Years ago—or perhaps I should say, decades ago—teachers had a rule: Give kids 10 minutes of homework every night in first grade, 20 in second grade, and so on, up to a maximum of two hours per night in high school. That is, for every grade, add 10 minutes to the nightly homework load.
But once No Child Left Behind started making its presence known in the most recent decade, the homework load has gone way up, to the point where several families say they feel “crushed” by the amount of work. A recent poll of public school teachers found that, on average, high school students are assigned 3.5 hours of homework per weeknight, or more than 17 hours a week, the Los Angeles Times reports.
There are good points to be made both for and against homework, of course, and the ASCD organization has documented some of the major findings in a concise report, here. Major studies have found a positive and statistically significant correlation between the amount of homework kids do and their academic achievement.
But as we find with many studies that link academic achievement, most commonly through scores on standardized tests, to anything else, we just can’t be sure we have isolated the single variable of “amount of homework” sufficiently to call results that look promising, from a statistician’s point of view, solid, from an educator’s point of view.
“It is not possible to make claims on homework’s causal effects on longer-term measures of achievement, such as class grades or standardized tests, or any other achievement-related outcomes” writes Sara Bennett in her book The Case Against Homework, quoting Duke University professor Harris Cooper. “Because the influences on homework are complex, [there is] no simple, general finding applicable to all students.”
Mr Cooper even believes too much homework can be counterproductive, Ms Bennett wrote. “It is not going to improve a ninth grader’s achievement to do 2.5 hours of homework per night versus 1.5 hours,” he said.
Much less 3.5 hours a night, which is what the poll found.
Ms Bennett reports in her book that a 2006 survey of students at one public high school in Massachusetts concluded that 28 percent of the students were doing more than four hours of homework per night. And while studies show some correlation between the amount of homework high school students do and their academic achievement, elementary students gain much less from a workload increase.
My advice would be to assign only homework that is actually beneficial to students, assignments that lead them to a deeper understanding of whatever’s being taught. The poll, conducted by the University of Phoenix, also found that the more experience a teacher had, the less homework he or she assigned. I wonder if they know something.
How much homework do you do? Is it too much, too little, or just right? And why do you think this?
The Washington Post reports that “During the past three decades, the homework load ‘has remained remarkably stable,’ said [Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution], except for 9-year-olds ‘primarily because many students who once did not have any now have some.’ He said ‘NAEP data do not support the idea that a large and growing number of students have an onerous amount of homework.’
“Only a small group of students report having two hours or more of homework nightly — between 1984 and 2012, that portion was 5 to 6 percent for age 9, 6 to 10 percent for age 13 and 10 to 13 percent for age 17.”
Jay Mathews writes that the elimination of mindless homework is a worthy goal, but also reminds his readers that “such subtle changes can be accomplished only by teachers and administrators, not by school boards accommodating a minority of angry parents. The anti-homework people have some good ideas and mean well, but they are often out of sync with what happens in classrooms. Effective teachers need the power to demand work that makes sense to them. Those of us who support them remember how doing our homework helped us and see how it is motivating our children.”