Homework is a set of tasks assigned to students by their teachers to be completed at home. Common homework assignments may include required reading, a writing or typing project, math problems to be completed, information to be reviewed before a test, or other skills to be practiced.
The effects of homework are debated. Generally speaking, homework does not improve academic performance among young children. Homework may improve academic skills among older students, especially lower-achieving students. However, homework also creates stress for students and parents, and reduces the amount of time that students can spend in other activities.
Purposes
The basic objectives of assigning homework to students often align with schooling in general. However, teachers have many purposes for assigning homework, including:Synthesis of research on homework. H Cooper - Educational Leadership, 1989 - addison.pausd.org reinforcing skills taught in class extending skills to new situations preparing for future class lessons engaging students in active learning developing time management and study skills promoting parent-student communications encouraging collaboration between students fulfilling school/district policies demonstrating a rigorous school program to others punishing a student or a class
Effects Academic performance
Homework research dates back to the early 1900s. However, no consensus exists on the general effectiveness on homework. Results of homework studies vary based on multiple factors, such as the age group of those studied and the measure of academic performance.
Younger students who spend more time on homework generally have slightly worse, or the same academic performance, as those who spend less time on homework. Homework has not been shown to improve academic achievements for grade school students. Proponents claim that assigning homework to young children helps them learn good study habits. No research has ever been conducted to determine whether this claim has any merit.
Among teenagers, students who spend more time on homework generally have higher grades, and higher test scores than students who spend less time on homework. Large amounts of homework cause students' academic performance to worsen, even among older students. Students who are assigned homework in middle and high school score somewhat better on standardized tests, but the students who have more than 90 minutes of homework a day in middle school or more than two hours in high school score worse.
Low-achieving students receive more benefit from doing homework than high-achieving students. However, school teachers commonly assign less homework to the students who need it most, and more homework to the students who are performing well. In past centuries, homework was a cause of academic failure: when school attendance was optional, students would drop out of school entirely if they were unable to keep up with the homework assigned.
Non-academic The amount of homework given does not necessarily affect students' attitudes towards homework and various other aspects of school.
found a near-zero correlation between the amount of homework and parents' reports on how well their elementary school students behaved. studied 809 adolescents in American high schools, and found that, using the Normative Deviance Scale as a model for deviance, the correlation was for white students, and for African-American students. For all three of the correlations, higher values represent a higher correlation between time spent on homework and poor conduct.
says that homework develops students' motivation and study skills. In a single study, parents and teachers of middle school students believed that homework improved students' study skills and personal responsibility skills. Their students were more likely to have negative perceptions about homework and were less likely to ascribe the development of such skills to homework. found that students generally had negative emotions when completing homework and reduced engagement compared to other activities.
Busy work The intention of homework is to further test students' knowledge at home. However, there is a line between productive work and busy work. Karin Chenoweth provides an example of a student taking chemistry who must color a mole for homework.Chenowith, Karin. "Homework vs. Busywork: Tales from Home and a Request for More." The Washington Post, Feb 13 2003. Chenoweth shared how busy work like this can have a negative effect on students, and explained that having this simple drawing is of no worth in terms of learning, yet it lowered the student's grade in class. However, Miriam Ferzli et al. point out that just because an assignment is time consuming does not give students the right to call an assignment "busy work," which can be seen in the case of lab reports, which are indeed time-consuming but which are also key to learning.Ferzli, Miriam, Michael Carter, and Eric Wiebe. "Transforming Lab Reports from Busy Work to Meaningful Learning Opportunities." LabWrite. Journal of College Science Teaching, November/ December, 2005.
One way to promote productive learning starts in the classroom and then seeps into the homework. Brian Cook and Andrea Babon point to the difference between active and passive learning, noting that active learning promotes engagement and "a deeper approach to learning that enables students to develop meaning from knowledge." Cook and Babon discuss the use of weekly quizzes, which are based on the course readings and which test each student's understanding at the end of each week. Weekly quizzes engage not only students, but also teachers, who must look at what is commonly missed, review students' answers, and clear up any misunderstandings.Cook, Brian Robert and Andrea Babon. "Active Learning Through Online Quizzes: Better Learning and Less (busy) Work." Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 41,1. 2017. 24–38.
Sarah Greenwald and Judy Holdener discuss the rise of online homework and report that "online homework can increase student engagement, and students generally appreciate the immediate feedback offered by online homework systems as well as the ability to have multiple attempts after an incorrect solution."Greenwald, Sarah J. and Judy A. Holdener. "The Creation and Implementation of Effective Homework Assignments (Part 1): Creation." PRIMUS, 29(1): 1–8, 2019. Greenwald and Holdener state that after creating effective homework assignments, teachers must also implement the learning from that homework.Greenwald, Sarah J. and Judy A. Holdener. "The Creation and Implementation of Effective Homework Assignments (Part 2): Implementation." PRIMUS, 29(2): 103–110, 2019 Sarah Greenwald and Judy Holdener point to a teacher who uses a two-step homework process of connecting homework to classroom learning by first assigning homework followed by in-class presentations. The teacher says using class time for following up on homework gives that connection to what is learned in the class, noting, "In the initial step students complete and submit (traditional) homework assignments electronically, and then later they revisit their work through presentations of selected problems during class.
Health and daily life Homework has been identified in numerous studies and articles as a dominant or significant source of stress and anxiety for students., , , , , . Studies on the relation between homework and health are few compared to studies on academic performance.
A study used survey data to examine relations among homework, student well-being, and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper middle class communities, with these students having an average of more than 3 hours of homework per night. Students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school but also physical health problems, more academic stress, and lack of balance in their lives.
A 2007 study of American students by MetLife found that 89% of students felt stressed from homework, with 34% reporting that they "often" or "very often" felt stressed from homework. Stress was especially evident among high school students. Students that reported stress from homework were more likely to be deprived of sleep.
Homework can cause tension and conflict in the home as well as at school, and can reduce students' family and leisure time. In the survey, failure to complete homework and low grades where homework was a contributing factor was correlated with greater conflict; some students have reported teachers and parents frequently criticizing their work. In the MetLife study, high school students reported spending more time completing homework than performing home tasks.
Time use A University of Michigan Institute for Social Research nationally representative survey of American 15- to 17-year olds, conducted in 2003, found an average of 50 minutes of homework each weekday.F. Thomas Juster, Hiromi Ono and Frank P. Stafford, Changing Times of American Youth: 1981-2003 , University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (Ann Arbor, Michigan: November 2004).
A 2019 Pew Research Center review of Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey data reported that 15-, 16-, and 17-year-old Americans spent on average an hour a day on homework during the school year. The change in this demographic's average daily time spent doing homework (during the school year) increased by about 16 minutes from 2003–2006 to 2014–2017. U.S. teenage girls spent more time doing homework than U.S. teenage boys.Gretchen Livingston, The way U.S. teens spend their time is changing, but differences between boys and girls persist, Pew Research Center (February 20, 2019).
A 2019 nationally representative survey of 95,505 freshmen at U.S. colleges, conducted by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, asked respondents, "During your last year in high school, how much time did you spend during a typical week studying/doing homework?" 1.9% of respondents said none, 7.4% said less than one hour, 19.5% said 1–2 hours, 27.9% said 3–5 hours, 21.4% said 6–10 hours, 11.4% said 11–15 hours, 6.0% said 16–20 hours, 4.5% said over 20 hours.Ellen Bara Stolzenberg et al., The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2019, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, p. 42.
Benefits Some educators argue that homework is beneficial to students, as it enhances learning, develops the skills taught in class, and lets educators verify that students comprehend their lessons. Proponents also argue that homework makes it more likely that students will develop and maintain proper study habits that they can use throughout their educational career.Grohnke, Kennedy, and Jake Merritt. "Do Kids Need Homework?" Scholastic: News/ Weekly Reader Edition 5/6, vol. 85, no. 3, 2016, pp. 7.
History
United States Historically, homework was frowned upon in American culture. With few students able to pursue higher education, and with many children and teenagers needing to dedicate significant amounts of time to chores and farm work, homework was disliked not only by parents, but also by some schools. The students' inability to keep up with the homework, which was largely memorizing an assigned text at home, contributed to students dropping out of school at a relatively early age. Attending school was not legally required, and if the student could not spend afternoons and evenings working on homework, then the student could quit school.