctively different from other coding classes.

Shared below is a video throwing light on the same subject:

Enhancing Student Progress through Targeted Learning

In the realm of modern education, it's essential to identify resources that not only complement homework but actively enhance student learning and progress. At YoungWonks, we understand this need and offer specialized Coding Classes for Kids designed to introduce them to the world of technology and prepare them for the future. For students keen on exploring specific programming languages, our Python Coding Classes for Kids provide a solid foundation in one of the most popular and versatile languages today. Additionally, for those intrigued by hardware and game development, YoungWonks offers comprehensive Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Game Development Coding Classes , which blend fun and learning in a unique way, encouraging innovation and creativity. These programs aim to supplement traditional homework, offering a hands-on approach to learning that can significantly impact student progress.

*Contributors: Written by Vidya Prabhu; Photo courtesy: Shutterstock

This blog is presented to you by YoungWonks. The leading coding program for kids and teens. YoungWonks offers instructor led one-on-one online classes and in-person classes with 4:1 student teacher ratio. Sign up for a free trial class by filling out the form below:

How the ‘Stress Bias’ Affects Students’ Test Scores

Test anxiety is real. Even those who don’t experience extreme levels of stress when taking exams probably know someone whose skin goes clammy and stomach churns on test days. The condition is recognized by the Anxiety and Depression Society of America as a form of performance anxiety, due to fear of failure, lack of preparation, and poor testing history.

Unlike a normal amount of stress , test anxiety doesn’t lead to better results. As new research shows, under some circumstances, it can decrease test scores—sometimes by quite a bit.

Stress Bias: the Impact of Test Anxiety

Parents and teachers have long suspected that the stress of test-taking can influence students’ results. However, without formal research on the topic, it was hard to know how much of a difference it could make. A new study shows that stress bias decreases standardized test scores for some students. The effect is particularly severe for children exposed to other significant stressors outside of school, such as neighborhood violence and poverty .

These results may require states to reconsider the methods used to measure academic progress. If stress causes lower scores, annual standardized academic achievement exams may not accurately reflect some students’ skills and abilities. Since these scores have an impact on the courses students take, whether or not they are eligible to graduate, and which colleges they attend, the effects of stress bias extend far beyond the day of the test.

Testing, Stress, and Performance

The study, titled Testing, Stress, and Performance: How Students Respond Physiologically to High-Stakes Testing , is the work of researcher Jennifer Heissel and her team. The group measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol in students before, during, and after high-stakes exams. Once compiled, the results were powerful.

The students selected for the study attended school in New Orleans. They were already under significant amounts of stress due to family instability, neighborhood violence, and poverty, which affected their bodies’ ability to handle additional stressors. Researchers examined cortisol levels during weeks where no exams were held and compared the results to exam weeks.

Some students had marked increases or decreases in cortisol during exam weeks, and the changes showed up in exam results. The students who reacted strongly to the stress of testing scored 0.40 standard deviations lower than expected. These results suggest that exam scores are not necessarily a reflection of students’ abilities. Given the impact that standardized test scores have on future academic decisions, these findings are significant.

Of course, this is the first study to methodically examine the impact of stress on high-stakes test scores. A relatively small group of students were included, and all were from low-income backgrounds in New Orleans. Additional research may be needed to move forward with large-scale policy changes. In the meantime, there are steps teachers and parents can take to support overly anxious children.

Supporting Students Through Test Anxiety

The good news about test anxiety is that it can be managed. With guidance from parents and teachers, many students have successfully reduced their stress levels before and during exams. These are some of the techniques that have proven effective with students of all ages:

• Increase opportunities for art, music, and movement during periods of high test-related stress. All of these areas are proven antidotes to academic performance anxiety.
• Offer plenty of opportunities to review material. Eliminating the sense of being unprepared for the test reduces stress.
• Practice test-taking. In some cases, anxiety comes from not knowing what to expect. Use sample questions and explain all parts of the answer sheet so students can clearly visualize how test day will unfold.
• Explain the stakes. Students understand that certain tests are particularly important, and they sense teachers’ concerns about standardized state tests. However, they may be imagining consequences of poor scores that are far worse than reality. By discussing how test results are used, students who have catastrophized the process will understand that poor results do not spell the end of the world.
• Value progress as much as—or more than—scores. If students are showing improved performance, take time out to celebrate.

Finally, be sure to provide unlimited reassurance. Beneath test-related stress lies any number of dark feelings. For example, students may believe that parents and teachers will think less of them if scores are low. Remind students to do their best, but be sure to note that test scores don’t impact the pride and affection you feel for them.

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Harvard and Caltech Will Require Test Scores for Admission

The universities are the latest highly selective schools to end their policies that made submitting SAT or ACT scores optional.

By Anemona Hartocollis and Stephanie Saul

Harvard will reinstate standardized testing as a requirement of admission, the university announced Thursday, becoming the latest in a series of highly competitive universities to reverse their test-optional policies.

Students applying to enter Harvard in fall 2025 and beyond will be required to submit SAT or ACT scores, though the university said a few other test scores will be accepted in “exceptional cases,” including Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests. The university had previously said it was going to keep its test-optional policy through the entering class of fall 2026.

Within hours of Harvard’s announcement, Caltech, a science and engineering institute, also said it was reinstating its testing requirements for students applying for admission in fall 2025.

The schools had been among nearly 2,000 colleges across the country that dropped test score requirements over the last few years, a trend that escalated during the pandemic when it was harder for students to get to test sites.

Dropping test score requirements was widely viewed as a tool to help diversify admissions, by encouraging poor and underrepresented students who had potential but did not score well on the tests to apply. But supporters of the tests have said without scores, it became harder to identify promising students who outperformed in their environments.

In explaining its decision to accelerate the return to testing, Harvard cited a study by Opportunity Insights , which found that test scores were a better predictor of academic success in college than high school grades and that they can help admissions officers identify highly talented students from low income groups who might otherwise had gone unnoticed.

“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond,” Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, said in a statement announcing the move.

“In short, more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range,” she added.

Caltech, in Pasadena, Calif., said that reinstating testing requirements reaffirmed the school’s “commitment as a community of scientists and engineers to using all relevant data in its decision-making processes.”

Harvard and Caltech join a growing number of schools, notable for their selectivity, that have since reversed their policies, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown, Purdue and the University of Texas at Austin.

For Harvard, the move comes at a time of transition, and perhaps a return to more conservative policies.

Last June, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions in cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, raising fears that with the demise of affirmative action, those schools would become less diverse.

And in January, Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, resigned under pressure from critics who said she had not acted strongly enough to combat antisemitism on campus after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, and under mounting accusations of plagiarism in her academic work, which she stood by.

The provost, Alan Garber, was named interim president, while the dean of the law school, John Manning, became interim provost, the university’s second-highest administrative position. Mr. Manning is considered a strong potential candidate to replace Dr. Gay. His background stands out for his conservative associations, having clerked for the former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

In the current climate on campus, a return to test scores could be seen as a return to tradition. It also may address concerns of many parents that the college admissions process, especially in elite institutions, is inscrutable and disconnected from merit.

Applications to Harvard were down by 5 percent this year, while those at many of its peer universities went up, suggesting that the recent turmoil may have dented its reputation. But it still received a staggering number of undergraduate applications — 54,008 — and admitted only 3.6 percent. Requiring test scores could make sorting through applications more manageable.

Critics of standardized tests have long raised concerns that the tests helped fuel inequality because some wealthier students raised their scores through high-priced tutoring. But recent studies have found that test scores help predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success, and that test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years .

But Robert Schaeffer, director of public education at FairTest, an organization that opposes standardized testing, said Thursday that the Opportunity Insights analysis had been criticized by other researchers. “Those scholars say that when you eliminate the role of wealth, test scores are not better than high school G.P.A.,” he said, adding that it is not clear whether that pattern is true among the admissions pool at super selective colleges such as Harvard.

Mr. Schaeffer said that at least 1,850 universities remain test optional, including Michigan, Vanderbilt, Wisconsin and Syracuse, which have recently extended their policies. “The vast majority of colleges will not require test scores.” An exception, he said, could be the University of North Carolina system, which is considering a plan to require tests, but only for those students with a G.P.A. below 2.8.

Acknowledging the concerns of critics, Harvard said that it would reassess the new policy regularly. The school said that test scores would be considered along with other information about an applicant’s experience, skills, talents, contributions to communities and references. They will also be looked at in the context of how other students are doing at the same high school.

“Admissions officers understand that not all students attend well-resourced schools, and those who come from modest economic backgrounds or first-generation college families may have had fewer opportunities to prepare for standardized tests,” William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, said in a statement.

Harvard said that in the interest of selecting a diverse student body, it has enhanced financial aid and stepped up recruitment of underserved students by joining a consortium of 30 public and private universities that recruits students from rural communities.

An earlier version of this article misstated Robert Schaeffer’s position. He is the director of public education at FairTest, not the director.

How we handle corrections

Anemona Hartocollis is a national reporter for The Times, covering higher education. More about Anemona Hartocollis

Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education. More about Stephanie Saul