does high school homework increase academic achievement

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

• Publications
• IZA Discussion Papers
• Does High School Homework Increase Academic Achievement?

IZA DP No. 8142: Does High School Homework Increase Academic Achievement?

published in: Education Economics, 2017, 25 (1), 45-59

Although previous research has shown that homework improves students' academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students' homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which are less accurate than time-diary data. However, most time-diary data sets do not contain outcome measures, and thus are limited in the questions they can answer. One data set that does have both time-diary and outcome information is the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Students complete time diaries as part of the CDS and then a few years later provide information on outcomes in the TA. The CDS provides us with time diaries for both weekdays and weekend days, providing a good picture of homework over the course of a week rather than on just a single day. For high school graduates, we explore the effects of time spent on homework on two measures of academic achievement: high school GPA and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time increases the probability of college attendance for boys. In addition, when we look at homework performed as a sole activity, we find that homework increases high school GPA for boys.

• academic achievement
• human capital

Cookie settings

These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.

In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.

Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?

• Share this story on facebook
• Share this story on twitter
• Share this story on reddit
• Share this story on linkedin
• Get this story's permalink
• Print this story

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.

Link to this page

Copy and paste the URL below to share this page.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Does High School Homework Increase Academic Achievement?

2000, SSRN Electronic Journal

Related Papers

Steven McMullen

This study takes advantage of nationally representative panel data on student behavior and academic performance to test two possible policy reforms. First, I examine a policy that increases the amount of homework that students complete. Second, I examine the impact of increasing the amount of homework assigned. Previous studies have not been able to consistently estimate the impact of homework because of important omitted variables and measurement error, which strongly bias the estimated impact of homework time. This paper, however, uses an instrumental variables approach with student fixed effects to account for both time-varying and time-invariant unobserved characteristics and inputs. This approach produces estimates of the impact of homework time on academic achievement that are much larger than those of previous studies. Additionally, these findings suggest that assigning additional homework primarily improves the achievement of low performing students and students in low performing schools. Thus, assigning more homework could help close the gap in achievement between high and low performing students.

In the literature on the impact of homework there is little empirical support for assigning homework to elementary school students. Nevertheless, the practice has become more common, despite popular resistance among many parents and popular media. We examine the effects of both assigning homework and time spent on homework on mathematics and reading achievement using nationally representative longitudinal data on elementary school students. In order to control for important unobserved characteristics and inputs we use empirical specifications that include student fixed effects. We find that this approach consistently indicates that homework has a positive impact on academic achievement, and that less sophisticated empirical approaches will produce misleading results. Additionally, we find that the impact of homework is not uniform across the population, but that some minority groups and low income students get more benefit from homework, indicating that increasing homework assigned could be a valuable policy for decreasing the black-white as well as the high and low-income achievement gap.

School Psychology Quarterly

Jodene Fine

Miriam Linver

Children’s Homework Time—Do Parents ’ Investments Make a Difference? This article describes the homework time of 2024 children in school grades 1 through 12, using time diary data from a national dataset, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-Child Development Supplement (PSID-CDS). As part of the PSID-CDS, time diary data were collected for one randomly selected weekday and weekend day. Data were analyzed with an investment model perspective, where parental time, money, and human capital were expected to influence children’s and adolescents ’ homework time. About 2/3 of children did any homework. Logistic regression revealed that ethnicity was the primary predictor of whether or not children in elementary school and junior high school did any homework, although some investment model variables, in particular time (number of children in household) was significant for elementary school children, and money (family income) was influential for junior high school students. All three investme...

Working Papers

Charlene Kalenkoski

Stephen Holt

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Labour Economics

Journal of Youth and Adolescence

Iliana Barrera Romero

Recent studies have questioned whether the nation's educational system is adequately preparing children to function productively in today's society. To examine this issue, the present study utilized the Experience Sampling Method to investigate the amount of time young adolescents spent doing classwork and homework, their inner subjective experience while doing so, and their companions while doing homework. The relationship between these variables and students' academic performance was also examined. Results revealed that students spent only 15.5 hours per week engaged in school work and only 6 hours per week doing homework, with increased homework time associated with better academic achievement. In addition, students were found to complete homework primarily alone or in classes, although doing homework with their parents was associated with better academic performance. Lastly, students' affect was found to be relatively neutral when doing classwork, but comparatively more negative while doing homework, particularly when doing homework alone. The implications of these findings for understanding the socializing influence of school are discussed.

RELATED PAPERS

Cancer immunity

Aqeel Ahmed

Piyush Sinha

mariluz cano , HELMER QUINTERO

Nicolas Durand

Physical Review Letters

John Annand

Revista Brasileira Multidisciplinar

Ana Nunciato

Baihaqi Fanani

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

BENEDICTE GENDRON

GISELE SAVIANI

Anuário Unesco/Metodista de Comunicação Regional

Deivison Branco Nogueira

dsr.inpe.br

ROMEU ALVES

Papeles De Poblacion

Austreberta Nazar Beutelspacher

ComTech: Computer, Mathematics and Engineering Applications

muhamad abdul holik

V Jornadas De La Redvitec 10 Anos De Experiencias De Cooperacion Universidad Entorno Socioproductivo Estado

Maria Cristina Deza

Journal of the American Chemical Society

Daniel Murgida

Gait & Posture

christian murie

Nanomaterials

Ana Andrea Estrada

Bioinformatics

Gábor Tusnády

Jimena Fernandez

Arnaldo Melo

South Asian Journal of Business and Management Cases

susmita suggala

IJECA (International Journal of Education and Curriculum Application)

Ita Fitriati

Jonathan david Alvarez

Luis Salvador-Carulla

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Browse Econ Literature

• Working papers
• Software components
• Book chapters
• JEL classification

More features

• Subscribe to new research

RePEc Biblio

Author registration.

• Economics Virtual Seminar Calendar NEW!

Does high school homework increase academic achievement?

• Author & abstract
• Download & other version
• 8 Citations
• Related works & more

Corrections

• Charlene Marie Kalenkoski
• Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia

Suggested Citation

Download full text from publisher, other versions of this item:.

Follow serials, authors, keywords & more

Public profiles for Economics researchers

Various research rankings in Economics

RePEc Genealogy

Who was a student of whom, using RePEc

Curated articles & papers on economics topics

Upload your paper to be listed on RePEc and IDEAS

New papers by email

Subscribe to new additions to RePEc

EconAcademics

Blog aggregator for economics research

Cases of plagiarism in Economics

About RePEc

Initiative for open bibliographies in Economics

News about RePEc

Questions about IDEAS and RePEc

RePEc volunteers

Participating archives

Publishers indexing in RePEc

Privacy statement

Found an error or omission?

Opportunities to help RePEc

Get papers listed

Have your research listed on RePEc

Open a RePEc archive

Have your institution's/publisher's output listed on RePEc

Get RePEc data

Use data assembled by RePEc