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https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/homework-research-how-much/585889/?utm_source=feed

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America's devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it's what today's parents and teachers grew up with themselves.

Africa Studio / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and '70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn't last either: In the '80s, government researchers blamed America's schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.

The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn't have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.

But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work-and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They're reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it's time to revisit the subject.

Read: My daughter's homework is killing me

Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be "meaningful" and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.

"The first year was a bit bumpy," says Louann Carlomagno, the district's superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents' expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to "realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader-that was new."

Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. "The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I've had with parents," Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.

Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.

Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it's part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. "The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic," Schneider says. "Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework ... They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions."

Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. "I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families," he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. "They don't need it," Schneider says, "so they're not advocating for it."

That doesn't mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they're working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.

As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it's worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there's some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.

In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s, and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.

This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it's compatible with "the 10-minute rule," a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level-that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.

In Cooper's eyes, homework isn't overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found "little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student"; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with "concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities."

According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, considers homework to be a "reliable extinguisher of curiosity," and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper's 2006 meta-analysis doesn't establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children's (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn's prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)

In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn't help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork, while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students' success.)

Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. "If all you want is to cram kids' heads with facts for tomorrow's tests that they're going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores," he says. "But if you're interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn't merely ineffective, but counterproductive."

His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. "The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn't enough," Kohn says. What about homework's effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.

Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework's quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn't a catchall rule for what's best-the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.

Given that homework's benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it's a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn't done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs-things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.

Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it's important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. "The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system," he says. "Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing." In other words, many parents' own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn't rigorous enough. (This dovetails with-and complicates-the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)

Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. "They could do it, but they're afraid to do it, because they're getting pressure every day about test scores," Stengel says.

Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. "Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching," she says.

"In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework," Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. "If we had kids reading-anything, the sports page, anything that they're able to read-that's the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they're not. They're going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about."

"Exploratory" is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he'd like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. "We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago," Simpson says, "so it's been easy to say we aren't going to assign worksheets, we aren't going assign regurgitative problem sets." For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus.

Simpson says he thinks it's a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: "When our students can't make the connection between the work they're doing at 11 o'clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot."

When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she's pleased with the results, but she's noticed something funny. "Some kids," she says, "really do like homework." She's started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily-whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home.

Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It's usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they've managed their time.

In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they're particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. "They're making meaningful decisions about their time that I don't think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing," Bronke said.

The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it-to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it's actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class-to start with nothing, and add as necessary.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Joe Pinsker is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers families and education.

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America's devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it's what today's parents and teachers grew up with themselves. America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh.

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Elementary School Homework Probably Isn’t Good For Kids | HuffPost

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Elementary School Homework Probably Isn’t Good For Kids | HuffPost

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Many parents are surprised to see a flood of projects and homework sent home with their kids starting as early as Kindergarten. And a nasty surprise it is. Combine a snack-hungry 5-year-old with a math worksheet and you've got a parental nightmare. Still, that angst would - one could at least argue - be worthwhile if it meant greater scholastic achievement. The problem? There is very little evidence to suggest that homework is anything more than a hassle when it's assigned to young children.

Dr. Cathy Vatterott, an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs has spent much of her career researching the research about homework. The findings, she told Fatherly, are unambiguous. "They really can't prove any benefit in elementary school," she says.

What is, however, a bit harder to understand is the nature of the "they." Who wants to give young children homework and why? The answer has a lot to do with ideas about education that don't make any sense if recontextualized within the body of research on developmental psychology.

"Teachers and possibly schools confuse homework with rigor," Vatterott says. She notes this is particularly true in private schools and high-income school districts that pride themselves on awards and college placement. These institutions lean into homework, conflating student achievement with evidence of homework efficacy. In reality, the teachers (and by extension their students) are victims of educational superstition.

"There are teachers out there who see things are going really well," Vatterott says. "And they think, 'We better keep doing what we're doing or all hell is going to break loose.'"

In truth, data indicates that homework for the youngest students in the elementary grades has, at best, has no bearing on achievement. And the studies that do suggest homework has positive effects can only prove correlation, not causation. That's because it's incredibly difficult to control for all of the other variables that can lead to better academic outcomes, including factors like teacher quality, parental involvement, amount of sleep a child receives, proper nutrition, and - here comes the big one - socio-economic status. And, yes, there is research that suggests homework can have negative effects.

"There's a lot of evidence that it's putting too much stress on families," Vatterott explains. "And that it's contributing to whether kids like school or not. We certainly don't want kids to hate school."

There is very little evidence to suggest that homework is anything more than a hassle when it's assigned to young children.

Temple University professor, early learning researcher, and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Dr. Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek places an even finer point on the damage homework can do. "All this homework is also changing the dynamic of parent-child relationships," she tells Fatherly. "It certainly isn't making learning fun, and learning doesn't just happen at school."

Hirsh-Pasek acknowledges that practice is necessary for learning, but she rejects the idea that said practice must be completed through worksheets and homework packets. The play that kids naturally engage in, she points out, helps them practice the skills they develop in the classroom.

"Believe it or not, you learn about math when you're playing different board games," Hirsh-Pasek explains. "And you learn about space when you put together train tracks and play with Legos. You learn important skills, like how to get along with other people when you play with other people. They're learning way more important skills when they're not doing their homework."

That said, there is one activity that researchers feel that parents and children should be doing at home: reading.

"There is practically nothing that will be more important than reading time," Hirsh-Pasek says. "It's a time when kids learn integrated narrative. It's a time when they learn about relationships and hear vocabulary that they don't hear anywhere else."

Vatterott explains that a similar sentiment about reading seems to be gaining ground nationally. "Trend-wise, what's happening across the country, is that we've started to see an increase in elementary schools eliminating homework, or saying that homework is just to read or be read to," she says, though she notes that achievement-obsessed schools are obstinate holdouts. And it could be that some parents are holdouts too. After all, doesn't homework teach grit and responsibility to kids that desperately need it? Shouldn't they stop whining and knuckle down?

Yes and no. There is virtue to struggle and to responsibility, but homework is really more of an obligation than anything.

"A struggle is good when there is a success at the end of the struggle," suggests Vatterott. "But it's a very simplistic view to suggest that homework teaches them responsibility and to delay gratification. It's a really weak argument."

Hirsh-Pasek agrees. "The truth is that everything has to be put in balance," she says. "If you want your child to learn perseverance give them some chores at home. The worst thing that you can do today is to have people sit when they should be standing and stand when they should be moving."

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Elementary School Homework Probably Isn't Good For Kids

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Many parents are surprised to see a flood of projects and homework sent home with their kids starting as early as Kindergarten. And a nasty surprise it is. Combine a snack-hungry 5-year-old with a math worksheet and you've got a parental nightmare.

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A compelling exposé of homework - how it fails our children, why it's so widely accepted, and what we can do about it.

Death and taxes come later; what seems inevitable for children is the idea that, after spending the day at school, they must then complete more academic assignments at home. The predictable results: stress . . . (Read More)

A 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 themselves.
Let's start by reviewing what we . . .(Read More)

It's not unusual to read that a new study has failed to replicate - or has even reversed - the findings of an earlier study. The effect can be disconcerting, particularly when medical research announces that what was supposed to be good for us turns out to be dangerous, or vice versa.
Qualifications and reversals also . . .(Read More)

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A compelling exposé of homework - how it fails our children, why it's so widely accepted, and what we can do about it. Death and taxes come later; what seems inevitable for children is the idea that, after spending the day at school, they must then complete more academic assignments at home.

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Homework: An Unnecessary Evil? … Surprising Findings From New Research (##) - Alfie Kohn

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Homework: An Unnecessary Evil? … Surprising Findings From New Research (##) - Alfie Kohn

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November 26, 2012

An unnecessary evil? ... Surprising Findings From New Research

By Alfie Kohn

A 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 themselves.

Let'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. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement. 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 says.

Second, 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. (Take 10 seconds to see if you can come up with other variables that might be driving both of these things.)

Third, 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 everywhere.

Along 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. Rather, it offers an aerial view, the kind preferred by economists, relying on two large datasets (from the National Education Longitudinal Study [NELS] and the Education Longitudinal Study [ELS]). Thousands of students are asked one question - How much time do you spend on homework? - and statistical tests are then performed to discover if there's a relationship between that number and how they fared in their classes and on standardized tests.

It's easy to miss one interesting result in this study that appears in a one-sentence aside. 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. There's no good reason for such a striking discrepancy, nor do the authors offer any explanation. 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. Which number is more accurate? Or are both of them way off? There's no way of knowing. And because all the conclusions are tied to that number, all the conclusions may be completely invalid.[4]

But let's pretend that we really do know how much homework students do. Did doing it make any difference? The Maltese et al. study looked at the effect on test scores and on grades. They emphasized the latter, but let's get the former out of the way first.

Was 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? And how meaningful a measure were those tests in the first place, since, as the authors concede, they're timed measures of mostly mechanical skills? (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.")

But it was grades, not tests, that Maltese and his colleagues really cared about. 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. Previous research has looked only at students' overall grade-point averages.

And the result of this fine-tuned investigation? 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."

This result clearly caught the researchers off-guard. Frankly, it surprised me, too. 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?

And yet it wasn't. Again. Even in high school. Even in math. 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. (That's not a surprising proposition for a careful reader of reports in this field. 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.[5])

Maltese and his colleagues did their best to reframe these results to minimize the stunning implications.[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. But if you read the results rather than just the authors' spin on them - which you really need to do with the work of others working in this field as well[7] - you'll find that there's not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school. 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 published.

If 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.

1. 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. They argue that (a) six hours a day of academics are enough, and kids should have the chance after school to explore other interests and develop in other ways - or be able simply to relax in the same way that most adults like to relax after work; and (b) the decision about what kids do during family time should be made by families, not schools. Let's put these arguments aside for now, even though they ought to be (but rarely are) included in any discussion of the topic.

2. Valerie A. Cool and Timothy Z. Keith, "Testing a Model of School Learning: Direct and Indirect Effects on Academic Achievement," Contemporary Educational Psychology 16 (1991): 28-44.

3. Adam V. Maltese, Robert H. Tai, and Xitao Fan, "When Is Homework Worth the Time? Evaluating the Association Between Homework and Achievement in High School Science and Math," The High School Journal, October/November 2012: 52-72. Abstract at http://ow.ly/fxhOV.

4. Other research has found little or no correlation between how much homework students report doing and how much homework their parents say they do. When you use the parents' estimates, the correlation between homework and achievement disappears. See Harris Cooper, Jorgianne Civey Robinson, and Erika A. Patall, "Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?: A Synthesis of Research, 1987-2003," Review of Educational Research 76 (2006): 1-62.

5. To put it the other way around, studies finding the biggest effect are those that capture less of what goes on in the real world by virtue of being so brief. 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. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2001).

6. Even the title of their article reflects this: They ask "When Is Homework Worth the Time?" rather than " Is Homework Worth the Time?" This bias might seem a bit surprising in the case of the study's second author, Robert H. Tai. He had contributed earlier to another study whose results similarly ended up raising questions about the value of homework. Students enrolled in college physics courses were surveyed to determine whether any features of their high schoolphysics courses were now of use to them. 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. But once the researchers controlled for other variables, such as the type of classes they had taken, that relationship disappeared, just as it had for Keith (see note 2). The researchers then studied a much larger population of students in college science classes - and found the same thing: Homework simply didn't help. See Philip M. Sadler and Robert H. Tai, "Success in Introductory College Physics: The Role of High School Preparation," Science Education 85 [2001]: 111-36.

7. See chapter 4 ("'Studies Show...' - Or Do They?") 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 [www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/research.htm].

8. On the alleged value of practice, see The Homework Myth, pp. 106-18, also available at http://bit.ly/9dXqCj.

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Homework: An Unnecessary Evil? ... Surprising Findings From New Research (##)

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November 26, 2012 By Alfie Kohn A 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 themselves.

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Researchers still argue over the value of homework.

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The Great Homework Debate Part II – What is the effect size of homework on student learning? | paddington teaching and learning

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The Great Homework Debate Part II – What is the effect size of homework on student learning? | paddington teaching and learning

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As covered elsewhere on our blog , Hattie's approach in his groundbreaking book, "Visible learning for teachers: maximising impact on teaching", is to compare the impact of different teaching interventions using a single 'barometer of effect sizes'. Effect sizes above are considered to be within the 'zone of desired effects'. In other words, anything above d=0.40 is really worth our time - it can significantly improve student achievement.

Skimming over the 5 meta-analyses of homework that Hattie includes, one might be forgiven for thinking that the impact of homework is not strong. The mean standard effect size of homework is only d=0.29, not really anything to write home about. But dig a bit deeper, (as summarised in a great post from the fantastic blog by headguruteacherTom Sherrington, called Homework -what does the Hattie research actually say? ) and you discover this important distinction:
Effect size for primary schools: d = 0.15 Effect size for secondary schools: d= 0.64.
Hoorah! An effect size of d= 0.64 is the equivalent of approximately a years learning, but why is there such a difference between age-groups?

Hattie's analyses of this difference are thorough. He considers both the variations in measurements amongst the studies and the ability (or otherwise) of younger students to complete homework tasks unaided. But what does this all add up to for the classroom teacher? Further interpretations of these analyses (see the Headteacherguru link above) summarise the findings:

Younger students may not yet have developed the correct study skills needed to organise their homework efforts.

As a rule, the impact of homework is greater if the task is concise, meaningful and tightly linked to current classroom learning.

Only as students get older, are they more able to complete open-ended activities.

Perhaps then, news stories headlined French parents to boycott homework are not as alarming to advocates of homework in the as we once thought. After all, this article simply restates what Hattie's research so eloquently demonstrate s- the effect sizes of homework are smaller in primary schools. But we should realise that we need to correctly set up and manage the transition from primary school, in terms of our homelearning expectations. Year 7 students are often our most enthusiastic students, but we need to support their efforts and design tasks carefully.
Next week for some practical homework ideas for Key Stage 3 students!

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The Great Homework Debate Part II - What is the effect size of homework on student learning?

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As covered elsewhere on our blog , Hattie's approach in his groundbreaking book, "Visible learning for teachers: maximising impact on teaching", is to compare the impact of different teaching interventions using a single 'barometer of effect sizes'. Effect sizes above d=0.40 are considered to be within the 'zone of desired effects'.

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Homework: Is It Good for Kids? Here's What the Research Says | Time

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Homework: Is It Good for Kids? Here's What the Research Says | Time

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Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

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Homework Battles: When Parent Help Negatively Affects Students | MindShift | KQED News

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Homework Battles: When Parent Help Negatively Affects Students | MindShift | KQED News

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Bindaas Madhavi/Flickr

Homework has become as much work for parents as it is for kids in many families when parents slog through assignments together with their kids every night. They see it as part of their parental duty to help their children. But when it comes to assisting kids with challenging subjects or an unfamiliar way of learning - like the new Common Core math standards and homework that requires approaches very different from those learned in previous generations - frustration that builds from struggling over the homework can foster anxiety.

A study conducted by researchers at the Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago has found that if parents have high levels of math anxiety and give a lot of homework help (more than two to three times a week), they can have a negative impact on their child's math achievement and increase their child's math anxiety.

"When parents are really high in math anxiety their children - both boys and girls - learn less math over the school year and become more anxious."

"This is one of the first studies to look at how math anxiety is produced," said Erin Maloney, lead author on the study. Researchers have already established that a teacher's math anxiety negatively affects student performance over the course of the year and leads female students to endorse negative stereotypes about girls' math abilities. For this study, Maloney and her co-authors Gerardo Ramirez, Elizabeth A. Gunderson, Susan C. Levine and Sian L. Beilock statistically controlled for teachers' math anxiety and content knowledge, along with the socioeconomic status of the children.

"Kids as young as first grade really do report high anxiety about math and that anxiety is linked to their math achievement," Maloney said. The study found a caregiver's math anxiety negatively impacted both male and female children equally. And, the effects were bigger the more anxious a parent was and the more often they helped with homework. While not a study of female caregivers in particular, 89 percent of primary caregivers in this study were women.

The study was done with a large sample size of children in first and second grade that was designed to be representative of the Illinois state population. Students in the study completed tests measuring math, reading and math anxiety in the first 12 weeks of school. They were tested again in the last 8 weeks of school. Parents were given a 25-question survey that asked questions about how they feel in various real-world situations requiring math, like tipping at a restaurant.

"When parents are really high in math anxiety, their children, both boys and girls, learn less math over the school year and become more anxious over the school year," Maloney said, but only in cases where the primary care provider helped with homework frequently.

The effects of math anxiety on achievement are well documented. Stanford researchers did brain scans of children solving math problems. In math-anxious children, the part of the brain tasked with handling negative emotions was overactive, whereas the math problem solving parts of the brain were diminished. The children's fear was interfering with their ability to use problem solving skills.

Sian Beilock and her colleagues at the Human Performance Lab posited that math anxiety was taking up students' working memory, impeding their ability to succeed on tests. They asked students to write about their math anxiety before a test. By offloading those negative emotions first, the intervention has produced encouraging results in the classroom.

But what are parents to do with this new information?

"It's really not enough for us as educators to just say 'get involved,'" Maloney said. She believes researchers and educators need to develop better tools for parents to understand the math their children are working on so they can help appropriately. Unfamiliar teaching methods heighten the math anxiety that's already found in many American adults.

Homework Battles: When Parent Help Negatively Affects Students

Author

Katrina Schwartz

Katrina Schwartz is a journalist based in San Francisco. She's worked at KPCC public radio in LA and has reported on air and online for KQED since 2010. She's a staff writer for KQED's education blog MindShift.

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Homework Battles: When Parent Help Negatively Affects Students

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Homework has become as much work for parents as it is for kids in many families when parents slog through assignments together with their kids every night. They see it as part of their parental duty to help their children.