Does homework improve learning
Brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study -- and a reminder of the importance of doing just that: reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers 's start by reviewing what we know from earlier investigations. 1] first, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school. In fact, there isn't even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. If we're making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it's either because we're misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence , even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn't been particularly persuasive. There does seem to be a correlation between homework and standardized test scores, but (a) it isn't strong, meaning that homework doesn't explain much of the variance in scores, (b) one prominent researcher, timothy keith, who did find a solid correlation, returned to the topic a decade later to enter more variables into the equation simultaneously, only to discover that the improved study showed that homework had no effect after all[2], and (c) at best we're only talking about a correlation -- things that go together -- without having proved that doing more homework causes test scores to go up. When homework is related to test scores, the connection tends to be strongest -- or, actually, least tenuous -- with math. If homework turns out to be unnecessary for students to succeed in that subject, it's probably unnecessary comes a new study, then, that focuses on the neighborhood where you'd be most likely to find a positive effect if one was there to be found: math and science homework in high school. Like most recent studies, this one by adam maltese and his colleagues[3] doesn't provide rich descriptive analyses of what students and teachers are doing. Thousands of students are asked one question -- how much time do you spend on homework? When kids in these two similar datasets were asked how much time they spent on math homework each day, those in the nels study said 37 minutes, whereas those in the els study said 60 minutes. They just move right along -- even though those estimates raise troubling questions about the whole project, and about all homework studies that are based on self-report. They emphasized the latter, but let's get the former out of the way there a correlation between the amount of homework that high school students reported doing and their scores on standardized math and science tests? Yes, and it was statistically significant but "very modest": even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours' worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test. Is that really worth the frustration, exhaustion, family conflict, loss of time for other activities, and potential diminution of interest in learning? Thus, a headline that reads "study finds homework boosts achievement" can be translated as "a relentless regimen of after-school drill-and-skill can raise scores a wee bit on tests of rote learning. They were proud of having looked at transcript data in order to figure out "the exact grade a student received in each class [that he or she] completed" so they could compare that to how much homework the student did. There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and "no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not. When you measure "achievement" in terms of grades, you expect to see a positive result -- not because homework is academically beneficial but because the same teacher who gives the assignments evaluates the students who complete them, and the final grade is often based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, students did the homework. Even if homework were a complete waste of time, how could it not be positively related to course grades? The study zeroed in on specific course grades, which represents a methodological improvement, and the moral may be: the better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework. We got a hint of that from timothy keith's reanalysis and also from the fact that longer homework studies tend to find less of an effect. 6] like others in this field, they seem to have approached the topic already convinced that homework is necessary and potentially beneficial, so the only question we should ask is how -- not whether -- to assign it.
The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we'd start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that's experience is any guide, however, many people will respond to these results by repeating platitudes about the importance of practice[8], or by complaining that anyone who doesn't think kids need homework is coddling them and failing to prepare them for the "real world" (read: the pointless tasks they'll be forced to do after they leave school). Those open to evidence, however, have been presented this fall with yet another finding that fails to find any meaningful benefit even when the study is set up to give homework every benefit of the doubt. It's important to remember that some people object to homework for reasons that aren't related to the dispute about whether research might show that homework provides academic benefits. Keith, "testing a model of school learning: direct and indirect effects on academic achievement," contemporary educational psychology 16 (1991): 28-44. Evaluating the association between homework and achievement in high school science and math," the high school journal, october/november 2012: 52-72. Other research has found little or no correlation between how much homework students report doing and how much homework their parents say they do. 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. See data provided -- but not interpreted this way -- by cooper, the battle over homework, 2nd ed. Even the title of their article reflects this: they ask "when is homework worth the time? He had contributed earlier to another study whose results similarly ended up raising questions about the value of homework. At first a very small relationship was found between the amount of homework that students had had in high school and how well they were currently faring. The researchers then studied a much larger population of students in college science classes - and found the same thing: homework simply didn't help. Of my book the homework myth (cambridge, ma: da capo, 2006), an adaptation of which appears as "abusing research: the study of homework and other examples," phi delta kappan, september 2006 . 106-18, also available at http:/// alfie kohn on twitter:Homework: new research suggests it may be an unnecessary breaking news this story on this story on this story on this story on this story's cooper is professor of psychology and neuroscience at duke, where he also directs the university's program in education, and is author of "the battle over homework: common ground for administrators, teachers, and parents" (corwin press). Poll conducted for the associated press earlier this year found that about 57 percent of parents felt their child was assigned about the right amount of homework. Pleasing a majority of parents regarding homework and having equal numbers of dissenters shouting "too much! Is about as good as they can hope 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 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 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 other studies simply correlate homework and achievement with no attempt to control for student differences. Most interesting, though, is these results suggest little or no relationship between homework and achievement for elementary school might that be? 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 , how much homework should students do?
The national pta and the nea have a parent guide called "helping your child get the most out of homework. It states, "most educators agree that for children in grades k-2, homework is more effective when it does not exceed 10-20 minutes each day; older children, in grades 3-6, can handle 30-60 minutes a day; in junior and senior high, the amount of homework will vary by subject…. Many school district policies state that high school students should expect about 30 minutes of homework for each academic course they take, a bit more for honors or advanced placement recommendations are consistent with the conclusions reached by our analysis. 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 achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what's going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward nts of homework counter that it can also have negative effects. Parents can get too involved in homework -- pressuring their child and confusing him by using different instructional techniques than the 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. Contributes to civic chool newsletter and toolkit win version of this letter articles by | sedl letter homework improve academic achievement? 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 so, you’d be wrong. Researchers have been far from unanimous in their assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of homework as an instructional technique,” according to an article published in the journal of educational psychology. The conclusions of more than a dozen reviews of the homework literature conducted between 1960 and 1989 varied greatly. Their assessments ranged from homework having positive effects, no effects, or complex effects to the suggestion that the research was too sparse or poorly conducted to allow trustworthy conclusions. 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? 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. Casting doubt on that assumption goes back at least to 1897, when a study found that assigning spelling homework had no effect on how proficient children were at spelling later on. 2] by 1960, a reviewer tracked down 17 experimental studies, most of which produced mixed results and some of which suggested that homework made no difference at all. One found that homework helped, two found that it didn’t, and two found mixed results. The authors, who included a long-time advocate of traditional educational policies, claimed the results demonstrated that homework had “powerful effects on learning. 5] but another researcher looked more carefully and discovered that only four of those fifteen studies actually compared getting homework with getting no homework, and their results actually didn’t provide much reason to think it helped.
8] cooper included seventeen research reports that contained a total of 48 comparisons between students who did and did not receive homework. He also reviewed surveys that attempted to correlate students’ test scores with how much homework they did. Forty-three of fifty correlations were positive, although the overall effect was not particularly large: homework accounted for less than 4 percent of the differences in students’ scores. Those that compared students with and without homework found a stronger association with achievement than the earlier studies had, but these new experiments measured achievement by students’ scores on tests that had been designed to match the homework they had just done. As for more recent studies looking for a relationship between achievement and time spent on homework, the overall correlation was about the same as the one found in 1989. The recent studies not included in cooper’s new review: one, using a methodology associated with economics, concluded that the amount of math homework given to teenagers was a very good predictor of these students’ standardized test scores in math. 11] but another study – the same one that found younger students are spending a lot more time doing homework these days (see chapter 1) — discovered that the extent of that time commitment was “not associated with higher or lower scores on any [achievement] tests. 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 tions of the research. 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 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 . 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). Or that a complete absence of homework would have any detrimental effect at mes 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 l 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). 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 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 short, most of the research that’s cited to show that homework is academically beneficial really doesn’t prove any such thing. 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 . 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 first two flaws combine to cast doubt on much of the existing data, according to a damning summary that appears in the encyclopedia of educational research: “research on homework continues to show the same fundamental weaknesses that have characterized it throughout the century: an overdependence on self-report as the predominant method of data collection and on correlation as the principal method of data analysis. 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. Each is seriously flawed in its own 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 the second kind of study, course grades are used to determine whether homework made a difference. 23] quite apart from the destructive effects that grades have on students’ interest in learning, their depth of understanding, and their preference for challenging tasks, the basis for a grade is typically as subjective as the result is uninformative. Bad as grades are in general, they are particularly inappropriate for judging the effectiveness of homework for one simple reason: the same teacher who handed out the assignments then turns around and evaluates the students who completed them. The final grade a teacher chooses for a student will often be based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, that student did the homework. Thus, to say that more homework is associated with better school performance (as measured by grades) is to provide no useful information about whether homework is intrinsically valuable. The studies that use grades as the outcome measure, not surprisingly, tend to show a much stronger effect for homework than studies that use standardized test scores. They also looked at how much homework was assigned by the teacher as well as at how much time students spent on their homework. Here’s how they came out:Effect on grades of amount of homework assigned no sig. On grades of amount of homework done negative on test scores of amount of homework done no sig. On grades of amount of homework done positive on test scores of amount of homework done no sig.
- how to collect data for research proposal
- delimitation and limitation of research
- writing an intro for a research paper
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 last, and most common, way of measuring achievement is to use standardized test scores. 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. The limitations of these tests are so numerous and so serious that studies showing an association between homework and higher scores are highly misleading. Because that’s also true of studies that use grades as a stand-in for achievement, it should be obvious that combining two flawed measures does nothing to improve the situation. 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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. In cooper’s review, as i’ve already pointed out, homework could explain only a tiny proportion of the differences in achievement scores. 31] and in a more recent investigation of british secondary schools, “the payoff for working several more hours per week per subject would appear to be slight, and those classes where there was more homework were not always those classes which obtained better results. 32] as one scholar remarked, “if research tells us anything” about homework, it’s that “even when achievement gainshave been found, they have been minimal, especially in comparison to the amount of work expended by teachers and students. 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 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. 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!
1989, cooper summarized the available research with a sentence that ought to be e-mailed to every parent, teacher, and administrator in the country: “there is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students. It, too, found minuscule correlations between the amount of homework done by sixth graders, on the one hand, and their grades and test scores, on the other. 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 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’tdone 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 seems safe to say that these latest four studies offer no reason to revise the earlier summary statement that no meaningful evidence exists of an academic advantage for children in elementary school who do homework. If the raw correlation between achievement (test scores or grades) and time spent on homework in cooper’s initial research review is “nearly nonexistent” for grades 3 through 5, it remains extremely low for grades 6 through 9. 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. 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 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). 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. 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. Even students who reported having been assigned no homework at all didn’t fare badly on the er the results of the 2000 math exam. Fourth graders who did no homework got roughly the same score as those who did 30 minutes a night. In eighth grade, the scores were higher for those who did between 15 and 45 minutes a night than for those who did no homework, but the results were worse for those who did an hour’s worth, and worse still for those did more than an hour. Comparisons allow us to look for correlations between homework and test scores within each country and also for correlations across countries. In some countries more time spent on homework was associated with higher scores; in others, it was not. 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. Cities: “there was no consistent linear or curvilinear relation between the amount of time spent on homework and the child’s level of academic achievement. These researchers even checked to see if homework in first grade was related to achievement in fifth grade, the theory being that homework might provide gradual, long-term benefits to younger children. 46] the reasoning, in other words, goes something like this:Premise 1: our students get significantly less homework than their counterparts across the e 2: other countries whup the pants off us in international sion: premise 1 explains premise onal conclusion: if u. Teachers assigned more homework, our students would perform step of this syllogism is either flawed or simply false. When they published their findings in 2005, they could scarcely conceal their surprise:Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships, [but] the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in the frequency, total amount, and percentage of teachers who used homework in grading are all negative! If these data can be extrapolated to other subjects – a research topic that warrants immediate study, in our opinion – then countries that try to improve their standing in the world rankings of student achievement by raising the amount of homework might actually be undermining their own success. States or districts as well as 37 other countries, meanwhile, “there was little relationship between the amount of homework assigned and students’ performance. 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. At first they found a very small relationship between the amount of homework that students had had in high school and how well they were currently doing. The same researchers then embarked on a similar study of a much larger population of students in college science classes – and found the same thing: homework simply didn’t help. Among her findings: the exceptional teachers not only tended to give less homework but also were likely to give students more choices about their ’s interesting to speculate on why this might be true. 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. 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. Homework is an obvious burden to students, but assigning, collecting, grading, and recording homework creates a tremendous amount of work for me as well. 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 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 ’s true that we don’t have clear evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that homework doesn’t help students to learn. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what that evidence might look like – beyond repeated findings that homework often isn’t even associated with higher achievement.
To borrow a concept from the law, however, the burden of proof here doesn’t rest with critics to demonstrate that homework doesn’t help. It rests with supporters to show that it does, and specifically to show that its advantages are sufficiently powerful and pervasive to justify taking up children’s (and parents’ and teachers’) time, and to compensate for the distinct disadvantages discussed in the last chapter. When a principal admits that homework is “taking away some of the years of adolescence and childhood” but then says that requiring it from the earliest grades “give[s] us an edge in standardized testing,” we have to wonder what kind of educator – indeed, what kind of human being – is willing to accept that trade-off even if the latter premise were true. 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. 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 is there some other benefit, something other than academic learning, that might be cited in homework’s defense? 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. 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. 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 +. 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. 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). 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. Several surveys have found that students consistently report their homework time to be higher than teachers’ estimates” (ziegler 1986, 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. 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. An additional hour of homework each night results in an increase in english [grade point average] of 0. 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. 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.
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. Does poorly in relative terms only at the high school level, not with respect to the performance of younger students.