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“Homework in primary school has an effect of zero.”

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"Homework in primary school has an effect of around zero", says Professor John Hattie. But what does really work in education, schools and classrooms around the world? Every week Sarah Montague interviews the people whose ideas are challenging the future of education, like Sugata Mitra, Sir Ken Robinson and the headmaster of Eton College Tony Little. In August John Hattie, Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, was her guest at BBC Radio 4. You can listen to the whole interview with John Hattie following this link (28 mins). Here are some quick takeaways. If you want to read further about what works best in education you can order the books Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers.

John Hattie about class size

"Well, the first thing is, reducing class size does enhance achievement. However, the magnitude of that effect is tiny. It's about a hundred and fifth out of a hundred and thirty odd different effects out there and it's just one of those enigmas and the only question to ask is why is that effect so small? Because it is small. And the reason, we've found out, that it's so small is because teachers don't change how they teach when they go from a class of thirty to fifteen and perhaps it's not surprising."

John Hattie about public vs private schools

"Here in England, if you take out the prior differences from going to a private school where they tend to get parents who choose, as oppose to them sent to the local school, they tend to get a brighter student, you take that out, there's not much difference. In many places the government school would be better. So, it's kind of ironic, in the last twenty years where we've pushed this notion that parents have choice, so they can choose the school that may not be in the best interest of their student."

John Hattie about homework

"Homework in primary school has an effect of around zero. In high school it's larger. (...) Which is why we need to get it right. Not why we need to get rid of it. It's one of those lower hanging fruit that we should be looking in our primary schools to say, "Is it really making a difference?" If you try and get rid of homework in primary schools many parents judge the quality of the school by the presence of homework. So, don't get rid of it. Treat the zero as saying, "It's probably not making much of a difference but let's improve it". Certainly I think we get over obsessed with homework. Five to ten minutes has the same effect of one hour to two hours. The worst thing you can do with homework is give kids projects. The best thing you can do is to reinforce something you've already learnt."

John Hattie about streaming

"It doesn't make a difference."
Sarah Montague: "But bright kids aren't held back by less bright and less bright not suffering?"
"No. No difference at all. No. Teachers think it's easier for them and it may be but in terms of the effects of students, no. Now you've got to remember that a lot of students gain a tremendous amount of their learning from their other students in the class and variability is the way that you get more of that kind of learning from other students."

Listen to the whole interview with John Hattie at BBC Radio 4. If you want to read further you can order the books Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers.

BBC Radio 4: The Educators.
Sarah Montague interviews the people
whose ideas are challenging
the future of education.
Episode 2:John Hattie
Duration: 28 minutes
First broadcast: 20 August 2014
Presenter: Sarah Montague
Producer: Joel Moors.

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"Homework in primary school has an effect of zero" (J. Hattie)

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"Homework in primary school has an effect of around zero", says Professor John Hattie. But what does really work in education, schools and classrooms around the world? Every week Sarah Montague interviews the people whose ideas are challenging the future of education, like Sugata Mitra, Sir Ken Robinson and the headmaster of Eton College Tony Little.

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From Harvard 2012

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The debate over how much schoolwork students should be doing at home has flared again, with one side saying it's too much, the other side saying in our competitive world, it's just not enough.

It was a move that doesn't happen very often in American public schools: The principal got rid of homework.

This past September, Stephanie Brant, principal of Gaithersburg Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., decided that instead of teachers sending kids home with math worksheets and spelling flash cards, students would instead go home and read. Every day for 30 minutes, more if they had time or the inclination, with parents or on their own.

"I knew this would be a big shift for my community," she says. But she also strongly believed it was a necessary one. Twenty-first-century learners, especially those in elementary school, need to think critically and understand their own learning - not spend night after night doing rote homework drills.

Brant's move may not be common, but she isn't alone in her questioning. The value of doing schoolwork at home has gone in and out of fashion in the United States among educators, policymakers, the media, and, more recently, parents. As far back as the late 1800s, with the rise of the Progressive Era, doctors such as Joseph Mayer Rice began pushing for a limit on what he called "mechanical homework," saying it caused childhood nervous conditions and eyestrain. Around that time, the then-influential Ladies Home Journal began publishing a series of anti-homework articles, stating that five hours of brain work a day was "the most we should ask of our children," and that homework was an intrusion on family life. In response, states like California passed laws abolishing homework for students under a certain age.

But, as is often the case with education, the tide eventually turned. After the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, a space race emerged, and, writes Brian Gill in the journal Theory Into Practice, "The homework problem was reconceived as part of a national crisis; the U.S. was losing the Cold War because Russian children were smarter." Many earlier laws limiting homework were abolished, and the longterm trend toward less homework came to an end.

The debate re-emerged a decade later when parents of the late '60s and '70s argued that children should be free to play and explore - similar anti-homework wellness arguments echoed nearly a century earlier. By the early-1980s, however, the pendulum swung again with the publication of A Nation at Risk, which blamed poor education for a "rising tide of mediocrity." Students needed to work harder, the report said, and one way to do this was more homework.

For the most part, this pro-homework sentiment is still going strong today, in part because of mandatory testing and continued economic concerns about the nation's competitiveness. Many believe that today's students are falling behind their peers in places like Korea and Finland and are paying more attention to Angry Birds than to ancient Babylonia.

But there are also a growing number of Stephanie Brants out there, educators and parents who believe that students are stressed and missing out on valuable family time. Students, they say, particularly younger students who have seen a rise in the amount of take-home work and already put in a six- to nine-hour "work" day, need less, not more homework.

Who is right? Are students not working hard enough or is homework not working for them? Here's where the story gets a little tricky: It depends on whom you ask and what research you're looking at. As Cathy Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework, points out, "Homework has generated enough research so that a study can be found to support almost any position, as long as conflicting studies are ignored." Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth and a strong believer in eliminating all homework, writes that, "The fact that there isn't anything close to unanimity among experts belies the widespread assumption that homework helps." At best, he says, homework shows only an association, not a causal relationship, with academic achievement. In other words, it's hard to tease out how homework is really affecting test scores and grades. Did one teacher give better homework than another? Was one teacher more effective in the classroom? Do certain students test better or just try harder?

"It is difficult to separate where the effect of classroom teaching ends," Vatterott writes, "and the effect of homework begins."

Putting research aside, however, much of the current debate over homework is focused less on how homework affects academic achievement and more on time. Parents in particular have been saying that the amount of time children spend in school, especially with afterschool programs, combined with the amount of homework given - as early as kindergarten - is leaving students with little time to run around, eat dinner with their families, or even get enough sleep.

Certainly, for some parents, homework is a way to stay connected to their children's learning. But for others, homework creates a tug-of-war between parents and children, says Liz Goodenough, M.A.T.'71, creator of a documentary called Where Do the Children Play?

"Ideally homework should be about taking something home, spending a few curious and interesting moments in which children might engage with parents, and then getting that project back to school - an organizational triumph," she says. "A nag-free activity could engage family time: Ask a parent about his or her own childhood. Interview siblings."

Instead, as the authors of The Case Against Homework write, "Homework overload is turning many of us into the types of parents we never wanted to be: nags, bribers, and taskmasters."

Leslie Butchko saw it happen a few years ago when her son started sixth grade in the Santa Monica-Malibu (Calif.) United School District. She remembers him getting two to four hours of homework a night, plus weekend and vacation projects. He was overwhelmed and struggled to finish assignments, especially on nights when he also had an extracurricular activity.

"Ultimately, we felt compelled to have Bobby quit karate - he's a black belt - to allow more time for homework," she says. And then, with all of their attention focused on Bobby's homework, she and her husband started sending their youngest to his room so that Bobby could focus. "One day, my younger son gave us 15-minute coupons as a present for us to use to send him to play in the back room. ... It was then that we realized there had to be something wrong with the amount of homework we were facing."

Butchko joined forces with another mother who was having similar struggles and ultimately helped get the homework policy in her district changed, limiting homework on weekends and holidays, setting time guidelines for daily homework, and broadening the definition of homework to include projects and studying for tests. As she told the school board at one meeting when the policy was first being discussed, "In closing, I just want to say that I had more free time at Harvard Law School than my son has in middle school, and that is not in the best interests of our children."

One barrier that Butchko had to overcome initially was convincing many teachers and parents that more homework doesn't necessarily equal rigor.

"Most of the parents that were against the homework policy felt that students need a large quantity of homework to prepare them for the rigorous AP classes in high school and to get them into Harvard," she says.

Stephanie Conklin, Ed.M.'06, sees this at Another Course to College, the Boston pilot school where she teaches math. "When a student is not completing [his or her] homework, parents usually are frustrated by this and agree with me that homework is an important part of their child's learning," she says.

As Timothy Jarman, Ed.M.'10, a ninth-grade English teacher at Eugene Ashley High School in Wilmington, N.C., says, "Parents think it is strange when their children are not assigned a substantial amount of homework."

That's because, writes Vatterott, in her chapter, "The Cult(ure) of Homework," the concept of homework "has become so engrained in U.S. culture that the word homework is part of the common vernacular."

These days, nightly homework is a given in American schools, writes Kohn.

"Homework isn't limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important. Most teachers and administrators aren't saying, 'It may be useful to do this particular project at home,'" he writes. "Rather, the point of departure seems to be, 'We've decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week). ... This commitment to the idea of homework in the abstract is accepted by the overwhelming majority of schools - public and private, elementary and secondary."

Brant had to confront this when she cut homework at Gaithersburg Elementary.

"A lot of my parents have this idea that homework is part of life. This is what I had to do when I was young," she says, and so, too, will our kids. "So I had to shift their thinking." She did this slowly, first by asking her teachers last year to really think about what they were sending home. And this year, in addition to forming a parent advisory group around the issue, she also holds events to answer questions.

Still, not everyone is convinced that homework as a given is a bad thing. "Any pursuit of excellence, be it in sports, the arts, or academics, requires hard work. That our culture finds it okay for kids to spend hours a day in a sport but not equal time on academics is part of the problem," wrote one pro-homework parent on the blog for the documentary Race to Nowhere, which looks at the stress American students are under. "Homework has always been an issue for parents and children. It is now and it was 20 years ago. I think when people decide to have children that it is their responsibility to educate them," wrote another.

And part of educating them, some believe, is helping them develop skills they will eventually need in adulthood. "Homework can help students develop study skills that will be of value even after they leave school," reads a publication on the U.S. Department of Education website called Homework Tips for Parents. "It can teach them that learning takes place anywhere, not just in the classroom. ... It can foster positive character traits such as independence and responsibility. Homework can teach children how to manage time."

Annie Brown, Ed.M.'01, feels this is particularly critical at less affluent schools like the ones she has worked at in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and Los Angeles as a literacy coach.

"It feels important that my students do homework because they will ultimately be competing for college placement and jobs with students who have done homework and have developed a work ethic," she says. "Also it will get them ready for independently taking responsibility for their learning, which will need to happen for them to go to college."

The problem with this thinking, writes Vatterott, is that homework becomes a way to practice being a worker.

"Which begs the question," she writes. "Is our job as educators to produce learners or workers?"

Slate magazine editor Emily Bazelon, in a piece about homework, says this makes no sense for younger kids.

"Why should we think that practicing homework in first grade will make you better at doing it in middle school?" she writes. "Doesn't the opposite seem equally plausible: that it's counterproductive to ask children to sit down and work at night before they're developmentally ready because you'll just make them tired and cross?"

Kohn writes in the American School Board Journal that this "premature exposure" to practices like homework (and sit-and-listen lessons and tests) "are clearly a bad match for younger children and of questionable value at any age." He calls it BGUTI: Better Get Used to It. "The logic here is that we have to prepare you for the bad things that are going to be done to you later ... by doing them to you now."

According to a recent University of Michigan study, daily homework for six- to eight-year-olds increased on average from about 8 minutes in 1981 to 22 minutes in 2003. A review of research by Duke University Professor Harris Cooper found that for elementary school students, "the average correlation between time spent on homework and achievement ... hovered around zero."

So should homework be eliminated? Of course not, say many Ed School graduates who are teaching. Not only would students not have time for essays and long projects, but also teachers would not be able to get all students to grade level or to cover critical material, says Brett Pangburn, Ed.M.'06, a sixth-grade English teacher at Excel Academy Charter School in Boston. Still, he says, homework has to be relevant.

"Kids need to practice the skills being taught in class, especially where, like the kids I teach at Excel, they are behind and need to catch up," he says. "Our results at Excel have demonstrated that kids can catch up and view themselves as in control of their academic futures, but this requires hard work, and homework is a part of it."

Ed School Professor Howard Gardner basically agrees.

"America and Americans lurch between too little homework in many of our schools to an excess of homework in our most competitive environments - Li'l Abner vs. Tiger Mother," he says. "Neither approach makes sense. Homework should build on what happens in class, consolidating skills and helping students to answer new questions."

So how can schools come to a happy medium, a way that allows teachers to cover everything they need while not overwhelming students? Conklin says she often gives online math assignments that act as labs and students have two or three days to complete them, including some in-class time. Students at Pangburn's school have a 50-minute silent period during regular school hours where homework can be started, and where teachers pull individual or small groups of students aside for tutoring, often on that night's homework. Afterschool homework clubs can help.

Some schools and districts have adapted time limits rather than nix homework completely, with the 10-minute per grade rule being the standard - 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 30 minutes for third-graders, and so on. (This remedy, however, is often met with mixed results since not all students work at the same pace.) Other schools offer an extended day that allows teachers to cover more material in school, in turn requiring fewer take-home assignments. And for others, like Stephanie Brant's elementary school in Maryland, more reading with a few targeted project assignments has been the answer.

"The routine of reading is so much more important than the routine of homework," she says. "Let's have kids reflect. You can still have the routine and you can still have your workspace, but now it's for reading. I often say to parents, if we can put a man on the moon, we can put a man or woman on Mars and that person is now a second-grader. We don't know what skills that person will need. At the end of the day, we have to feel confident that we're giving them something they can use on Mars."
Read a January 2014 update.

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Are You Down With or Done With Homework?

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It was a move that doesn't happen very often in American public schools: The principal got rid of homework. This past September, Stephanie Brant, principal of Gaithersburg Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., decided that instead of teachers sending kids home with math worksheets and spelling flash cards, students would instead go home and read.

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Alfie Kohn (2006)
"There is no evidence of any academic benefit from homework in elementary school."

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Chapter 2 of (Da Capo Press, 2006)
Copyright © 2006 by Alfie Kohn

By Alfie Kohn

Because 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 help.

If 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."[1]

When 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? Fill-in-the-blank worksheets or extended projects? In what school subject(s)? How old are the students? How able and interested are they? Are we looking at how much the teacher assigned or at how much the kids actually did? How careful was the study and how many students were investigated?

Even when you take account of all these variables, the bottom line remains that no definite conclusion can be reached, and that is itself a significant conclusion. 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."

Research 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.[3] In 1979, another reviewer found five more studies. One found that homework helped, two found that it didn't, and two found mixed results.[4] Yet another review was published a few years later, this one of eight articles and seven dissertations that had appeared from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. 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.[6]

"The literature reviews done over the past 60 years . . . report conflicting results," one expert concluded in 1985. "There is no good evidence that homework produces better academic achievement."[7] Four years later, Harris Cooper, an educational psychologist, attempted to sort things out by conducting the most exhaustive review of the research to date. He performed a "meta-analysis," which is a statistical technique for combining numerous studies into the equivalent of one giant study.[8] Cooper included seventeen research reports that contained a total of 48 comparisons between students who did and did not receive homework. About 70 percent of these found that homework was associated with higher achievement. 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.[9]

Cooper and his colleagues published a review of newer studies in 2006. 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.[10]

Among 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." (By contrast, the amount of time children spent reading for pleasure was strongly correlated with higher scores.)[12]

Taken as a whole, the available research might be summarized as inconclusive. But if we look more closely, even that description turns out to be too generous. 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 further.

Limitations of the Research

1. At best, most homework studies show only an association, not a causal relationship. Statistical principles don't get much more basic than "correlation doesn't prove causation." The number of umbrellas brought to a workplace on a given morning will be highly correlated with the probability of precipitation in the afternoon, but the presence of umbrellas didn't make it rain. 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 homework.

There 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 . . . or that better students simply spend more time on home study."[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). Again, it would be erroneous to conclude that homework is responsible for higher achievement. Or that a complete absence of homework would have any detrimental effect at all.

Sometimes 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 spurious.

Several 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).[15] But researchers who report this counterintuitive finding generally take pains to explain that it "must not be interpreted as a causal pattern."[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 up.

That 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 away.

In short, most of the research that's cited to show that homework is academically beneficial really doesn't prove any such thing.

2. Do we really know how much homework kids do? 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 . . . uncorrelated with the student report."[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 reliable.

These 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."[22]

3. Homework studies confuse grades and test scores with learning. Most researchers, like most reporters who write about education, talk about how this or that policy affects student "achievement" without questioning whether the way that word is defined in the studies makes any sense. What exactly is this entity called achievement that's said to go up or down? 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. About the best thing you can say for these numbers is that they're easy for researchers to collect and report. Each is seriously flawed in its own way.

In 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 effective.

In the second kind of study, course grades are used to determine whether homework made a difference. The problem here is that a grade, as one writer put it long ago, is "an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material."[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. Any given assignment may well be given two different grades by two equally qualified teachers - and may even be given two different grades by a single teacher who reads it at two different times. The final course grade, moreover, is based on a combination of these individual marks, along with other, even less well defined considerations.[24]

As 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. Yet grades are the basis for a good number of the studies that are cited to defend that very conclusion. 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.[25]

Here's one example. Cooper and his colleagues conducted a study in 1998 with both younger and older students (from grades 2 through 12), using both grades and standardized test scores to measure achievement. They also looked at how much homework was assigned by the teacher as well as at how much time students spent on their homework. Thus, there were eight separate results to be reported. Here's how they came out:

Younger students

Effect on grades of amount of homework assigned No sig. relationship

Effect on test scores of amount of homework assigned No sig. relationship

Effect on grades of amount of homework done Negative relationship

Effect on test scores of amount of homework done No sig. relationship

Older students

Effect on grades of amount of homework assigned No sig. relationship

Effect on test scores of amount of homework assigned No sig. relationship

Effect on grades of amount of homework done Positive relationship

Effect on test scores of amount of homework done No sig. relationship

Of 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 age.

The last, and most common, way of measuring achievement is to use standardized test scores. Purely because they're standardized, these tests are widely regarded as objective instruments for assessing children's academic performance. But as I've argued elsewhere at some length,[27] there is considerable reason to believe that standardized tests are a poor measure of intellectual proficiency. They are, however, excellent indicators of two things. The first is affluence: Up to 90 percent of the difference in scores among schools, communities, or even states can be accounted for, statistically speaking, without knowing anything about what happened inside the classrooms. All you need are some facts about the average income and education levels of the students' parents. The second phenomenon that standardized tests measure is how skillful a particular group of students is at taking standardized tests - and, increasingly, how much class time has been given over to preparing them to do just that.

In my experience, teachers can almost always identify several students who do poorly on standardized tests even though, by more authentic and meaningful indicators, they are extremely talented thinkers. Other students, meanwhile, ace these tests even though their thinking isn't particularly impressive; they're just good test-takers. 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. What's more, this association has been documented at the elementary, middle, and high school level.

Standardized tests are even less useful when they include any of these features:

* If most of the questions are multiple-choice, then students are unable to generate, or even justify, their responses. To that extent, students cannot really demonstrate what they know or what they can do with what they know. Multiple-choice tests are basically designed so that many kids who understand a given idea will be tricked into picking the wrong answer.

* If the test is timed, then it places a premium not on thoughtfulness but on speed.

* If the test is focused on "basic skills," then doing well is more a function of cramming forgettable facts into short-term memory than of really understanding ideas, making connections and distinctions, knowing how to read or write or analyze problems in a sophisticated way, thinking like a scientist or historian, being able to use knowledge in unfamiliar situations, and so on.

* If the test is given to younger children, then, according to an overwhelming consensus on the part of early-education specialists, it is a poor indicator of academic skills. Many children under the age of eight or nine are unable to demonstrate their proficiency on a standardized test just because they're tripped up by the format.

* If the test is "norm-referenced" (like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, Terra Nova, Stanford Achievement Test, and others used widely in classrooms and also by researchers), then it was never designed to evaluate whether students know what they should. Instead, its primary purpose is to artificially spread out the scores in order to facilitate ranking students against each other. The question these tests are intended to answer is not "How well are our kids - or our schools - doing?" but "Who's beating whom?" We know nothing about academic competence in absolute terms just from knowing what percentage of other test-takers a given child has bested. Moreover, the selection of questions for these tests is informed by this imperative to rank. Thus, items that a lot of students answer correctly (or incorrectly) are typically eliminated - regardless of whether the content is important - and replaced with questions that about half the kids will get right. This is done in order to make it easier to compare students to one another.

My purpose in these few paragraphs has been to offer only a very brief summary of the reasons that informed educators and parents would never regard a standardized test score as meaningful information about the quality of a student's thinking - or about the quality of a school. (In the latter case, a high or rising average test score may actually be a reason to worry. 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.[28]

I'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 there.

If 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.[29] After all, "works better" just means "produces higher scores on exams that measure these low-level capabilities."

Overall, 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 improves.

Cautionary Findings

Assume 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.

4. Homework matters less the longer you look. 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. So here's another theory: The studies finding the greatest effect were those that captured 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.

5. Even where they do exist, positive effects are often quite small. In Cooper's review, as I've already pointed out, homework could explain only a tiny proportion of the differences in achievement scores. The same was true of a large-scale high school study from the 1960s.[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 gains have been found, they have been minimal, especially in comparison to the amount of work expended by teachers and students."[33]

6. There is no evidence of any academic benefit from homework in elementary school. 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 benefit.

The 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. But this remarkable fact is rarely communicated to the general public. 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!

In 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."[34] In revisiting his review a decade later, he mentioned another large study he had come across. 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. For third graders, the correlations were negative: more homework was associated with lower achievement.[35]

In 2005, I asked Cooper if he knew of any newer studies with elementary school students, and he said he had come across exactly four, all small and all unpublished. He was kind enough to offer the citations, and I managed to track them down.

The first was a college student's term paper that described an experiment with 39 second graders in one school. 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 third study tested 64 fifth graders on social studies facts.

All three of these experiments found exactly what you would expect: The kids who had drilled on the material - a process that happened to take place at home - did better on their respective class tests. The final study, a dissertation project, involved teaching a lesson contained in a language arts textbook. 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't done 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 facts.

It 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.[37] And the news isn't much better for children in middle school or junior high school. 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. The correlation only spikes at or above grade 10.[38]

Such 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. A large correlation is necessary, in other words, but not sufficient. 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 data.

All 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). No wonder "many Japanese elementary schools in the late 1990s issued 'no homework' policies."[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.[40] But it's a development that seems entirely rational in light of what the evidence shows right here in the United States.

Additional Research

7. The results of national and international exams raise further doubts about homework's role. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is often called the nation's report card. 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. Yet the most striking result, particularly for elementary students, is precisely the absence of such an association. Even students who reported having been assigned no homework at all didn't fare badly on the test.

Consider 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. Remarkably, the scores then declined for those who did 45 minutes, then declined again for those who did an hour or more! 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. In twelfth grade, the scores were about the same regardless of whether students did only 15 minutes or more than an hour.[41] Results on the reading test, too, provided no compelling case that homework helped.[42]

International comparisons allow us to look for correlations between homework and test scores within each country and also for correlations across countries. Let's begin with the former. In the 1980s, 13-year-olds in a dozen nations were tested and also queried about how much they studied. "In some countries more time spent on homework was associated with higher scores; in others, it was not."[43] In the 1990s, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) became the most popular way of assessing what was going on around the world, although of course its conclusions can't necessarily be generalized to other subjects. 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. [44] This is known as a "curvilinear" relationship; on a graph it looks sort of like an upside-down U.

But even that relationship didn't show up in a separate series of studies involving elementary school students in China, Japan, and two U.S. 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. Again they came up empty handed.[45]

What about correlations across cultures? Here we find people playing what I'll later argue is a pointless game in which countries' education systems are ranked against one another on the basis of their students' test scores. Pointless or not, "a common explanation of the poor performance of American children in cross-cultural comparisons of academic achievement is that American children spend little time in study."[46] The reasoning, in other words, goes something like this:

Premise 1: Our students get significantly less homework than their counterparts across the globe.

Premise 2: Other countries whup the pants off us in international exams.

Conclusion: Premise 1 explains Premise 2.

Additional conclusion: If U.S. teachers assigned more homework, our students would perform better.

Every step of this syllogism is either flawed or simply false. We've already seen that Premise 1 is no longer true, if indeed it ever was (see chapter 1). Premise 2 has been debunked by a number of analysts and for a number of different reasons.[47] Even if both premises were accurate, however, the conclusions don't necessarily follow; this is another example of confusing correlation with causation.

But in fact there is now empirical evidence, not just logic, to challenge the conclusions. Two researchers looked at TIMSS data from both 1994 and 1999 in order to be able to compare practices in 50 countries. 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. . . . More homework may actually undermine national achievement.[48]

In a separate analysis of the 1999 TIMSS results that looked at 27 U.S. states or districts as well as 37 other countries, meanwhile, "there was little relationship between the amount of homework assigned and students' performance."[49] And the overall conclusion was also supported by TIMSS data showing that "Japanese junior high school students performed at the top but did not study as much as their peers in other countries."[50]

8. Incidental research raises further doubts about homework. 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. Here are two examples:

First, a pair of Harvard scientists queried almost 2,000 students enrolled in college physics courses in order to figure out whether any features of their high school physics courses were now of use to them. 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. Once the researchers controlled for other variables, such as the type of courses kids had taken, that relationship disappeared. 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.[51]

Second, back in the late 1970s, New Jersey educator Ruth Tschudin identified about three hundred "A+ teachers" on the basis of recommendations, awards, or media coverage. She then set out to compare their classroom practices to those of a matched group of other teachers. Among her findings: the exceptional teachers not only tended to give less homework but also were likely to give students more choices about their assignments.

It's interesting to speculate on why this might be true. Are better teachers more apt to question the conventional wisdom in general? More likely to notice that homework isn't really doing much good? More responsive to its negative effects on children and families? More likely to summon the gumption to act on what they've noticed? 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."[52] (Imagine that quotation enlarged and posted in a school's main office.)

This analysis rings true for Steve Phelps, who teaches math at a high school near Cincinnati. "In all honesty," he says, "the students are compelled to be in my class for 48 minutes a day. If I can't get done in 48 minutes what I need to get done, then I really have no business intruding on their family time."[53] But figuring out how to get it done isn't always easy. 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. . . . But as I mastered the material, homework ceased to be necessary. A no-homework policy is a challenge to me," he adds. "I am forced to create lessons that are so good that no further drilling is required when the lessons are completed."

Lyons has also conducted an informal investigation to gauge the impact of this shift. He gave less and less homework each year before finally eliminating it completely. And he reports that

each year my students have performed better on the AP Economics test. The empirical data from my class combined with studies I've read convinced me. Homework is an obvious burden to students, but assigning, collecting, grading, and recording homework creates a tremendous amount of work for me as well. I would feel justified encroaching on students' free time and I'd be willing to do the grading if I saw tangible returns, but with no quantifiable benefit it makes no sense to impose on them or me.[54]

The results observed by a single teacher in an uncontrolled experiment are obviously not conclusive. Nor is the Harvard physics study. Nor is Tschudin's survey of terrific teachers. 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 goods.

People 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 faith.

It'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.[56]

Most 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." I've been arguing, in effect, that even that relatively moderate position is not supported by the evidence. I've been arguing that any gains we might conceivably identify are both minimal and far from universal, limited to certain ages and to certain (dubious) outcome measures. 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 learning.

But is there some other benefit, something other than academic learning, that might be cited in homework's defense? That will be the subject of the following chapter...

NOTES

For full citations, please see the reference section of The Homework Myth.

1. Cooper et al., p. 70.

2. This early study by Joseph Mayer Rice is cited in Gill and Schlossman 2004, p. 175.

3. Goldstein.

4. Austin.

5. Paschal et al.; Walberg et al.

6. Barber, p. 56. Two of the four studies reviewed by Paschal et al. found no benefit to homework at all. 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.

7. Jongsma, p. 703.

8. 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. Meta-analyses may be useful for combining multiple studies of, say, the efficacy of a blood pressure medication, but not necessarily studies dealing with different aspects of complex human behavior. Mark Lepper (1995), a research psychologist at Stanford University, has argued that "the purely statistical effect sizes used to compare studies in a meta-analysis completely and inappropriately ignore the crucial social context in which the conduct and interpretation of research in psychology takes place." The real-world significance of certain studies is lost, he maintains, when they are reduced to a common denominator. "The use of purely statistical measures of effect size" - overlooking what he calls the "psychological size of effects" - "promotes a[n] illusion of comparability and quantitative precision that is subtly but deeply at odds with the values that define what makes a study or a finding interesting or important." This concern would seem to apply in the case of distinctive investigations of homework. (Quotations from pp. 414, 415, 420.)

9. Cooper 1999a, 2001. 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 +.19.

10. Cooper et al. 2006.

11. Betts.

12. Hofferth and Sandberg, p. 306.

13. Cooper 1999a, p. 100. 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. But correlations between the two leave us unable to disentangle the two effects and determine which is stronger.

14. Cool and Keith. 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).

15. For example, see Chen and Stevenson; Epstein; Georgiou; Gorges and Elliott.

16. Epstein and Van Voorhis, pp. 183-84. Also see Walberg et al., pp. 76-77.

17. Muhlenbruck et al. In Cooper et al. 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. 80).

18. Cooper et al. 2006, p. 44.

19. Cooper et al. 2001, pp. 190-91.

20. Chen and Stevenson, p. 558.

21. "Several surveys have found that students consistently report their homework time to be higher than teachers' estimates" (Ziegler 1986, p. 21).

22. Ziegler 1992, p. 602. Cooper (1989a, 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.

23. Dressel, p. 6.

24. For a more detailed discussion about (and review of research regarding) the effects of grades, see Kohn 1999a, 1999b.

25. Cooper 1999a, p. 72. That difference shrank in the latest batch of studies (Cooper et al. 2006), but still trended in the same direction.

26. Cooper et al. 1998. The correlation was .17.

27. See Kohn 1999b, 2000, which includes analysis and research to support the claims made in the following paragraphs.

28. Nevertheless, Cooper criticizes studies that use only one of these measures and argues in favor of those, like his own, that make use of both (see Cooper et al. 1978, p. 71). The problems with tests and grades may be different, but they don't cancel each other out when the two variables are used at the same time.

29. Cooper 1989a, p. 99. 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., p. 41).

30. Cooper 1999a, p. 72; 2001, p. 16. The studies he reviewed lasted anywhere from two to thirty weeks.

31. Natriello and McDill. "An additional hour of homework each night results in an increase in English [grade point average] of 0.130" (p. 27).

32. Tymms and Fitz-Gibbon. Quotation appears on p. 8. If anything, this summary understates the actual findings. When individual students' scores on the English A-level exams were examined, those who worked for more than seven hours a week in a particular subject "tended to get a third of a grade better than students of the same gender and ability who worked less than [two hours] a week, and if students with similar prior achievement are considered, the advantage only amounted to about a fifth of a grade." 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. 7-8).

33. Barber, p. 55.

34. Cooper 1989a, p. 109. Why this might be true is open to interpretation. Cooper (2001, p. 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.

35. The unpublished study by C. Bents-Hill et al. is described in Cooper 2001, p. 26.

36. The four, in order, are Finstad; Townsend; Foyle; and Meloy.

37. 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. 2006, p. 43).

38. Cooper 1989a, p. 100. The correlations were .02, .07, and .25, respectively.

39. Baker and Letendre, p. 118.

40. For example, see any number of writings by Herbert Walberg. Another possible reason that "elementary achievement is high" in Japan: teachers there "are free from the pressure to teach to standardized tests" (Lewis, p. 201). Until they get to high school, there are no such tests in Japan.

41. See the table called "Average Mathematics Scores by Students' Report on Time Spent Daily on Mathematics Homework at Grades 4, 8, and 12: 2000," available from the National Center for Education Statistics at: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/mathematics/results/ homework.asp. As far as I can tell, no data on how 2004 NAEP math scores varied by homework completion have been published for nine- and thirteen-year-olds. Seventeen-year-olds were not asked to quantify the number of hours devoted to homework in 2004, but were asked whether they did homework "often," "sometimes," or "never" - and here more homework was correlated with higher scores (U.S. Department of Education 2005, p. 63).

42. In 2000, fourth graders who reported doing more than an hour of homework a night got exactly same score as those whose teachers assigned no homework at all. Those in the middle, who said they did 30-60 minutes a night, got slightly higher scores. (See http://nces.ed.gov/ nationsreportcard/reading/results/homework.asp). In 2004, those who weren't assigned any homework did about as well as those who got either less than one hour or one to two hours; students who were assigned more than two hours a night did worse than any of the other three groups. For older students, more homework was correlated with higher reading scores (U.S. Department of Education 2005, p. 50).

43. Ziegler 1992, p. 604.

44. Mullis et al. 1998, p. 114.

45. Chen and Stevenson, pp. 556-57.

46. Ibid., p. 551.

47. Even at a first pass, TIMSS results suggest that the U.S. does poorly in relative terms only at the high school level, not with respect to the performance of younger students. But TIMSS results really don't support the proposition that our seniors are inferior. That's true, first, because, at least on the science test, the scores among most of the countries are actually pretty similar in absolute terms (Gibbs and Fox, p. 87). Second, the participating countries "had such different patterns of participation and exclusion rates, school and student characteristics, and societal contexts that test score rankings are meaningless as an indicator of the quality of education" (Rotberg, p. 1031). Specifically, the students taking the test in many of the countries were older, richer, and drawn from a more selective pool than those in the U.S. Third, when one pair of researchers carefully reviewed half a dozen different international achievement surveys conducted from 1991 to 2001, they found that "U.S. students have generally performed above average in comparisons with students in other industrialized nations" (Boe and Shin; quotation appears on p. 694). Also see the many publications on this subject by Gerald Bracey.

48. Baker and Letendre, pp. 127-28, 130. Emphasis in original.

49. Mullis et al. 2001, chap. 6.

50. Tsuneyoshi, p. 375.

51. Sadler and Tai; personal communication with Phil Sadler, August 2005. The larger study also found that students who took Advanced Placement science courses - and did well on the test - didn't fare much better in college science courses than those who didn't take the A.P. classes at all.

52. Baker and Letendre, p. 126.

53. Phelps, personal communication, March 2006.

54. Lyons, personal communication, December 2005.

55. Quoted in Lambert.

56. This New Jersey principal is quoted in Winerip, p. 28.

Copyright © 2006 by Alfie Kohn. Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this chapter in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.

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Chapter 2 of (Da Capo Press, 2006) Copyright © 2006 by Alfie Kohn Because 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.

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SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. - Guess what, kids? No homework. Really. All year.

A small but growing number of elementary schools and individual teachers are doing away with the after-school chore to allow kids more time to play, participate in activities, spend time with families, read and sleep.

There's been pushback against homework from parents in recent years who say their children's time is monopolized by other activities, said Steven Geis, president of the National Elementary School Principals' Association.

At North Trail Elementary School, in Farmington, Minnesota, where he is principal, students do what he says is engaging homework.

Some schools and individual teachers are revising their homework policies to ensure that they are effective, he said.

At the Orchard School, a kindergarten-through-5th grade school in South Burlington, Vermont, the principal there said he's seen more anxiety among students in the last decade. The school opted to do away with homework this school year, based in part on the book "The Homework Myth."

"They're just kids. They're pretty young and they just put in a full day's shift at work and so we just don't believe in adding more to their day. We also feel that we are squashing their other passions and interest in learning," Principal Mark Trifilio said.

Alfie Kohn, the outspoken education lecturer and author of the book, "The Homework Myth," says homework is a case of all pain and no gain.

"The disadvantages of homework are clear to everyone: exhaustion, frustration, loss of time to pursue other interests and often diminution of interest in learning," he said. "Homework may be the greatest extinguisher of curiosity ever invented."

But Harris Cooper, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University, who has been studying the effects of homework for 30 years, disagrees.

He thinks all school children should be doing homework, but the amount and type should vary depending on age and developmental levels.

Cooper led research that reviewed more than 60 studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that homework had a positive effect on student achievement, but the positive correlation was much stronger for students in grades 7-12 than for those in elementary school.

He prescribes homework assignments that are short, simple and lead to success for elementary school kids, he said.

It teaches kids that they don't just learn in the classroom and helps turn them into lifelong learners while improving their sense of independence, and time management and study skills, Cooper said.

"Homework is like medicine. If you take too little, it does nothing. If you take too much, it can kill you," Cooper said. "You've got to get the dose right, and if you do, it can do wonders."

A lot of the backlash is a reaction to some teachers assigning too much homework, he said.

A guideline for many schools is 10 minutes of homework per grade: so 10 minutes in 1st grade, 20 minutes in 2nd grade and so on.

"We definitely don't say 'no homework' but we try to keep it reasonable," said Cherie Stobie, principal at the K-8 Marion school in Marion, Montana.

"The main benefit is just having the additional time to practice later in the day because research shows that if students practice, you know they take a break after they've learned something and they practice it again later, it's more likely to be retained," she said.

Noelle M. Ellerson, of AASA: The School Superintendents Association, said there has been a small but growing number of schools or teachers revising homework policies or talking about it "whether it's to do away with it or to shift to a policy where homework is the classwork they didn't finish during the day or where the homework of the child is to read with their parents."

At the Orchard School, the children's daily home assignment now is to read books, get outside and play, eat dinner with family - including helping with setting and cleaning up - and get a good night's sleep.

"It's awesome," 9-year-old Avery Cutroni said of the no-homework policy. She had dance and piano lessons after school recently, so said she had a busy schedule. Plus, she's reading more on her own, her mother said.

"I think it gives kids a lot time for mental and physical rest which I think is super important," said Heidi Cutroni, of the school's elimination of homework. "I think it's really good for parent-teacher-student relations in all directions and I think it just gives kids a chance to use their time for what their passionate and excited about."

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Marion Among Schools Nationwide Reducing Homework Load - Flathead Beacon

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SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. - Guess what, kids? No homework. Really. All year. A small but growing number of elementary schools and individual teachers are doing away with the after-school chore to allow kids more time to play, participate in activities, spend time with families, read and sleep.

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By Rachelle Dene Poth on TeachThought

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Thinking About Improving Homework by Rachelle Dene Poth
The end of the school year can be challenging with so many changes occurring: the weather, spring sports, weeks of standardized testing, field trips and other activities lead to oftentimes, chaotic schedules. These changes can decrease motivation in students and in some cases, teachers as well, and result in a feeling that the school year is over before it really is.

I notice this gradual transformation each year, and do my best to mix things up, to keep learning going, and to stay strong until the end. This year seemed to be a more challenging year, although I cannot pinpoint why, but as I mentioned in my prior post, I decided to do something about it. I made the decision to try some new methods, reevaluate how I have been doing things in my classroom, and what could I be doing better.

The last grading period has been a time to test out some new tools, give students new opportunities, more choices and be a little less structured, allowing for some spontaneity in our learning. So as part of my "staying strong till the finish", after mixing up the seating arrangements and receiving positive responses, I shifted my focus to a new area: Homework
What Is Homework, Anyway?
Recently I have been giving a lot of thought to homework. My focus has been on really looking at the types and the frequency of assignments I give. Over the past few years, I have changed my thinking and tried to move away from a "one size fits all" assignment and move toward a more personalized, authentic assignment. There have been several reasons for this change in thought.

Hearing from other educators at conferences, input from my students, and as a language teacher, also having to find ways to avoid student use of translators for assignments. These experiences, in addition to a little frustration from homework not being completed, have led me to really try some new methods in this area.

Some of the areas I considered when thinking about homework were: the types of assessments I use in my classroom, my students, the frequency of homework completion, the type of homework, and even more closely, a look at the individuals within each group of students that I am teaching. My goal is to continue to reflect on whether or not the type of instruction and the strategies I am using, are beneficial to them and if the homework I assign truly has value and builds their skills, or is it just busy work. A lot of the discussion out there now is about getting rid of homework assignments and traditional grading.
Why I Decided To Do Something Different
I have been teaching foreign languages for almost 20 years, and I notice how quickly time has passed, when I find myself teaching a concept and I feel like I just taught the same thing the day before. This "déjà vu" experience leads me to think about the progress I am making with the curriculum in the current school year, and how I have paced my instruction throughout the year. But what I have come to realize more this year than any other, is that it should not be the goal to be at the same point at the same time each year. In my mind, that simply should not be how it goes.

I think a lot of people consider teaching as a profession in which the same plans are used, lessons are taught at the same pace, the same assignments and tests are given each year. If we truly did that, then the profession of teaching would seem to be a rather easy and predictable one. However, that is not the way it is.

I had a conversation with someone that thought teachers simply used the same exact materials each year, with each class, and that teaching was a really easy profession. This conversation bothered me, and the last part about it being "easy" really hit me. So this inspired me to think about my teaching practice. What materials I was I using in class? How was I providing instruction for my students and was I using the same resources each year with each class? Had I been doing the same thing in my classroom every year? Did I simply pull out a folder to make copies or open up a computer to reprint what I had used each of the 19 years prior to this one?

Honestly, sometimes yes. I had. I had used the same worksheet, or a document for a part of a test over the years. I hadn't done this because I was lazy. In some cases it was for providing a quick activity or assessment, and others it was because I thought the materials were valuable and would help the students to learn.
Thinking About Homework In Your Classroom
Ask yourself these same questions. What do you come up with? If you have been doing the same thing, then maybe it is time to make a few changes. Think about what would work best for and help your students. This means more than just looking at each individual class, it means really looking at the needs of each individual student. To do this requires that we get to know our students, and to know our students means we have to build relationships and understand where they're coming from and what they're interested in doing in class.

What helps them to learn the best? What do they want and need from us? So I decided to use this as an opportunity to take a bit of a risk and try some new methods during this final grading period. It made sense because then I could really think about it over the summer and start fresh in the fall.
The first homework experiment
Students have a lot of homework and I do believe in the value of homework. It is the way we help students to practice and figure out what they know and what they don't know and how they can become better. It is one of many ways teachers can assess students and learn about their needs, provide instruction and valuable feedback. But I've changed my thinking about homework. I used to think that I had to give students homework every day. And I also thought that homework had to be the same for each student and each class. In part, my methods were a result of the experience I had as a high school student. I decided to change the daily homework assignments and make things more personal, let the students determine for themselves what they could do for homework, and have choices.

Just as a start, I assigned each student to be the teacher for the next class period. With a partner for example, we are working on the past tense in Spanish and in pairs, I let the students decide which verb tense they would like to teach their partner. The homework was to simply come to class the next day with a way to teach their partner the verbs. I said it could be something tangible in the form of a worksheet or any activity that they found, a website, a video, a game, or another resource. It really did not matter to me as long as whatever they had they could use in class and they could teach.

I believed that in the process the students would learn more and also develop collaborative learning skills.
What Did The Students Think?
While they taught, I moved around to interact with each group to see what it was they had prepared. There were worksheets found online, worksheets that students created, handwritten pages of notes, flashcards, some had found websites with games and others had found videos or had created a Kahoot or Quizizz game for their partner to play. But what was most important was that they sought out resources, they had an opportunity to teach someone else and their homework was personalized not only for them, but also for other students. It went well and they were enjoying it and learning.

I will admit that I was nervous about doing this. Not requiring a specific form or product for each student to show in class, and being open to any format the students brought in, was very different. It was a risk. But I was amazed at how creative they were, how engaged each group was, and the variety of "homework" that had been done.

Student feedback is very important for me and I value their input and regularly engage them in informal conversations or will have them complete a survey. I want to know their thoughts. What did they like? What did they not like? Did they learn? Was this an effective way to practice the material we were covering in class? We spent two days doing this first assignment, so each person could teach. And then I had them switch groups, and teach again. The end result was that students were teachers, the learning was personal, they were engaged, felt valued, and the experience was meaningful and beneficial to their learning.

It is a risk and when you don't necessarily have the whole plan set out, and you just kind of go with it, you might be surprised at the results. Giving the students control, seeing their interactions, and knowing that this homework was the type that was beneficial to each of them, encouraged me to continue to find new ways to give more classroom control to the students. Giving up some control is not always easy, but in doing this, it opens up more opportunities for facilitating learning, providing individualized instruction and building those relationships which are the foundation of education.

More than anything else, this kind of thinking opens up new learning opportunities.
Thinking About Improving Homework; adapted image attribution flickr user skokienorthshoresculpturepark

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Thinking About Improving Homework by Rachelle Dene Poth The end of the school year can be challenging with so many changes occurring: the weather, spring sports, weeks of standardized testing, field trips and other activities lead to oftentimes, chaotic schedules. These changes can decrease motivation in students and in some cases, teachers as well, and ...

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Ideas for alternatives to traditional homework

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It's 2017... maybe it's time to rethink some of the things we have been doing for the past 40 years?

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The Atlantic

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Education experts offer their thoughts on how-if at all-schools should assign, grade, and use take-home assignments.

Guillermo del Olmo / Africa Studio / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

This is the third installment in our series about school in a perfect world. Read previous entries on calendars and content.

We asked prominent voices in education-from policy makers and teachers to activists and parents-to look beyond laws, politics, and funding and imagine a utopian system of learning. They went back to the drawing board-and the chalkboard-to build an educational Garden of Eden. We're publishing their answers to one question each day this week. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Today's assignment: The Homework. Will students have homework?

Imagining the ideal school system
Read more

Homework is absolutely necessary for students to demonstrate that they are able to independently process and apply their learning. But who says homework has to be the same as it has been? Homework might include pre-reading in preparation for what will be covered in class that day, independent research on a student-chosen topic that complements the class curriculum, experiential learning through a volunteer activity or field trip, or visiting a website and accomplishing a task on it. The structure will be left to the teachers to determine, as best fits the learning objective, and should be graded-whether by the teacher or student. Students will be held accountable for their homework and understand that it is an integral part of the learning process.

Homework provides an opportunity for families to be engaged in the learning process, reinforces what has been taught during the school day, and provides students with an opportunity to learn how to be accountable and responsible to others and meet deadlines. Homework will not be graded, but will provide the class an opportunity to work together either as a large or small group to promote peer-to-peer learning while analyzing the assignment. Incentives that are student-specific will be used to encourage preparedness. If a student has mastered a topic, then he or she will be given an assignment that challenges them toward the next level of that work. The structure of homework will depend on the topic. Some assignments might require students to report on real-world observations, try at-home experiments, or allow them to develop ways that will each student best learn the information.

Related Stories

Students will have work that may be done in school or at home. We will cease seeing things as just "homework." The goal of work is to help students build mastery of knowledge and skills that can be applied in different contexts. Students will do as much or as little of certain tasks until they have built mastery. For some students, that will take place at home. Others will do most of their work surrounded by their peers and teachers at school. We will move beyond the notion of letter grades, where we accept failure as part of the system, to a competency-based notion in which students either master a competency or keep working until they do.

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Education experts offer their thoughts on how-if at all-schools should assign, grade, and use take-home assignments. This is the third installment in our series about school in a perfect world. Read previous entries on calendars and content.

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10 reasons to Get Rid of HW, 5 Alternatives

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10 reasons to Get Rid of HW, 5 Alternatives

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John Spencer @spencerideas

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Effect of homework on elementary students

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Effect of homework on elementary students

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As parents, one of your main responsibilities is to make sure that your kids are prepared for the real world, and that they are going to be responsible adults. In today's world, this can be more challenging than ever, but it certainly isn't impossible.

In fact, there are many life skills you can teach your kids to help them become responsible members of society, not to mention being happy and productive adults, and below I have outlined several tips that will help teach your kids how to be responsible and productive adults.

1. Teach Navigation Skills

Having one's driver's license doesn't mean that one has navigation skills. In addition to helping them learn how to drive, teach them how to navigate.

They need to understand how to use a GPS system as well as a map, how to navigate through rush hour traffic, both in the city and on the highway, and other skills they won't learn in Driver's Ed. Of course, they also need to learn how to be patient in traffic and learn defensive driving skills.

2. Encourage Them To Get A Job

Just because your teen does well in school, it doesn't mean that they are ready for the workforce. School teaches them academics.

You need to make sure that they know what it is to hold down a job.

Encourage them to take on summer and after-school jobs, so they will learn about the responsibility of a paying job, and how to deal with others, how to deal with conflict, and how to conduct themselves appropriately in any situation,

3. Teach Goal Setting

Everyone has goals, but not all goals are realistic ones. Teens in particular tend to have impractical goals-becoming famous, rich or popular, especially with what they see in social media these days-and it is your job to show them how to set realistic ones, and how to achieve those.

Talk to your teen about what they want to achieve both long-term and short-term. There are many studies about the relationship of goal setting in maintaining happiness in one's life. Every time you experience reward by achieving your goals, dopamine is released which is responsible for feelings of motivation.

4. Help Them Control Emotions

We all have our moments when it is difficult to deal with our emotions. It could be a conflict at work, relationship issues, or other situations that require tact. But, over time, we learn how to keep things in check for the most part. This is something that many teens have trouble with, since they are dealing with school work, teachers, peer pressure, and their home lives, but you can help.

Teach them how to deal with their emotions in a healthy manner, such as through sports, music, or arts and crafts . This also helps in encouraging patience. Even leading personal trainers for athletes would say that controlling emotions is very crucial. The more they are able to stay in control, the more confidence they will have (and you as well) for when tougher situations happen.

5. Teach Coping Skills for Emergencies

Once your kids are on their own, they are going to need coping skills to help them deal with emergencies. It could be as simple as a fire in a frying pan, an automotive breakdown, or even a leaky pipe in the kitchen.

You need to take the time to teach them about any number of little emergencies that can happen, and how to deal with them appropriately. They also need to learn how to cope without their mobile devices. These things may not always be available when they need them.

6. Involve in Household Management

If your teenager has a messy room, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to be sloppy housekeepers in their own home. But, it is a good sign that they need to learn more about household management skills, such as budgeting, cleaning, scheduling appointments, and more.

They are likely going to have roommates, either in a dormitory or in an apartment, and if they don't have these life skills, they are going to have problems with anyone they live with.

7. Close Your Wallet

Stop giving your teen money every time they ask for it. The more you give them, the less you teach them.

One of the most important life skills for anyone is how to handle their finances. If your teen is working, have them save a portion of their paycheck each week and put it right into a savings account.

Even better, encourage them to invest now in a retirement savings plan. It's never too early to plan for the future. Not only will this teach them about financial responsibility, they will also have some extra cash when they really need it.

8. Encourage Healthy Eating Habits

A lot of today's teens do not have healthy habits. They sit with their mobile devices all day long without getting much exercise, and they don't eat properly. .

No matter what you are cooking at home, they are bound to be eating junk food when you are not around. A personal trainer once told me, "It is a good idea to take them to see a nutritionist, who can help get their diets on the right track, and teach them about healthy eating that is right for their body types." The important bit here is matching a healthy diet to your kid's body type and day to day activities.

9. Teach "You Did It, You Fix It"

A lot of parents make the mistake of trying to fix all of their kids' problems. While this may be okay when they are very young, they must learn to deal with their own problems, especially the problems that they create themselves.

If your kids are in situations that they can handle, such as an argument with a friend or a conflict with a teacher, don't help them. Let them handle it on their own, instead, teach them problem-solving skills and become they're "guide" so they learn from the experience.

10. Stop Bailing Them Out

This goes hand in hand with teaching them about taking responsibility. If your teen gets into trouble, be it a conflict at school or with a sibling, don't run to their rescue, at least not right away.

Yes, they may end up needing your help, but let them try and figure out how to take responsibility for their own actions. You won't always be around to bail them out.

11. Give Them Problems To Solve

Your job isn't to make life easy for your teen. Your job is to teach them how to get along in the real world as an adult. So, don't solve their problems for them.

Give them situations where they will have to think for themselves, and see what they are able to do. They may surprise you, and themselves, given the opportunity to solve their own problems.

12. Teach Them To Stand Up For Themselves

Obviously, you are not teaching your kids to be fighters. But, you should be helping them learn how to negotiate in a conflict. Getting angry and throwing temper tantrums isn't going to help them in any way, and I'm sure we've all learned this the hard way as parents.

Teach them the skills they need to stay calm in any situation, such as counting to 10 before losing their temper, learning how to walk away from a conflict, and helping them recognize their emotions and be able to deal with those emotions during conflicts.

13. Teach Them How To Pay it Forward

Not only do we need to take care of ourselves, we need to have compassion for the world around us.

There are several ways that you can teach your teen how to contribute to this world. Get them to volunteer at a local animal shelter or food bank.

You never know. They may love these things so much that it could lead to a career in helping others.

14. Encourage Them to Trust Themselves

Schools teach kids how to follow rules, but not about real life skills. You need to teach them that while they need to take instructions, they also need to be independent thinkers.

Help your teens learn how to trust in themselves and their decisions. Sure, there will be a few bad decisions made, but they will learn from their mistakes, and learn how to make better decisions.

15. Explain the Household Budget

You can talk to kids until you are blue in the face about how to budget, but unless they actually see good budgeting skills in action, they will have difficulty understanding how to do it themselves.

Talk to them about various household expenses, such as electricity and other utility bills, grocery expenses, and maintaining a vehicle. Show them your household income, and where every bit of it goes. Let them help with the budgeting so they will know what to do when they are on their own.

16. Get Them a Credit Card

Give your teen their own credit card.

Yes, you read that right.

This is one of the best ways to teach fiscal responsibility. If they run up the card and have no credit left, don't pay it off for them. Let them figure out how to pay it off and use it responsibly. The earlier they learn about responsibility with credit cards, the better.

17. Set a Shining Example

If you are doing none of the above things yourself, how can you expect your teen to become a responsible adult?

You are their best example, so put your best foot forward. Get the bills paid on time. Keep the house clean. Go to work every day. When kids have a great example like you, they are going to have a great head start on their future.

We Play A Major Role

In order to prepare teens for adulthood, you, as a parent, need to teach them important life skills that will help them to become productive adults.

Keep an open dialog with your kids, and let them know that they can come to you to get answers; and, if they need help with developing any of the skills that you are trying to teach them. If you work together, you can do it. Keep an open communication with them, and if they have problems, listen, and come up with ways to work through those problems together.

Featured photo credit: Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash via unsplash.com

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Research Finds The Effects Of Homework On Elementary School Students, And The Results Are Surprising

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As parents, one of your main responsibilities is to make sure that your kids are prepared for the real world, and that they are going to be responsible adults. In today's world, this can be more challenging than ever, but it certainly isn't impossible.

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When Kyle Schwartz started teaching third grade at Doull Elementary School in Denver, she wanted to get to know her students better. She asked them to finish the sentence "I wish my teacher knew."

The responses were eye-opening for Ms. Schwartz. Some children were struggling with poverty ("I wish my teacher knew I don't have pencils at home to do my homework"); an absent parent ("I wish my teacher knew that sometimes my reading log is not signed because my mom isn't around a lot"); and a parent taken away ("I wish my teacher knew how much I miss my dad because he got deported to Mexico when I was 3 years old and I haven't seen him in six years").

The lesson spurred Ms. Schwartz, now entering her fifth teaching year, to really understand what her students were facing outside the classroom to help them succeed at school. When she shared the lesson last year with others, it became a sensation, with the Twitter hashtag "#iwishmyteacherknew" going viral. Other teachers tried the exercise and had similar insights. Many sent her their students' responses.

In her recently published book, " I Wish My Teacher Knew: How One Question Can Change Everything For Our Kids," Ms. Schwartz details how essential it is for teachers and families to be partners.

"I really want families to know how intentional teachers are about creating a sense of community and creating relationships with kids," Ms. Schwartz said. "Kids don't learn when they don't feel safe or valued."

Melody Molinoff of Washington, D.C., who has two sons, ages 9 and 11, in the public school system, agreed.

"Parents see the teacher as their partner in bringing up their child, and that's a huge responsibility that we are putting on our teachers and our schools," Ms. Molinoff said. "I always want my sons' teachers to know what their challenges are, what they like, just more about them."

Mary Clayman, a fourth-grade teacher in the Washington public schools, said she has noticed the same thing from the other side of the desk.

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When Kyle Schwartz started teaching third grade at Doull Elementary School in Denver, she wanted to get to know her students better. She asked them to finish the sentence "I wish my teacher knew." The responses were eye-opening for Ms. Schwartz.

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By Anabel Gonzalez

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What should we do when students aren't turning in their homework? Should we just enter a zero in
the grade book and move on?

Mark Barnes (@markbarnes19) recently published " 5 Reasons Homework Destroys Learning". Reading his post caused me to ponder on the many conversations I have with my kids at school and my kids at home about homework. I will tell you upfront that I do not believe we should abolish the practice, but I do feel very strongly as both an educator and as a parent that we need to be more intentional and purposeful with homework assignments and we must personalize and differentiate as we do with classroom work.

My kids at school are middle and high school ELLs. Many of them find homework to be overwhelming, primarily due to their limited English proficiency coupled with a lack of available help at home. And rather than asking for help from teachers or peers, they simply throw in the towel. Long term ELLs are notorious for this, more so than newcomers. Recent immigrants naturally become utterly frustrated with their language barriers, but their language needs are more obvious and their work is significantly modified. Conversely, long-term ELLs' language deficiencies are much more disguised - not only to their teachers but also to themselves. They have mastered social English, but still have academic language gaps which cause them to stumble in their classes. And so it generally goes like this. They are challenged and confused, feeling incompetent and not comfortable soliciting help because they think they should be performing as well as their classmates. After all, they speak as fluently as their native English-speaking peers. And so, their grade book begins to accumulate zeros for unsubmitted work. Most my students are eligible for extra time but if teachers are unaware of their struggles, their actions are interpreted as apathy or laziness.

I have two kids at home; my son is 10 and my daughter is 12. Both are assigned reasonable amounts of homework on a regular basis. In the last few months, I've been getting weekly emails from my son's teacher about math homework not being turned in. Math homework assignments are not lengthy and the word problems are relevant real-world scenarios, but they are generally a stretch. Some are completed on the computer, but most of them are worksheets. Although they have usually been within his reach, he always finds them grueling and procrastinates tremendously on getting started. Unlike my kids at school, my son is not an ELL. He happens to be identified as academically and intellectually gifted (AIG) and math is his strongest subject. However, he has also been diagnosed with ADHD and by late afternoon, the effects of his medicine have worn off. To say that homework time is challenging is a profound understatement. Fortunately for him, he has college-educated parents who are proficient in English and lots of help at home. But sometimes, just like my kids at school, he throws in the towel instead of asking for help. By contrast, my middle schooler is not AIG but is quite the overachiever. She's is much more compliant about doing her work and meeting deadlines, but she's also very quick to ask for help. When facing a difficult task, she has no qualms about seeking help from me as well as her teachers and, therefore, homework is uneventful.

Webster's simple definitions of homework include (1) "work that a student is given to do at home" or (2) "research or reading done in order to prepare for something." If students are assigned homework that is unable to be completed without (or with minimal) help, one could argue it is not good homework, has no academic benefit. But let's not throw in the towel ourselves. Homework can be beneficial so long as we find a way for it to be.

Here are some points to consider when assigning homework:

1. Know Your Students
With increasing class sizes, personalizing homework may be a daunting task. However, we don't teach curriculum we teach students and it's crucial to know our target in order to reach it. From special education to English language learners to attention issues, it's important to know about any special needs or situations, which may be camouflaged. Apathy and defiance are often a cover for underlying issues.

2. Offer Choice
One size does not fit all. Letting students choose their homework produces ownership. From tools to materials to formats, give students control over how they will practice their skills. Bottom line, if kids are not buying in, they're not doing the work and therefore, nothing is really getting accomplished.

3. Flip Lessons
If homework, as Webster's definition suggests, is preparation for something then by all means, ask them to read ahead or watch a videotaped lecture. However, be sure to provide a scaffold for their notetaking. All students could benefit from this, but especially diverse learners and special education students.
4. Be Flexible
Some kids will need chunks of daily work while others can be given a list of tasks due at the end of the week. Others may need a little flexibility and grace. Bottom line, grades should reflect learning. A zero for missed work or a low score because of a late submission tells nothing about what they have acquired. Quite the contrary and the message to the student is that it's all about a grade, not about learning.

5. Ask Questions
Homework should be about extra practice or preparation and if they aren't doing the work, neither is happening. We all have those students that can ace the class without ever doing a bit of homework, but that's not the norm. If a student is not submitting assignments, pull him or her aside and investigate what's keeping them from submitting work and let them know you are available to help. Encourage students to be open and honest when they can't assimilate the material. If they are not comfortable expressing themselves in class, perhaps they can stay after school, email questions or meet virtually via a video conference tool or a shared Google document if such technology is available.

Let's not let homework become one more obstacle in our relationship with our students. Homework or any other assignment for that matter should be about their growth and improvement, not our pride and accomplishment. It must be perceived by students as purposeful and doable, but we must also keep communication lines open so that learners can feel comfortable approaching others when they don't understand a task, not fearing they will be ridiculed or penalized.

Most importantly, homework must never make a student feel defeated. If homework is knocking learners down without a way to help them back up, it's time to rethink the practice.

#BestYearEver

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What should we do when students aren't turning in their homework? Should we just enter a zero in the grade book and move on? Mark Barnes (@markbarnes19) recently published " 5 Reasons Homework Destroys Learning". Reading his post caused me to ponder on the many conversations I have with my kids at school and my kids at home about homework.

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Arizona Daily Star

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But that's a thing of the past, at least for the Tucson mom's fourth-grader who attends a school that has abandoned homework in an effort to give families more quality time and to change the way children feel about their educational experience.

Foskey's daughter attends Picture Rocks Elementary School, a Marana campus that serves more than 600 students in grades K-6. This is the second year the school has tried the no-homework approach and it is receiving rave reviews from families who struggle to balance work, after school activities and dinner time in a span of a few hours.

"I was so relieved and happy when the school decided to do this," said Foskey who in addition to parenting four children, holds down a part-time job and is a part-time student. "When I tell others, they're in disbelief."

At a time when demands are high on students to meet more rigorous standards, families report spending hours completing homework, something that University of Arizona professor Etta Kralovec says is unnecessary.

Kralovec, associate professor of teacher education and author of "The End of Homework," began researching the impact of homework on children 20 years ago after a case study she conducted on high school dropouts in Maine found that homework contributed to students' feelings on why they were pushed out of school.

"I was stunned by that finding because I never heard about homework contributing to kids dropping out," said Kralovec, who reported to the state of Maine that it seemed like homework was pushing out children in poverty.

Kralovec recalls having a great relationship with her own son when he entered middle school, except for when it came to homework, prompting her to look into the subject even further.

"At that point is when I realized the lack of really solid research saying that the pain of homework is overcome by the academic achievement it fosters," Kralovec said. "Now we know that's not true and for so many parents, the pain of homework is just that: pain with no payoff."

For the principal of Picture Rocks Elementary, her experience with her own children is also what prompted Tawnya Caldwell to explore the no-homework policy for her school.

"I was a working mom and my husband worked and I hated the battles at the dinner table, after dinner, trying to get the homework done," she said. "I felt like I was filling out worksheets that meant nothing and it was taking time away from my family and creating a battle between me and my children that I didn't like."

When she became principal of Desert Winds K-3 School, which merged with Picture Rocks this year, she was determined to start the conversation with her staff about no longer assigning homework.

That conversation started three years ago and it was met with resistance from some teachers who felt like homework was instilling responsibility in students, Caldwell said.

But at a school where 80 percent of children qualify for free or reduced lunch - an indicator of poverty - Caldwell found that only half of students were completing homework. The other half was forced to come to school and explain that they hadn't finish the assignments, sometimes because they didn't have anyone at home to help or because their parents weren't capable of helping them.

"That doesn't help a child's self esteem or how they feel about school," Caldwell said.

Caldwell also shared research with her staff that found that quality time with family and having time to explore individual interests makes for a more well-rounded child than filling out a worksheet does.

What the staff ultimately agreed on was to encourage families to read together every night and if students do not finish work in class, they take it home. The school also caters to a small number of parents who feel strongly about homework, sending packets home when requested.

While it's too soon to say what kind of impact the decision is having on academic achievement, Caldwell is hopeful that eliminating the stress of homework will enhance students' attitudes about school and that will translate into success.

The Marana School District is also watching to see how the no-homework policy plays out to see whether it could be adopted at other campuses, said spokeswoman Tamara Crawley.

Already, the math department at Mountain View High School has decided to stop requiring homework. Instead, it sends home practice problems that students can complete but it is not collected or graded.

With a middle-schooler and a high school freshman at home, Foskey hopes that the no-homework trend spreads.

When her son attended Picture Rocks last year - the first year the no homework policy was fully in place - she felt he performed better academically than he had in years past. Since he's moved on to seventh grade at another campus the weight of homework is back and she's not convinced it is helping.

Instead, she'd like to see teachers take more time to ensure that students fully understand the concepts being taught, like what is happening at Picture Rocks. Kralovec also advocates for that method.

"Really, homework is a black hole," Kralovec said. "It goes home and the parents don't really know the subject matter, especially as kids get older.

"As teachers are held accountable for higher standards and as students are held accountable for higher standards, we need to tighten up the learning process so it's all done under the direction of a well-prepared teacher."

Across town in Vail, Leah Vigileos, dreams about the day her second-grader doesn't come home with pages of work to be done, but homework is viewed as beneficial in the Vail School District, which has been named one of the top performing districts in the state.

Rather than fight with her 7-year-old, Vigileos recently let the teacher know she would be limiting how much homework her son does.

"I'm not on homework strike, although I would love to be, but I won't jeopardize my son's grades," Vigileos said. "I've talked to the teacher and I told her 'I'm not going to turn it into a power struggle every day, I will focus on spelling and getting done as much as we can throughout the week' and she said it was fine, she doesn't want it to be a huge struggle."

While homework is valued in Vail, that kind of collaboration is what the district preaches, said Superintendent Calvin Baker.

"Homework is an issue that defies a solution by an edict from the district office," Baker said. "There are so many variables, it depends so much on the subject matter, the grade level, and the student, so we strongly encourage parents to work directly with the teacher and, if necessary, the principal and try to come up with solutions for their child."

Baker added, however, that many academic skills are in some ways like athletic skills that need to be practiced in and outside of the classroom.

"There should not be too much stress but some stress is appropriate," Baker said. "We are preparing our students to be adults in a highly competitive world and I don't know many adults who live a stress-free life. We all have challenges we have to deal with, so part of what we do is we help students learn how to deal with challenges."

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This Tucson school has abandoned homework, here's why

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But that's a thing of the past, at least for the Tucson mom's fourth-grader who attends a school that has abandoned homework in an effort to give families more quality time and to change the way children feel about their educational experience.

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Great resources here!

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Why Parents Shouldn't Make Kids Do Homework

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Why Parents Shouldn't Make Kids Do Homework

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Time magazine

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Why Parents Should Not Make Kids Do Homework

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I have students practice instead of giving homework. They track their progress on standards to know what they need to practice. This is my sheet for tracking, goals and reflection.

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Going over math homework a better way.

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Making the Most of Going over Homework - National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

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Reconsider typical discourse strategies when discussing homework and move toward a system that promotes the Standards for Mathematical Practice.

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Alfie Kohn writes about what a new homework study really says - and what it doesn't say. He is the author of 12 books about education and human behavior, including "The Schools Our Children Deserve," "The Homework Myth," and "Feel-Bad Education... And Other Contrarian Essays on Children & Schooling." He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org.

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.
NOTES
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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A 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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The impact is slightly above average.

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* An effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to a one grade leap at GCSE

* An effect size of 1.0 is equivalent to a two grade leap at GCSE

* 'Number of effects is the number of effect sizes from well designed studies that have been averaged to produce the average effect size.

* An effect size above 0.4 is above average for educational research

The effect sizes are averaged, and are a synthesis of research studies thought to be well designed and implemented by research reviewers. Hence they are the best guess we have about what has the greatest effect on student achievement.

Some effect sizes are 'Russian Dolls' containing more than one strategy e.g. 'Direct instruction' is a strategy that includes active learning, structured reviews after one hour, five hours and 20 hours study. There is also immediate feedback for the learners, and some corrective work if this is necessary.

Hattie does not define most of the terms in his table. My understanding of them is:

Feedback Hattie has made clear that 'feedback' includes telling students what they have done well (positive reinforcement), and what they need to do to improve (corrective work, targets etc), but it also includes clarifying goals. This means that giving students assessment criteria for example would be included in 'feedback'. This may seem odd, but high quality feedback is always given against explicit criteria, and so these would be included in 'feedback' experiments.

As well as feedback on the task Hattie believes that students can get feedback on the processes they have used to complete the task, and on their ability to self-regulate their own learning. All these have the capacity to increase achievement. Feedback on the 'self' such as 'well done you are good at this' is not helpful. The feedback must be informative rather than evaluative.

Students prior cognitive ability: This is IQ and similar measures

Acceleration I think this is very bright students being put forward a year in schools

Mastery learning A system of tests and retests of easy material with a high pass mark, if a student does not pass they must do extra work and then take a retest on the material they were weak at. See Teaching Today by Geoffrey Petty.

Questioning Students being questioned. The most effective questions are high order 'why?' 'how?" and 'which is best?' questions that really make students think . They need to be given time to think too, and can do better if they work in pairs than work alone.

Testing Testing by itself is not as effective as remediation/feedback where the test is used to find what the student needs to improve and they then do corrective work.

Effect sizes Below 0.4, some of these add a lot of value in a short time so don't ignore them...

Advance organizers A summary of the material in advance that puts some sort of structure to it. This can take a matter of moments and is best referred back to often.

Computer-assisted instruction Effect sizes for this are gradually rising as the instruction becomes more interactive, more engaging and generally better designed.

Instructional media Using state of the art visuals, videos, etc

Affective attributes of students The attitudes, beliefs and feelings of students

Programmed instruction A form of instruction that involves students being taught by a computer or set of workbooks, by doing a series of prescribed tasks. If the student gets an answer wrong they are directed back to correct their misunderstanding. Devised by Skinner in the 1960s, but not much used now.

Individualisation Students working on an individualised programme of learning. This may work better if students are not working in a solitary way.

Behavioural objectives Having and using objectives in the form: "The students should be able to..." immediately followed by an observable verb. For example 'explain' is okay because you can listen to, or read the student's explanation. However 'understand' isn't behavioural because you can't see or read the understanding.

Retention Students who do not do well enough in one school year, being kept back to do the year again.
Beware Over-interpretation!

Surface learning (e.g. rote remembering without understanding) could produce high effect sizes short term for low cognitive skills such as remembering. For example the use of mnemonics has an effect size of about 0.8 (There is more to learning than passing memory tests.)

Most of the research was done in schools, though Hattie says effect sizes are remarkably stable and not much influenced by age

Some high-effect strategies are 'Russian Dolls' with other strategies 'inside'.

Some low effect sizes are not very time consuming and well worth trying for their additive effect.

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Professor John Hattie's Table of Effect Sizes - The Teachers Toolbox

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An effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to a one grade leap at GCSE * An effect size of 1.0 is equivalent to a two grade leap at GCSE * 'Number of effects is the number of effect sizes from well designed studies that have been averaged to produce the average effect size.

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Ban homework -- It doesn't help little kids learn

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Ban homework -- It doesn't help little kids learn

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If you look at correlation studies, with a meta-analysis of 180 different research studies, on the impact that doing homework has, they find that it's very age dependent. At high school it can help. In middle school it can help a tiny bit. In elementary school there was zero correlation between the time kids spend on homework and academic achievement.

People will usually say, It's to develop responsibility, or good habits so when they get to high school they'll be ready. But if you look at a five-year-old or an eight-year-old or a 10-year-old they have other things they need to focus on now: Running around outside, making faces as their sister, learning family chores, learning how to cut up a carrot.... And kids need a break. It has the effect of turning kids away from school, diminishing joy of learning, creating negative attitudes.

If homework and school and learning get a bad rap at five or six, you've got years ahead of you - it's a disaster in the making.
Yeah, you're not gonna have good associations with school when you're older if it's unpleasant when you're young.
And pleasure reading is so important... and keeping it pleasurable. Some schools have substituted reading for homework.
You argue that books, and stories with unpleasant elements, are valuable for kids. "Don't Remove Ogres From Books" is one of your chapter titles. Don't these frighten kids, make them anxious, fearful? Why is it important to expose children to these?
It's not just the frightening moments, it's the sad, sorrowful moments. When it comes to fear, and sorrow, and anger, these are all the difficult moments we wish would go away. We don't want our kids to be scared, we especially don't want our boys to be scared. Those are feelings that are uncomfortable for adults, so we often like to push them aside.

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Ban homework: It doesn't help little kids learn-and it ruins their love of school

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If you look at correlation studies, with a meta-analysis of 180 different research studies, on the impact that doing homework has, they find that it's very age dependent. At high school it can help. In middle school it can help a tiny bit.

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What happened when my school ended useless homework

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What happened when my school ended useless homework

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(iStockphoto)

Anyone who closely follows the debate about the value of homework at different grades knows about a famous meta-analysis of previous research on the subject, published in 2006 by researcher Harris Cooper and colleagues, which found that homework in elementary school does not contribute to academic achievement. You might think that educators would have taken that to heart, but because research rarely informs educational policy, it didn't.

Today, children in preschool - that's 3- and 4-year-olds - routinely get homework in the form of dull worksheets. A February 2016 report on New York City's pre-kindergarten program reported this:

Out-of-school enrichment activities was another way pre-K programs engage parents in children's learning at home. Homework most often consisted of worksheet packets and reading with the child or instructions to practice with children what they are learning at school. Parents in the focus groups voiced strong opinions about homework, with some favoring it and others feeling it was not age-appropriate for preschoolers to have homework; some felt their children had too little and others too much. On the positive side, parents enjoyed engaging with their children and saw homework as a window into what they were learning at school.

On the other hand, some parents felt their children had too much homework and preferred their children to spend more time at play. Most felt the daily requirement of reading a book to the child was important and key to their child's reading and vocabulary progress. One parent pointed out that some of the content of the homework is beyond the child's knowledge so parents are almost "required" to teach it at home. To encourage children to enjoy reading, one center loans each child a book every week that parents are expected to read with their child.

In Cambridge, Mass., one principal faced the homework issue and did something about it. She is Katie Charner-Laird, principal of Cambridgeport School, which educates students from what it calls "junior kindergarten" through fifth grade. Charner-Laird is a progressive educator who wrote the following piece about what happened when she led her team to reevaluate homework and whether it was important to assign. This appeared on the website of the nonprofit organization National Association for the Education of Young Children, and I am republishing it with permission.

By Katie Charner-Laird

In 2014, I found myself in one too many meetings with discontent parents talking about homework. Some parents felt the homework was not meaningful. Others were upset because they felt there was not enough feedback from teachers. Still, other parents wanted teachers to be individualizing homework more. In each of these meetings, it became uncomfortably clear that I really didn't know what was happening across the school with regards to homework.

By the end of that year, I had made one firm commitment both to myself and to several parents. We would spend some time as a staff, before the next school year started, articulating our beliefs and approach to homework, and develop what some might call a homework policy.

Over that summer, I read a number of articles about how we have to get better at homework, the argument being that homework is a problem for children and families because it is tedious and doesn't ask children to think critically and creatively. While I didn't completely disagree with these articles, I also didn't find a strong rationale for why we give homework or how much homework we should be giving.

I had heard of Alfie Kohn's book, "The Homework Myth," but in truth, I was avoiding reading it. As a former teacher, I had always felt that homework was a critical part of children learning organizational skills and responsibility and a way to practice newly developed skills. Moreover, the idea of getting rid of homework seemed a bit too unconventional. But when I finally did pick up "The Homework Myth," I couldn't put it down. One by one, my reasons for considering homework an essential part of the elementary school experience were dismantled.

Homework: An unnecessary evil? Surprising findings from research, by Alfie Kohn

Time management and organizational skills: Kohn points out that rather than teaching time management to students, homework actually requires parents to do more to organize children's time.

Newly learned skills: Kohn argues that it is rare that all students need the same practice at the end of a lesson. For some, additional practice may be confusing, while for others, it may be unnecessary.

What the research says: Kohn scoured the research to find that there is no evidence that homework in elementary school leads to an increase in student achievement.

At our opening staff meetings last August, I asked teachers to read excerpts from "The Homework Myth," and discuss the article with grade-level colleagues. Many teachers were as dumbfounded as I was when challenged to think about their long-held beliefs about homework. I asked each grade level team to decide on a common homework approach for the coming school year. While I knew where I stood on the homework issue at this point, I felt it was important for teachers to make these decisions themselves after I had provided them with research and the opportunities to discuss it. As I met with each grade-level team, I also felt it was my responsibility to ensure that there was some semblance of a trajectory from kindergarten through fifth grade.

The School's New Homework Policy:

Last school year for the first time, I knew the homework expectations for each class in the school!

In kindergarten, students dictate stories to their families on a regular basis, but with no official due dates. Parents were encouraged to read to their children, but there were no set expectations for how much or how often.

Starting in first grade, students were expected to read nightly and this included families reading to children.

Most grade-level teams opted out of reading logs or other accountability structures, noting that these often devolved into a meaningless checklists lacking accountability altogether.

Third graders were asked to write nightly. Students determine the content and form of their writing, which is not graded. Third graders are also expected to practice their math facts based on both grade level expectations and personal levels of mastery.

In my experiences as both principal and teacher, parents often voice two significant complaints: homework either took too long, or not long enough; AND parents didn't understand the homework, so they couldn't help their child. These issues have been addressed in our new approach to homework. All homework is now open-ended enough to avoid these common complaints.

Teachers give parents information about other elements also taught in class so they can be supportive of the related homework. When a teacher asks students to read for 30 minutes, some students may read 10 pages, and others may read 30. Parents can help children find a regular time to do that homework because the time needed is consistent. Moreover, if a parent wants a child to do more homework, it is quite simple to just have them keep reading. There is no "wrong way" to do the homework. And this has led to many families reporting that the level of stress in their household has decreased dramatically.

So in 2014, Cambridgeport became "the school that doesn't give homework," yet I heard repeatedly from students, teachers, and parents about the significant, meaningful work they are doing at home. A fourth grader begged to take home his writing notebook on the third day of school so he could keep working on the story he had started in class. A class of fifth graders requested additional practice problems to take home with them. A father-daughter pair showed me the model they created of the setting of the book they were reading together.

Our school may be giving less homework but we have more students engaged in more meaningful learning activities at home than ever before.

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Principal: What happened when my school ended useless homework

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Anyone who closely follows the debate about the value of homework at different grades knows about a famous meta-analysis of previous research on the subject, published in 2006 by researcher Harris Cooper and colleagues, which found that homework in elementary school does not contribute to academic achievement.

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blog post by @MsMarshallCMS

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My students came in today and read an article about the value of homework. I asked them to make some notes on a T chart of the reasons that the article offered both in favor of and against homework. I told them to include their own ideas and experiences as well, reminding them that they have been doing homework for five years and that makes them experts on the topic. After reading the article and making their notes, I had the students turn and talk to their "elbow partner" about the pros/cons of homework, weighing the evidence on both sides of this issue before coming up with a statement of their own opinion.
Note: using the elbow partner, back partner, and face partner directives help to vary the audience for student talk

After the discussion, I asked the students to "Take a Stand" for what their partner believes about this statement: Homework is helpful and we should have homework every night. I have labels along the wall for students to stand under to show if they agree/disagree or are neutral on an issue. In the class on the left, you can see many students are gathered in the middle under the neutral sign, meaning they feel that the pros/cons of homework are equal, or that they don't have any strong feelings either way. In the class on the right, there was a rather large group under the disagree sign that felt that homework does more harm than good. Once the students had taken their places along the wall, I called on them to explain who they are standing for, and why they were standing in that particular area. I'd love to share a video of the students speaking for their partners, but unfortunately not all of the students in the video have turned in the photo/video release form-maybe I can add it later. I have summed up some of the most popular reasons given both for and against homework below.

Homework: Pros

According to my students:

Homework is practice and practice makes perfect

You can get good grades

You can learn about more stuff

It keeps you off of electronics

It keeps you from getting bored at home

Homework helps you learn

It helps you get smarter

It teaches you time management skills

If you do a project for homework it is fun

You can learn a lot from it

It lets us learn things out of class

homework: cons

According to my students:

It's too much of a time waster

It can be confusing/it's too hard to do by yourself

Kids hate homework

Students earn bad grades if they can't do their homework

If we want to hang out with out friends after school, we can't because we have to do our boring homework

Some teachers give way too much homework and kids never get to finish it, then they get in trouble

Kids do enough work in class-we need to have fun too

It's a waste of paper

If you don't know a problem, you can get stressed out

You should get to spend time with your family

I have a lot of experience with homework: doing it myself, assigning it, grading it, and comforting my own children when they are crying over it.

The first experience that caused me to question my homework policies, actually happened as I was playing the role of parent-not teacher. My daughter had a homework assignment that she was struggling with, to the point of crying in frustration. When I tried to help her, I could not figure out the problem either. There was a whole set of the same type of problem, so we couldn't do any of them. She was terribly upset. I have a Master's degree in education and I can't figure out how to do this homework, so I was feeling a little upset myself. This really got me thinking about my students. What do my students do that don't have parents at home that can help them? How many of them have parents that can't help them with their work? That work nights? That are caring for small children and are overwhelmed with family obligations? That don't speak the language that the homework is written in? Is it fair to grade homework? Are students actually being graded on their family situation? I had more questions than answers.

My daughter spends approximately eight hours a day in school. I pick her up at three. She plays sports, so school doesn't actually end until 6-7 PM. Then we go home and have dinner and she gets cleaned up and ready for bed. By this time it's about 9 PM and she still has 3 or more hours of homework to do. I often ask her to do things with me and her response is, "I can't I have too much homework." Some days she misses games or practices because she either has too much homework to finish, or she is too tired from staying up until the AM hours finishing homework.

I was surprised when we did the "Weigh In on Homework" lesson that quite a few of my students actually wanted homework. I explained to the class that if you play a sport, you go to practice. If you play an instrument, you practice to get better at it. If you want to do better in English class, what should you practice? Reading! Writing! Speaking! Will these activities be graded? No. Will these activities improve your skills in communication, reading, and writing which are vital to being successful in English class? Yes. Much of the time, assignments in an English class require a student to draw on their own experiences. I would like you to be having experiences, whether it's going to boy scouts, playing basketball, hiking, taking pictures, or just hanging out with friends. I don't want my students to miss out on experiences because of a worksheet packet that has to be completed by Friday.

In answer to the question "Do we have homework?":

Sometimes students will have to take their classwork home and finish it for homework and sometimes students will have a class project that they want to work on at home. If you really want to do more homework than I am giving you, look at the menus of extra credit projects that I have created for each unit that we study in English, there are some really fun projects that will extend your learning. I am not fond of workbooks, but I do understand that not everyone shares my opinions. If you want an English workbook to keep at home, I will be happy to give you one. Completion of workbook pages will not affect your grade, whereas extra credit projects will improve your grade. Ultimately, I respect everyone's unique family values and want to support your child in their academic, social, and emotional learning.

Here are some helpful links. If the button doesn't take you to a document, that means I haven't yet transferred that Word Doc to my Google Drive. Check back for updates.

1. I hope that you will be reading books, poems, articles, content on the web, recipes, instructions, directions, menus and so much more. I hope that you will be talking and communicating with friends and family.

2. I hope that you will write letters, blogs, and create content around topics that interest you.

3. I hope you will engage in conversations about our learning in our online blogging community here on this website and on our class Instagram.

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My students came in today and read an article about the value of homework. I asked them to make some notes on a T chart of the reasons that the article offered both in favor of and against homework.

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Harris Cooper, et al (2006)

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Duke Study: Homework Helps Students Succeed in School, As Long as There Isn’t Too Much | Duke Today

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It turns out that parents are right to nag: To succeed in school, kids should do their homework.

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@rachelmarker

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This week, I am sharing some of my learning from: (choose from any content area(s)) Describe the learning and teach a family member! Describe the learning and teach a family member! Describe the learning and teach a family member! Comments? Compliments? Questions?...

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@mraspinall

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Alternatives to Traditional Homework pic.twitter.com/PBy8s3kAkp
— Brian Aspinall (@mraspinall) December 14, 2015

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Parent Perspective: Why I said NO to homework

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Parent Perspective: Why I said NO to homework

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Here's a shocking thought: What if not doing homework was better for your kids? Would you still make them do it?

We want what's best for our children, and when kids hit school age we follow the teacher's lead. If the teacher assigns homework, we enforce it at home. Even in elementary school. Even in preschool and kindergarten. Even when the research disagrees.

Schooling may be mandatory, but homework isn't. Home time is family time. Kids need time to play and reboot for the next school day, not go into overtime.

When children hit school-age, sometimes it feels as if the school is suddenly in charge of your family life. Night after night parents lock themselves in battles with overtired kids. "You have to do your homework," we say, even when deep inside we know that the crying, wiggling child stuck in the homework chair desperately needs something else. Time to just be home, relax and play. Help with family chores. Or go to bed. But we think we must uphold homework, so we do. We nag. Cajole. Fight. Beg. And as a last resort, we do our kid's homework.

There is another way. Say no, respectfully.

You may be surprised to learn that research supports this. Dr. Harris Cooper, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Duke University, conducted a comprehensive review of nearly 180 research studies and found that homework has no evidence of academic benefit for elementary school students. You read that right. Startling, isn't it? Cooper's research on the research prompted him to say this: "There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students." (See further analysis of this issue here.)

Homework does have an impact, though. The same slew of studies show it increases emotional problems: negative attitudes towards school and high conflict in families.

What research suggests is that homework benefits are age-specific. Homework belongs in high school. In middle school, there's slight academic benefit, and none in the elementary years. "The research is very clear," writes University of Arizona education professor Etta Kralovec in her book on the subject. "There's no benefit at the elementary school level." ( See more information here.) Given these facts, it makes sense to give kids some practice assignments in middle school, but not too much. Even in high school, more than two hours of homework doesn't help.

RELATED STORY: The end of homework? Why some schools are banning it

I didn't yet know this research when my oldest child entered first grade, but I knew my child. I knew what he needed - and what he didn't need - and was willing to buck the system and trust my gut. When school was over for the day, I knew this 6-year-old needed time to run outside, make noise, make faces with his brother, and simply pursue his own interests. Children are told what to do all day long at school. They need time to move their bodies and think their own thoughts. I told our teacher our family wouldn't be participating in homework. We'd be supporting learning our own way.

I grew up without homework in elementary school, so I was already comfortable with the idea. I knew kids could learn and flourish without it. My childhood elementary school had no worksheets, no textbooks and no chairs, and yet we typically scored at the top of the district when worried officials came in and administered standardized tests. Our school was filled with the joy of learning.

In a homework-dominated culture, I think we forget joy.

Joy is part of learning. Kids are wired to learn just as they are wired to play. But homework at a young age can squash that out. Learning gets a bad name. Learning gets equated with homework.

When homework comes too young, it also delays development of responsibility. Parents turn into the Homework Patrol Cop, an unpleasant position that turns adults in to nagging homework monitors and kids into expert grumblers. These roles often extend into the teenage years. Homework, when it comes, should be the child's job. My parents never told me to do my high school homework. Instead, my mother would say, "What's your evening like?"

Homework is mainly a problem because it's a theft of time. It's a grave opportunity cost. And kids feel it. Homework steals kids' time at home. Time they desperately need to play, connect with family, cope with big emotions, be outside and get good, long sleep.

If we want to improve test scores and enhance memory, focus and problem-solving ability, we need to give kids good sleep. Sleep is well established to improve learning and behavior. According to the National Sleep Foundation, 30 percent of elementary kids are seriously sleep-deprived, and only a few are getting the recommended hours. It's not glamorous, but sleep is vital to children's learning and success. Homework isn't.

You have the right to decide what goes on in your home and family.

The first step is to realize you don't have to be a Homework Enforcer, you can be a parent. Parents are in charge of their children's upbringing. Your child's teacher is your partner in this, and good partners tell each other when something is not working.

So - get your courage up - the next step is to approach your child's teacher or principal and explain what's going on in your house each night, and what you'd rather see. If you don't know what to say, but you're curious about reducing homework load or opting out, check out sample scripts, ideas and more research in my book "It's OK to Go Up the Slide." It's meant for you whether you're a teacher or a parent. Learn why substituting reading for pleasure at home is better than homework, and discover respectful ways to change the homework culture. Other good resources include Alfie Kohn's "The Homework Myth."

It can be scary to question school routines. Remember that teachers care about kids. What teachers typically want most is a supportive, involved family who cares about education and doing what's best for the child. Good teachers are willing to listen - both to you and the research.

It's time to stop a practice that doesn't work. It's time to think, question, examine the research and, for kids' sake, ban elementary school homework.

Heather Shumaker's new book "It's OK to Go Up the Slide" (Tarcher/ Penguin Random House, March 2016) dives into homework and more hot-button topics like recess, screens, safety and strangers. Heather is a national speaker on early childhood issues and an advocate for play-based learning and no homework in elementary schools. Visit www.heathershumaker.com for info, blog, podcast and more.
This post comes from the TODAY Parenting Team community, where all members are welcome to post and discuss parenting solutions. Learn more and join us! Because we're all in this together.

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Here's why I said no to homework for my elementary-aged kids

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Here's a shocking thought: What if not doing homework was better for your kids? Would you still make them do it? We want what's best for our children, and when kids hit school age we follow the teacher's lead. If the teacher assigns homework, we enforce it at home.

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The Homework Debate: One Teacher's Perspective 

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The Homework Debate: One Teacher's Perspective 

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Cycles of Learning blog (2015)

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The Homework Debate: One Teacher's Perspective

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Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let’s ban elementary homework

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Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let’s ban elementary homework

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Salon.com (2016)

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"There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students."

This statement, by homework research guru Harris Cooper, of Duke University, is startling to hear, no matter which side of the homework debate you're on. Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught? That millions of families go through a nightly ritual that doesn't help? Homework is such an accepted practice, it's hard for most adults to even question its value.

When you look at the facts, however, here's what you find: Homework has benefits, but its benefits are age dependent.

For elementary-aged children, research suggests that studying in class gets superior learning results, while extra schoolwork at home is just . . . extra work. Even in middle school, the relationship between homework and academic success is minimal at best. By the time kids reach high school, homework provides academic benefit, but only in moderation. More than two hours per night is the limit. After that amount, the benefits taper off. "The research is very clear," agrees Etta Kralovec, education professor at the University of Arizona. "There's no benefit at the elementary school level."

Before going further, let's dispel the myth that these research results are due to a handful of poorly constructed studies. In fact, it's the opposite. Cooper compiled 120 studies in 1989 and another 60 studies in 2006. This comprehensive analysis of multiple research studies found no evidence of academic benefit at the elementary level. It did, however, find a negative impact on children's attitudes toward school.

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Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let's ban elementary homework

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"There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students." This statement, by homework research guru Harris Cooper, of Duke University, is startling to hear, no matter which side of the homework debate you're on. Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught?

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Marzano (2007)

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March 2007 | Volume 64 | Number 6
Responding to Changing Demographics Pages 74-79

Robert J. Marzano and Debra J. Pickering

Homework is typically defined as any tasks "assigned to students by school teachers that are meant to be carried out during nonschool hours" (Cooper, 1989a, p. 7). A number of synthesis studies have been conducted on homework, spanning a broad range of methodologies and levels of specificity (see fig. 1). Some are quite general and mix the results from experimental studies with correlational studies.

Two meta-analyses by Cooper and colleagues (Cooper, 1989a; Cooper, Robinson, & Patall, 2006) are the most comprehensive and rigorous. The 1989 meta-analysis reviewed research dating as far back as the 1930s; the 2006 study reviewed research from 1987 to 2003. Commenting on studies that attempted to examine the causal relationship between homework and student achievement by comparing experimental (homework) and control (no homework) groups, Cooper, Robinson, and Patall (2006) noted,

With only rare exceptions, the relationship between the amount of homework students do and their achievement outcomes was found to be positive and statistically significant. Therefore, we think it would not be imprudent, based on the evidence in hand, to conclude that doing homework causes improved academic achievement. (p. 48)

The Case Against Homework

Although the research support for homework is compelling, the case against homework is popular. The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Kralovec and Buell (2000), considered by many to be the first high-profile attack on homework, asserted that homework contributes to a corporate-style, competitive U.S. culture that overvalues work to the detriment of personal and familial well-being. The authors focused particularly on the harm to economically disadvantaged students, who are unintentionally penalized because their environments often make it almost impossible to complete assignments at home. The authors called for people to unite against homework and to lobby for an extended school day instead.

A similar call for action came from Bennett and Kalish (2006) in The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It. These authors criticized both the quantity and quality of homework. They provided evidence that too much homework harms students' health and family time, and they asserted that teachers are not well trained in how to assign homework. The authors suggested that individuals and parent groups should insist that teachers reduce the amount of homework, design more valuable assignments, and avoid homework altogether over breaks and holidays.

In a third book, The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (2006a), Kohn took direct aim at the research on homework. In this book and in a recent article in Phi Delta Kappan (2006b), he became quite personal in his condemnation of researchers. For example, referring to Harris Cooper, the lead author of the two leading meta-analyses on homework, Kohn noted,

A careful reading of Cooper's own studies . . . reveals further examples of his determination to massage the numbers until they yield something-anything-on which to construct a defense of homework for younger children. (2006a, p. 84)

He also attacked a section on homework in our book Classroom Instruction that Works (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001).

Kohn concluded that research fails to demonstrate homework's effectiveness as an instructional tool and recommended changing the "default state" from an expectation that homework will be assigned to an expectation that homework will not be assigned. According to Kohn, teachers should only assign homework when they can justify that the assignments are "beneficial" (2006a, p. 166)-ideally involving students in activities appropriate for the home, such as performing an experiment in the kitchen, cooking, doing crossword puzzles with the family, watching good TV shows, or reading. Finally, Kohn urged teachers to involve students in deciding what homework, and how much, they should do.

Some of Kohn's recommendations have merit. For example, it makes good sense to only assign homework that is beneficial to student learning instead of assigning homework as a matter of policy. Many of those who conduct research on homework explicitly or implicitly recommend this practice. However, his misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the research sends the inaccurate message that research does not support homework. As Figure 1 indicates, homework has decades of research supporting its effective use. Kohn's allegations that researchers are trying to mislead practitioners and the general public are unfounded and detract from a useful debate on effective practice.

The Dangers of Ignoring the Research

Certainly, inappropriate homework may produce little or no benefit-it may even decrease student achievement. All three of the books criticizing homework provide compelling anecdotes to this effect. Schools should strengthen their policies to ensure that teachers use homework properly.

If a district or school discards homework altogether, however, it will be throwing away a powerful instructional tool. Cooper and colleagues' (2006) comparison of homework with no homework indicates that the average student in a class in which appropriate homework was assigned would score 23 percentile points higher on tests of the knowledge addressed in that class than the average student in a class in which homework was not assigned.

Perhaps the most important advantage of homework is that it can enhance achievement by extending learning beyond the school day. This characteristic is important because U.S. students spend much less time studying academic content than students in other countries do. A 1994 report examined the amount of time U.S. students spend studying core academic subjects compared with students in other countries that typically outperform the United States academically, such as Japan, Germany, and France. The study found that "students abroad are required to work on demanding subject matter at least twice as long" as are U.S. students (National Education Commission on Time and Learning, 1994, p. 25).

To drop the use of homework, then, a school or district would be obliged to identify a practice that produces a similar effect within the confines of the school day without taking away or diminishing the benefits of other academic activities-no easy accomplishment. A better approach is to ensure that teachers use homework effectively. To enact effective homework policies, however, schools and districts must address the following issues.

Grade Level

Although teachers across the K-12 spectrum commonly assign homework, research has produced no clear-cut consensus on the benefits of homework at the early elementary grade levels. In his early meta-analysis, Cooper (1989a) reported the following effect sizes (p. 71):

Grades 4-6: ES = .15 (Percentile gain = 6)

Grades 7-9: ES = .31 (Percentile gain = 12)

Grades 10-12: ES = .64 (Percentile gain = 24)

The pattern clearly indicates that homework has smaller effects at lower grade levels. Even so, Cooper (1989b) still recommended homework for elementary students because

homework for young children should help them develop good study habits, foster positive attitudes toward school, and communicate to students the idea that learning takes work at home as well as at school. (p. 90)

The Cooper, Robinson, and Patall (2006) meta-analysis found the same pattern of stronger relationships at the secondary level but also identified a number of studies at grades 2, 3, and 4 demonstrating positive effects for homework. In The Battle over Homework (2007), Cooper noted that homework should have different purposes at different grade levels:

For students in the earliest grades, it should foster positive attitudes, habits, and character traits; permit appropriate parent involvement; and reinforce learning of simple skills introduced in class.

For students in upper elementary grades, it should play a more direct role in fostering improved school achievement.

In 6th grade and beyond, it should play an important role in improving standardized test scores and grades.

Time Spent on Homework

One of the more contentious issues in the homework debate is the amount of time students should spend on homework. The Cooper synthesis (1989a) reported that for junior high school students, the benefits increased as time increased, up to 1 to 2 hours of homework a night, and then decreased. The Cooper, Robinson, and Patall (2006) study reported similar findings: 7 to 12 hours of homework per week produced the largest effect size for 12th grade students. The researchers suggested that for 12th graders the optimum amount of homework might lie between 1.5 and 2.5 hours per night, but they cautioned that no hard-and-fast rules are warranted. Still, researchers have offered various recommendations. For example, Good and Brophy (2003) cautioned that teachers must take care not to assign too much homework. They suggested that

homework must be realistic in length and difficulty given the students' abilities to work independently. Thus, 5 to 10 minutes per subject might be appropriate for 4th graders, whereas 30 to 60 minutes might be appropriate for college-bound high school students. (p. 394)

Cooper, Robinson, and Patall (2006) also issued a strong warning about too much homework:

Even for these oldest students, too much homework may diminish its effectiveness or even become counterproductive. (p 53)

Cooper (2007) suggested that research findings support the common "10-minute rule" (p. 92), which states that all daily homework assignments combined should take about as long to complete as 10 minutes multiplied by the student's grade level. He added that when required reading is included as a type of homework, the 10-minute rule might be increased to 15 minutes.

Focusing on the amount of time students spend on homework, however, may miss the point. A significant proportion of the research on homework indicates that the positive effects of homework relate to the amount of homework that the student completes rather than the amount of time spent on homework or the amount of homework actually assigned. Thus, simply assigning homework may not produce the desired effect-in fact, ill-structured homework might even have a negative effect on student achievement. Teachers must carefully plan and assign homework in a way that maximizes the potential for student success (see Research-Based Homework Guidelines).

Parent Involvement

Another question regarding homework is the extent to which schools should involve parents. Some studies have reported minimal positive effects or even negative effects for parental involvement. In addition, many parents report that they feel unprepared to help their children with homework and that their efforts to help frequently cause stress (see Balli, 1998; Corno, 1996; Hoover-Dempsey, Bassler, & Burow, 1995; Perkins & Milgram, 1996).

Epstein and colleagues conducted a series of studies to identify the conditions under which parental involvement enhances homework (Epstein, 2001; Epstein & Becker, 1982; Van Voorhis, 2003). They recommended interactive homework in which

Parents receive clear guidelines spelling out their role.

Teachers do not expect parents to act as experts regarding content or to attempt to teach the content.

Parents ask questions that help students clarify and summarize what they have learned.

Good and Brophy (2003) provided the following recommendations regarding parent involvement:

Especially useful for parent-child relations purposes are assignments calling for students to show or explain their written work or other products completed at school to their parents and get their reactions (Epstein, 2001; Epstein, Simon, & Salinas, 1997) or to interview their parents to develop information about parental experiences or opinions relating to topics studied in social studies (Alleman & Brophy, 1998). Such assignments cause students and their parents or other family members to become engaged in conversations that relate to the academic curriculum and thus extend the students' learning. Furthermore, because these are likely to be genuine conversations rather than more formally structured teaching/learning tasks, both parents and children are likely to experience them as enjoyable rather than threatening. (p. 395)

Going Beyond the Research

Although research has established the overall viability of homework as a tool to enhance student achievement, for the most part the research does not provide recommendations that are specific enough to help busy practitioners. This is the nature of research-it errs on the side of assuming that something does not work until substantial evidence establishes that it does. The research community takes a long time to formulate firm conclusions on the basis of research. Homework is a perfect example: Figure 1 includes synthesis studies that go back as far as 60 years, yet all that research translates to a handful of recommendations articulated at a very general level.

In addition, research in a specific area, such as homework, sometimes contradicts research in related areas. For example, Cooper (2007) recommended on the basis of 60-plus years of homework research that teachers should not comment on or grade every homework assignment. But practitioners might draw a different conclusion from the research on providing feedback to students, which has found that providing "feedback coupled with remediation" (Hattie, 1992) or feedback on "testlike events" in the form of explanations to students (Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, Kulik, & Morgan, 1991) positively affects achievement.

Riehl (2006) pointed out the similarity between education research and medical research. She commented,

When reported in the popular media, medical research often appears as a blunt instrument, able to obliterate skeptics or opponents by the force of its evidence and arguments. . . . Yet repeated visits to the medical journals themselves can leave a much different impression. The serious medical journals convey the sense that medical research is an ongoing conversation and quest, punctuated occasionally by important findings that can and should alter practice, but more often characterized by continuing investigations. These investigations, taken cumulatively, can inform the work of practitioners who are building their own local knowledge bases on medical care. (pp. 27-28)

If relying solely on research is problematic, what are busy practitioners to do? The answer is certainly not to wait until research "proves" that a practice is effective. Instead, educators should combine research-based generalizations, research from related areas, and their own professional judgment based on firsthand experience to develop specific practices and make adjustments as necessary. Like medical practitioners, education practitioners must develop their own "local knowledge base" on homework and all other aspects of teaching. Educators can develop the most effective practices by observing changes in the achievement of the students with whom they work every day.

Assign purposeful homework. Legitimate purposes for homework include introducing new content, practicing a skill or process that students can do independently but not fluently, elaborating on information that has been addressed in class to deepen students' knowledge, and providing opportunities for students to explore topics of their own interest.

Design homework to maximize the chances that students will complete it. For example, ensure that homework is at the appropriate level of difficulty. Students should be able to complete homework assignments independently with relatively high success rates, but they should still find the assignments challenging enough to be interesting.

Involve parents in appropriate ways (for example, as a sounding board to help students summarize what they learned from the homework) without requiring parents to act as teachers or to police students' homework completion.

Carefully monitor the amount of homework assigned so that it is appropriate to students' age levels and does not take too much time away from other home activities.

References

Balli, S. J. (1998). When mom and dad help: Student reflections on parent involvement with homework. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 31(3), 142-148.

Bangert-Drowns, R. L., Kulik, C. C., Kulik, J. A., & Morgan, M. (1991). The instructional effects of feedback in test-like events. Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 213-238.

Bennett, S., & Kalish, N. (2006). The case against homework: How homework is hurting our children and what we can do about it. New York: Crown.

Bloom, B. S. (1984). The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-toone tutoring. Educational Leadership, 41(8), 4-18.

Cooper, H. (1989a). Homework.White Plains, NY: Longman.

Cooper, H. (1989b). Synthesis of research on homework. Educational Leadership, 47(3), 85-91.

Cooper, H. (2007). The battle over homework (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987-2003. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 1-62.

Corno, L. (1996). Homework is a complicated thing. Educational Researcher, 25(8), 27-30.

Epstein, J. (2001). School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators and improving schools. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Epstein, J. L., & Becker, H. J. (1982). Teachers' reported practices of parent involvement: Problems and possibilities. Elementary School Journal, 83, 103-113.

Fraser, B. J., Walberg, H. J., Welch, W. W., & Hattie, J. A. (1987). Synthesis of educational productivity research [Special issue]. International Journal of Educational Research, 11(2), 145-252.

Gill, B. P., & Schlossman, S. L. (2000). The lost cause of homework reform. American Journal of Education, 109, 27-62.

Good, T. L., & Brophy, J. E. (2003). Looking in classrooms (9th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Graue, M. E., Weinstein, T., & Walberg, H. J. (1983). School-based home instruction and learning: A quantitative synthesis. Journal of Educational Research, 76, 351-360.

Hattie, J. A. (1992). Measuring the effects of schooling. Australian Journal of Education, 36(1), 5-13.

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Marzano, R. J., & Pickering, D. J. (2007). Response to Kohn's allegations. Centennial, CO: Marzano & Associates. Available: http://marzanoandassociates.com/documents/KohnResponse.pdf

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Endnote

For a more detailed response to Kohn's views on homework, see Marzano & Pickering (2007) and Marzano & Pickering (in press).

Robert J. Marzano is a Senior Scholar at Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning in Aurora, Colorado; an Associate Professor at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee,Wisconsin; and President of Marzano & Associates consulting firm in Centennial, Colorado; robertjmarzano@aol.com. Debra J. Pickering is a private consultant and Director of Staff Development in Littleton Public Schools, Littleton, Colorado; djplearn@hotmail.com.

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The Case For and Against Homework - Educational Leadership

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March 2007 | Volume 64 | Number 6 Responding to Changing Demographics Pages 74-79 Robert J. Marzano and Debra J. Pickering Homework is typically defined as any tasks "assigned to students by school teachers that are meant to be carried out during nonschool hours" (Cooper, 1989a, p. 7).