Does homework help you learn
Decades spent trying to assess the value of homework, researchers still argue over the simplest : leslie crawford | october 17, know the drill. Then come the tears and tantrums — while we parents wonder, does the gain merit all this pain? The drama unfolds night after night, year after year, most parents hold on to the hope that homework (after soccer games, dinner, flute practice, and, oh yes, that childhood pastime of yore known as playing) advances their children what does homework really do for kids? Advertisement homework haterzwhether or not homework helps, or even hurts, depends on who you ask. If you ask my 12-year-old son, sam, he’ll say, “homework doesn’t help anything. Advertisement maybe, but in the fractious field of homework studies, it’s worth noting that sam’s sentiments nicely synopsize one side of the ivory tower debate. Books like the end of homework, the homework myth, and the case against homework and the film race to nowhere make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and canadian couple recently took their homework apostasy all the way to the supreme court of canada. After arguing that there was no evidence that it improved academic performance, they won a ruling that exempted their two children from all what’s the real relationship between homework and academic achievement? The homework laboratoriesthe good news: in an effort to answer this question, researchers have been doing their homework on homework, conducting hundreds of studies over the past several decades. A few studies can always be found to buttress whatever position is desired, while the counter-evidence is ignored,” writes the nation’s top homework scholar, harris cooper, in his 2006 homework meta-study at duke university’s department of psychology and much is too much? A survey done through the university of michigan found that by the 2002-’03 school year, students ages 6 to 17 were doing twice as much homework as in 1981-’82. The homework ante has been upped as school administrators respond to increasing pressure for their students to perform better on state-mandated how can you know if your child is doing the right amount? The oft-bandied rule on homework quantity — 10 minutes a night per grade (starting from between 10 to 20 minutes in first grade) — is ubiquitous. If you think your child is doing too much homework, cooper recommends talking with her teacher. Recent studies suggest that proper sleep may be far more essential to brain and body fact, for elementary school-age children, there is no measureable academic advantage to homework. For middle-schoolers, there is a direct correlation between homework and achievement if assignments last between one to two hours per night. As with middle-schoolers, give teens more than two hours a night, and academic success all homework is created equaljust as revealing, it appears that grade level has a direct impact on homework’s a previous meta-study conducted in 1989, cooper’s team at duke university found that grade level heavily influences how much homework helps with academic advancement (as measured by standardized and class test scores. It appears middle- and high schoolers have much to gain academically by doing their homework. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69% of the students in a class with no homework. In elementary school, there is no measurable correlation between homework and e all the research, homework remains something of a mystery. Until cooper and other researchers discover the best homework practices at every stage of a student’s development, parents will need to use their own best on the greatschools newsletter - our best articles, worksheets and more delivered can't tell you keep a sketchy secret if your child asks you not to tell? M interested in grades:Share 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. 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. 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. Contact | en español | site directory | about: evaluating performance | common ting ng and public | school boards | policymakers | > instruction > homework > what research says about the value of homework: research research says about the value of homework: research y of the homework homework affect student learning? The research means for school homework help or hinder student learning—and which students, under what conditions, does it help or hinder? School board members have long struggled with this question as they strive to implement policies that will support student learning. Parents worry that their children have too little homework or too much—and teachers get criticized for recent years, the issue has received increased attention in the popular press and has become a topic of controversy. Unfortunately, research and commentary offer conflicting conclusions on the past decade, according to gill and schlossman (1996), "leading educational spokespersons have celebrated homework as essential to raise educational standards, foster high academic achievement, upgrade the quality of the labor force, and link family and school in a common teaching mission" (27). According to the school library journal (2005), students are receiving higher grades with less outside preparation, while the washington post (2006) reports that the increase in the amount of student homework has increased arguments against it. Alfie kohn, a critic of homework, recently wrote, "there was no consistent linear or curvilinear relation between the amount of time spent on homework and the child's level of academic achievement" (2006, 15). Researchers claim that homework helps students develop responsibility and life skills and the ability to manage tasks and that it provides experiential learning, increased motivation, opportunities to learn to cope with difficulties and distractions, and academic benefits (corno and xu 2004; coutts 2004; xu and corno 1998). Many researchers take either a positive or a negative stance on homework, cooper (2001) takes a more balanced approach, stating, "research on the effects of homework suggests that it is beneficial as long as teachers use their knowledge of developmental levels to guide policies and expectations" (34). Cooper goes on to explain that homework has both positive and negative effects on various aspects of students' lack of unequivocal connections between homework and learning, combined with strong opinions both for and against homework, may spur policymakers to take a closer look at the issue. As this review will show, the research suggests that homework may benefit some students under certain conditions. Although the link between parent involvement in homework and student learning is far from clear, students from lower-income households may not have as much support at home as those from more affluent families; as a result, homework may not be a valuable learning experience for them. Some research also suggests that homework has nonacademic benefits, such as helping children establish routines, develop study skills, and take so many factors influencing homework's efficacy in learning, staying informed of the research and making the best decisions possible with available data may be the greatest steps policymakers can take to help ensure student learning in their y of the homework homework debate has gone in cycles (cooper, robinson, and patall 2006) since the late 1800s, when children in elementary school (then considered to be grades one through four) rarely received homework and those in grammar school (grades five through eight) typically received two to three hours' worth each night (gill and schlossman, 2004). 1927) was the first american researcher to examine homework's effects on academic achievement compared to the effects of supervised study in school. From the end of the nineteenth century through the 1940s, the child health and progressive education movements led to an attack on homework for elementary school and junior high school students. Some even blamed homework for the child mortality rate (gill and schlossman 1996); one writer of the period referred to homework as a "legalized criminality" (nash 1930, 7). 1950s saw a decline in the progressive education movement, coupled with a renewed interest in homework. Following the 1957 launch of sputnik, "the homework problem was reconceived as part of a national crisis: the u.
Does your homework help you learn
This renewed interest led to the view that homework was a necessary tool in the learning process (albeit not for elementary school children). In the early 1960s, parents became concerned that children were not being assigned enough homework in the belief that homework was essential for academic excellence (gill and schlossman 2004). The onset of the vietnam war, attention was diverted from the academic excellence movement, and public opinion swung once again away from support for homework. Until the mid-1970s, homework was viewed as an example of the excessive pressure on students to achieve (cooper et al. The 1983 release of the national commission on excellence in education's report, a nation at risk, brought about a new educational excellence movement and a new view of homework. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of adults supported and endorsed homework for its character-building and academic , however, there is disagreement not only about the value of homework but also about whether students are assigned too much of it or too little. Some researchers report that despite media reports of a public revolt against homework, the majority of parents, educators, and policymakers support homework. In fact, according to two decades' worth of data from the national assessment of educational progress (naep), "… the majority of all students at all grade levels averaged less than 1 hour of homework nightly" (gill and schlossman 2004, 180). It is difficult to know whether the pendulum is naturally swinging back to public disfavor of homework, or whether the requirements of the no child left behind act of 2001 have led teachers to assign more homework and, consequently, to public outcry against the stressors in students' lives. Either way, the overarching question is whether homework actually helps students homework debate has often focused on how and why homework affects students' learning and achievement scores. Kralovec and buell (2001) proposed that the public's belief in the effectiveness of homework is based on three homework myths:Does homework affect student learning? 1: homework increases academic researchers say: cooper (1989a) argues that reviews on the link between homework and achievement often directly contradict one another and are so different in design that the findings of one study cannot be evaluated fairly against the findings of 2: without excessive homework, students’ test scores will not be internationally researchers say: information from international assessments shows little relationship between the amount of homework students do and test scores. Students in japan and finland, for example, are assigned less homework but still outperform u. 3: those who question homework want to weaken curriculum and pander to students' researchers say: kralovec and buell (2001) note that homework critics rarely question the work assigned but rather the fact that the work is so often performed at home without adult supervision to aid the learning link between assignment of homework and student achievement is far from clear, as noted by cooper and other researchers (trautwein and koller 2003). In "the homework myth" (2006), kohn says calling the relationship between homework and achievement inconclusive may be too generous, arguing there is no conclusive evidence that homework provides any benefits—either academic or nonacademic—to students. Kralovec and buell (2003) attribute the lack of conclusive evidence to the diversity of research questions and designs used in homework research. And cooper, robinson, and patall (2006) note that educators claim "a long list of both positive and negative consequences of homework" (6), suggesting a need for continued examination of the positive and negative effects of homework can be grouped into categories. Supposed benefits include immediate achievement and learning, long-term academic benefits, nonacademic benefits, and benefits to parents and families. However, it is not known if this disparity would be any more of a disadvantage in homework than in regular following studies are representative of the inconclusive nature of homework research:Paschal, weinstein, and walberg (1984) discovered through a meta-analysis of fifteen quantitative studies that homework did have a positive effect on achievement, especially in certain grade levels. Specifically, traditional, daily, and graded homework had the greatest positive impact on student achievement in the fourth and fifth nd (1995) examined the association between homework and achievement in language acquisition among third graders. Results from her study indicated that students who were assigned homework scored higher on vocabulary tests than those who were (2006) examined the association between homework and math achievement in forty-six countries. Interestingly, student achievement was lower in countries where homework counted toward grades, where it was the basis of classroom discussion, and where students corrected homework in (1999) examined the differences in test scores among fourth graders who either did or did not do homework. Her findings indicated no differences in math achievement scores between students in the two homework is important to note, however, that correlational studies such as these show only that one or more factors are associated with others. Experimental studies, on the other hand, are designed to show gain a more complete understanding of the homework/achievement link, keith (1982) developed a model using path analysis. A path analysis is an extension of a correlation in which a researcher statistically tests proposed links where the presence or absence of one or more factors may lead to certain events, statuses, or factors that then cause an outcome, such as student learning. It is important to remember, however, that path analysis does not assume causality—it simply proposes a model of causality. In other words, keith's model does not explicitly show a causal link between homework and achievement, but it shows that such a link is voorhis (2003) examined the association between homework and science achievement in middle school grades. Accounting for variables in students' backgrounds, their teachers, and the involvement of their families, van voorhis found that students who completed more science homework earned higher science grades on their report cards. She also noted that interactive assignments—those that require interacting with other students or with parents—and parent involvement were important factors in ensuring homework's jong, westerhof, and creemers (2000) accounted for the relationship of many factors to one another in examining homework and math education. Through their multi-level analysis, the researchers found that the amount of homework was the only factor related to achievement—and that it accounted for only 2. Percent of the difference in achievement between students who did homework and those who did not. Notably, the frequency of homework assignments and the amount of time students spent on them were not related to sing the question of homework's effect on student achievement, cooper (1989a) says the majority of the studies that have been examined are correlational, not causal, in nature. Kohn (2006) follows the same line of thought: "a significant correlation is clearly a prerequisite for declaring that homework provides academic benefits, [but] it isn't sufficient to justify that conclusion" (14). The association between homework and achievement, in other words, may be the result of another, not studied, factor that influences the shortcomings of correlational studies, cooper (1989a) and cooper and colleagues (2006) suggest an emphasis on experimental and quasi-experimental studies. For instance, although student achievement has been found to be higher in classes where homework was assigned than in classes without homework, methodological weaknesses temper the strength of the conclusions that can be drawn from these ein and koller (2003) also say that lack of longitudinal data and the fact that some of the studies are conducted by teachers themselves, rather than impartial researchers, may lead to overstating the effects of homework. In fact, studies that have included longitudinal data or other checks and balances in the research design have found that homework has a negative effect on achievement (cooper et al. By examining taped sessions and interviews with parents and students, they discovered that homework helped third graders learn responsibility and develop time-management and job-management skills. The students also learned to work on schoolwork when they did not want to and to adjust their attentiveness to the demands of a specific assignment. These and similar benefits, such as good study habits and independent learning, have been found by other researchers as well (johnson and pontius 1989; warton 2001). Although not explicitly linked to achievement, it is logical to assume that these factors lead to improved is less clear whether homework can facilitate parents' involvement in children's schoolwork, however. Some researchers have found that homework has a positive effect on parents and families by allowing them to show an interest in their children's academic progress (hoover-dempsey et al. Balli (1998) discovered that when parents help their sixth-grade children with homework, the students believe they do better in school—regardless of how they feel about working with their n (1988) examined homework, parent involvement, and student achievement in elementary schools. She found more time spent doing homework, more help from parents, and more requests for parent involvement from teachers were associated with lower achievement in reading and mathematics. Epstein attributes the results to the possibility that parents may spend more time helping their children if they are poor-performing rather than high-performing to this hypothesis, cooper, lindsay, and nye (2000) found that students whose parents were more involved in their homework had lower test scores and class grades. Some have argued that homework can increase the achievement gap between students from affluent and poor families. High-achieving students who have extra resources from home, they say, benefit from homework because they have more opportunities to complete it and often get help with assignments. Such circumstances as parents working several jobs, frequent moves, and crowded homes make it difficult to complete homework or any at-home academic learning (scott-jones 1984; mcdermott, goldman, and varenne 1984). Thus, higher income students who are high achieving gain the most from homework when compared to other high-income or high-achieving students, which begs the question of how much lower-income students—and especially low-achieving lower-income students—can benefit from and colleagues (2006) say many of the "negative effects attributed to homework contradict the suggested positive effects" (8). In chen and stevenson's (1989) cross-cultural examination of homework in grades one, three, and five, the researchers argue that homework can have a negative impact on students' attitudes toward school. Bryan, nelson, and mathru (1995) claim that homework overexposes children to academic duties, decreasing their interest and increasing their physical and emotional fatigue; researchers call this the satiation effect. Similarly, in an examination of parent and student perceptions, coutts (2004) found that homework may take away leisure time and may not be as varied or useful as work done in , is homework beneficial to students? The studies discussed in this review cite both potentially positive and potentially negative effects on students, highlighting the difficulty in forming sound conclusions about the value of gh the overall effects of homework on student achievement are inconclusive, studies involving students at different grade levels suggest that homework may be more effective for older students than for younger the effect of homework vary with students' age? Leone and richards (1989) examined the association between how much time students spend on homework and what grades they receive. The results showed a positive association between the amount of homework and students' grades for children in grades six through ten and a negative association for children in grades two through four. These findings contribute to the body of research claiming that homework may be detrimental to younger students. Bempechat (2004) argues that younger students' social and cognitive abilities—such as their inability to focus adequately—may moderate the effect of homework on achievement. Despite this extra difficulty younger children may face, bempechat suggests that homework still provides a way to help them become better (1989a) noted a trend in these results: essentially, as students age, the positive effect of homework on achievement becomes more pronounced.
For example, differences in students' attention spans and study habits may account for differences in homework's effects. However, it may also be possible that teachers use homework in early grades to establish routines, instill a sense of responsibility, and help students learn time management, rather than for any immediate gains in bruck and colleagues (2000) provide a direct examination of the link between homework, grade level, and achievement. Their study, which addressed several concerns regarding the possible effects of students' age, yielded these findings:The amount of homework increases as students rk may serve different purposes at the elementary and secondary rs do not give students more help if they have trouble with -achieving students may take more time than higher-achieving students to finish findings suggest that the low correlation between homework and achievement at the elementary level may be due to the intended purpose and type of the homework and the reaction of specific students, rather than the homework itself. Age, then, is but one of the factors that need to be taken into account when assessing the association between homework and student do different groups of students react to homework? Research has been conducted to try to understand the ways in which various types of homework and various situations influence different groups of students. This research indicates that a variety of factors influence homework's effect on students, including the subject matter, the amount of homework, and the nature of the assignment; classroom factors such as provision of materials and follow-up discussion in class; and home or community factors such as parent involvement (cooper 1989a). The results have shown that the effects of homework may be influenced by students' academic performance level, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (ses). And nye (1994) conducted an extensive examination of the literature on homework and students with learning disabilities. Although their review did not conclude overall effectiveness of homework for these students, it did conclude that other variables influence the link between achievement and homework. For instance, monitoring such homework habits as notebook organization was found to be a potentially effective method for "improving the completion rates and accuracy of homework assignments for students with learning disabilities" (cooper and nye 1994, 477). Some studies have concluded that homework is an insignificant factor in the achievement of students with learning disabilities (truesdell and abramson 1992), a study conducted by rosenberg (1989) suggested that three factors maximize the effectiveness of homework assignments completed by this group of students. These factors are the rate of homework completion, the percentage correct on homework assignments, and the rate of acquisition of the content being presented. Thus, "homework can be employed to increase the effectiveness of direct instruction sequences with students diagnosed as [learning disabled]" (314). Have also focused their attention on the effects of homework among various ethnic or socioeconomic groups. As reported in one study, students in predominantly minority schools do less homework than those in predominantly white schools. In addition, students in schools that are identified as low performing and that have high percentages of students in poverty do less homework than students in more high-performing and high-ses schools (easton and bennett 1989). Study examined the influence of homework, among other variables, on student grades across five ethnic groups: white, black, hispanic, asian american, and native american students (keith and benson 1992). Researchers then examined the relationships between those created constructs using path this nationally representative study, the researchers concluded that, relative to other ethnic groups, homework had a stronger impact on asian american students than on those of other ethnicities. The differences suggest that not only do asians report completing more homework, on average, but that each hour of homework they do complete has a greater effect on their learning than for other ethnic groups" (91). The researchers hypothesized that other factors, such as parent support at home, may help strengthen homework's effect on students of various ethnic and racial types of homework assignments are effective? May be defined in simple terms as "tasks assigned to students by school teachers that are meant to be carried out during non-school hours" (cooper 1989a, 7), but the topic has many aspects, including the purpose of homework, the interaction level of the assignment, and teacher s the greatest distinction that can be made when discussing homework is its purpose. Homework can be assigned for instructional and noninstructional purposes (cooper, 1989a), both of which can be further ctional homework is generally assigned for one of four purposes:Practice homework, the most common type, is assigned to reinforce material presented in the classroom and to help students master individual skills. In a study of teachers' use of homework in high schools, murphy and decker (1989) found that teachers most frequently assigned homework to reinforce class material (55 percent) and to master course objectives (23 percent). Homework is assigned to introduce students to material the teacher will present in the ion homework asks students to apply previously learned skills to different ation homework requires students to produce a product, such as a social studies project, by applying multiple rs report assigning extension and integration homework far less frequently than practice and preparation homework (murphy and decker 1989). Second level of homework, noninstructional homework, also includes four subcategories (epstein and van voorhis 2001):Homework assigned for personal development is intended to help students improve behavioral skills, such as time management or rk assigned to improve communication between parents and their children is identified as parent-child relations homework, such as developing a family interaction homework is assigned to more than one student in an effort to build and develop team-working homework is often assigned to fulfill mandates from school or district administration, such as requirements for a specified amount of daily or weekly or no research has been conducted on the effects of noninstructional homework. However, as mentioned earlier, homework assigned to younger students may have its main effects on nonacademic outcomes, and teachers may be assigning young students homework for noninstructional literature on types of homework is generally restricted to descriptions of the purpose of each type and how often homework of that type is assigned in the classroom. Research comparing the effects of the various types of homework on academic achievement is far less exhaustive. Of the studies that do exist, researchers have focused on the two most frequently reported purposes of homework: practice and preparation. For instance, of the eight studies included in cooper's (1989b) meta-analysis of preparation and practice homework, only two studies examined the effects of both an effort to compare these two homework practices, foyle (1985) examined their effectiveness in tenth-grade american history. Although, like many researchers, he concluded that homework—compared to no homework—had a statistically positive impact on student achievement, foyle did not find a significant difference in achievement between practice and preparation addition, cooper's (1989b) meta-analysis of preparation and practice research revealed no conclusive results regarding comparisons of the two. However, he concluded that, "with regard to achievement, all eight studies found that homework involving preparation for new material or practice of old material led to higher scores on tests than homework that dealt solely with the content of the present day's lesson" (122). Small number of studies conducted on the impact of homework assigned for different purposes leaves policymakers with little evidence on which to base decisions. In one older study, schools in which more homework was routinely assigned had higher levels of student achievement compared to schools where regular homework was not expected (rutter, maughan, mortimore, and ouston 1979). In a more rigorous statistical test of school homework policies and student math achievement, philips (1997) found that students at schools where above-average amounts of homework were assigned (compared to the total sample of schools) had higher math achievement than did students at schools where students did less rk can be further classified by level of interaction, or the social context in which it is completed; that is, independently, by a group of students, or with help from a parent, sibling, or other individual (cooper 1989a). Studies that measure the impact of homework on achievement focus on homework completed without help from others. Little research exists on the impact of homework completed by a student working with one or more other people. This potential for impact has lent itself to numerous studies on the impact of parent involvement on homework, but research still provides highly mixed reviews of just how much impact can be attributed to parent involvement. Quasi-experimental study by van voorhis (2003) looked at science homework involving interaction between parent and student to measure its impact on family involvement and academic achievement. In addition, students who were assigned interactive homework also returned more homework assignments than students who were assigned noninteractive homework. Finally, she found that students who were assigned interactive homework received better science grades than students who were assigned other types of gh the findings from this study are encouraging, other studies mentioned earlier in this review have not demonstrated a clear and positive link between parent involvement in homework and student teacher's response to homework assignments is occasionally reported as a factor influencing the impact of homework on achievement or other outcomes. According to cooper (1989a), teachers can provide four types of feedback:Letter grades that evaluate students' performance on the homework. Review of the homework that provides students with ways to improve their or written praise or bal incentives, such as extra experimental study conducted by murphy and decker (1989) revealed that the majority of teachers (approximately three-quarters of them) check and grade homework. Although this study did not examine the impact of such feedback on student achievement, the results could indicate the level of importance teachers place on homework, which may indirectly influence the rate at which students complete l other studies examining teacher feedback have focused on its effects on student achievement. While the use of incentives has been shown to increase homework completion rates, most such studies have focused on learning disabled students in math classes and failed to examine the effects of teacher feedback on other groups of students or in other content types of homework are further classified by the amount of homework assigned, which includes both frequency, or how often homework is assigned, and length of completion, or time involved to complete homework (cooper 1989a). However, as cooper points out, few studies separate the two factors, which are often used interchangeably when discussing amount of assigned much time should students spend on homework? A review of mainly correlational studies examining the amount of homework and its relation to achievement revealed encouraging findings. Cooper's (2001) meta-analysis of seventeen studies measuring such a relationship noted fifty correlations among the studies; "of the 50 correlations, 43 indicated that students who reported spending more time on homework also scored higher on a measure of achievement or attitude" (26). Another study showed some indications that the optimal amount of homework for high school students was 1½ to 2½ hours per night, and less for younger students (cooper, robinson, and patall 2006). The studies included in his 2001 meta-analysis, a later study conducted by cooper and colleagues differentiated between the amount of homework assigned by the teacher and the amount that students completed (cooper et al. Interestingly, the amount of homework assigned by teachers was typically unrelated to student achievement; yet, as in his earlier findings, student reports of the amount of homework completed were positively associated with student contrast, in a study conducted by de jong, westerhof, and creemers (2000), the researchers contend that "teachers giving less homework are less effective" (152). They caution, however, that such a finding pertains primarily to teachers who give significantly small amounts of homework but do not define "small amount. Researchers argue that the relationship between time spent on homework and academic achievement is weaker for students in elementary grades than for older students (cooper and valentine 2001; cooper 1989a). However, other researchers offer contrasting views and contend that the impact of homework time on achievement is greater at the earlier (fourth and fifth) grade levels, compared to the later (sixth to tenth) grade levels (de jong, westerhof, and creemers 2000). Additionally, some research suggests that the positive relationship with student achievement weakens when middle school students spend more than one hour on homework per day (cooper et al. Several researchers contend that low-performing students spend more time on homework than high-performing students do (de jong, westerhof, and creemers 2000; epstein and van voorhis 2001). De jong and colleagues (2000) argue that when students are grouped on the basis of ability, teachers assign more homework to high-performing students than to low-performing students, perhaps because they expect more from the high achievers (burstein 1993). However, in classes of mixed ability, the lower-performing students spend more time on homework than their higher-performing peers, which may account for the difficulty in finding clear relationships between time spent on homework and student gh little research has been conducted on the impact of homework completed during in-school versus out-of-school hours, it is worth noting such a distinction.
In a longitudinal study conducted by keith, diamond-hallam, and fine (2004), researchers used structural equation models to examine the effects of in-school versus out-of-school homework on high school students. They concluded that homework completed outside of the school day had a greater impact on grades and achievement test scores than homework completed in study hall or elsewhere during the school no child left behind act of 2001 (nclb) has brought a surge of federal and state funding for out-of-school-time programs that provide academic assistance, such as homework help, for low-performing students. Although the literature on the relationship between homework completed out of school and academic achievement is sparse, cosden and colleagues (2001) examined ten studies that evaluated after-school programs offering academic activities and homework assistance. Only two of the studies reported improved academic achievement; however, several noted improvements in behavioral skills, such as increased academic motivation and improved work habits, which may indirectly impact l, these researchers noted, "after-school programs can serve a protective function for children, particularly for those who do not have access to other structured after-school activities or homework assistance at home" (cosden et al. Results from a rigorous three-year study of the 21st century community learning centers program, which mandates programs to provide out-of-school-time enrichment, remediation, and homework assistance in reading, math, and other subjects, did not find any connection between providing structured time for homework completion and academic performance (james-burdumy, dynarski, moore, deke, mansfield, pistorino, and warner 2005). The research means for school conflicting nature of the research findings noted in this review reflects the continuing debate surrounding the value of homework. Over the past 150 years, the public's support for homework has waxed and waned on a fairly regular cycle. The new backlash against homework could be viewed as part of the natural cycle, or as a fresh perspective on how these strict accountability requirements affect less of the reason, school leaders and educators need definitive, research-based guidance on the role homework should play in their school systems. Although homework cannot serve as an easy answer to raising student achievement, the literature suggests that it can have a direct effect on student learning under certain conditions and an indirect effect under other conditions. The results, while not clear cut, suggest the following lessons:Homework appears to provide more academic benefits to older students than to younger students, for whom the benefits seem to lie in nonacademic realms, such as in improving study skills and learning structure and responsibility. The amount of homework provided to younger students may therefore be less important than simply assigning something to help them establish routines and learn personal amount and type of homework seem to be more important factors for older students. Older students appear to benefit from completing homework on a regular basis, although it is unclear whether better students do more homework, or doing homework creates better students. Nor is it clear whether providing structured time for students to do homework results in any major learning gains. Community college or university) requires independent study outside of class and, thus, facilitating practice of these study and time management skills at home appears to be a reasonable policy at the high school level regardless of any connection between secondary student learning and ts from low income households, especially those who are low performing, may not benefit from homework in the same way as do students from more financially secure the results are clear about any link between homework and student learning, it is for students with learning disabilities. The additional time to practice skills under the supervision of a parent seems to be a successful method for meeting the learning needs of these rk also appears to facilitate learning for asian american students to a greater extent than it does for students of other ethnic and racial heritages, although, notably, the reasons for such a difference are not teachers assign homework that prepares students for upcoming lessons or helps them review material that has not been covered recently may have more impact on student learning than assigning homework that simply continues the school day's lessons into the evening central lesson of this body of research is that homework is not a strategy that works for all children. Because of its possible negative effects of decreasing students' motivation and interest, thereby indirectly impairing performance, homework should be assigned judiciously and moderately. Heavy homework loads should not be used as a main strategy for improving home-school relations or student homework review was produced by researchers at edvantia for the center for public education. 2007 the center for public y name as (required):Comments (max 2000 characters):Home > instruction > homework > what research says about the value of homework: research in this guide... Research says about the value of homework: at a glancewhat research says about the value of homework: research rk: research q&ahomework--what is it good for? Archived chatwhat research says about the value of homework: might also be interested research says about the value of homework: at a glancehomework: research q&ahomework--what is it good for? Data can provide center for public education is an initiative of the national school boards directory | media | about | en españ 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). 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. 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. Every hour that teachers spend preparing kids to succeed on standardized tests, even if that investment pays off, is an hour not spent helping kids to become critical, curious, creative thinkers. 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. Analysis rings true for steve phelps, who teaches math at a high school near cincinnati. 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. 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. 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.