cooper h homework

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

The study, led by professor Harris Cooper, also shows that the positive correlation is much stronger for secondary students than elementary students

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

Duke University researchers have reviewed more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and concluded that homework does have a positive effect on student achievement.

Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology, said the research synthesis that he led showed the positive correlation was much stronger for secondary students --- those in grades 7 through 12 --- than those in elementary school.

READ MORE: Harris Cooper offers tips for teaching children in the next school year in this USA Today op-ed published Monday.

"With only rare exception, the relationship between the amount of homework students do and their achievement outcomes was found to be positive and statistically significant," the researchers report in a paper that appears in the spring 2006 edition of "Review of Educational Research."

Cooper is the lead author; Jorgianne Civey Robinson, a Ph.D. student in psychology, and Erika Patall, a graduate student in psychology, are co-authors. The research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

While it's clear that homework is a critical part of the learning process, Cooper said the analysis also showed that too much homework can be counter-productive for students at all levels.

"Even for high school students, overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades," Cooper said.

Cooper said the research is consistent with the "10-minute rule" suggesting the optimum amount of homework that teachers ought to assign. The "10-minute rule," Cooper said, is a commonly accepted practice in which teachers add 10 minutes of homework as students progress one grade. In other words, a fourth-grader would be assigned 40 minutes of homework a night, while a high school senior would be assigned about two hours. For upper high school students, after about two hours' worth, more homework was not associated with higher achievement.

The authors suggest a number of reasons why older students benefit more from homework than younger students. First, the authors note, younger children are less able than older children to tune out distractions in their environment. Younger children also have less effective study habits.

But the reason also could have to do with why elementary teachers assign homework. Perhaps it is used more often to help young students develop better time management and study skills, not to immediately affect their achievement in particular subject areas.

"Kids burn out," Cooper said. "The bottom line really is all kids should be doing homework, but the amount and type should vary according to their developmental level and home circumstances. Homework for young students should be short, lead to success without much struggle, occasionally involve parents and, when possible, use out-of-school activities that kids enjoy, such as their sports teams or high-interest reading."

Cooper pointed out that there are limitations to current research on homework. For instance, little research has been done to assess whether a student's race, socioeconomic status or ability level affects the importance of homework in his or her achievement.

This is Cooper's second synthesis of homework research. His first was published in 1989 and covered nearly 120 studies in the 20 years before 1987. Cooper's recent paper reconfirms many of the findings from the earlier study.

Cooper is the author of "The Battle over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents" (Corwin Press, 2001).

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Harris Cooper

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Harris Cooper received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1975. From 1977 to 2003, he was on the faculty at the University of Missouri. In 2003, he moved to Duke University where he is a professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and served as Director of the Program in Education from 2003 to 2008. Dr. Cooper has been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, the University of Oregon, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Cooper's research interests follow two paths. The first concerns research synthesis and research methodology. His book, Synthesizing Research: A Guide for Literature Reviews (1998), is in revision for its 4th edition. He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Research Synthesis (1994), a volume that is currently being prepared for a 2nd edition. Dr. Cooper and his students have published over two dozen research syntheses, many of which appeared in varied prestigious journals including Psychological Bulletin, Review of Educational Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology. In 2007, Dr. Cooper was the recipient of the Frederick Mosteller Award for Contributions to Research Synthesis Methodology given by the Campbell Collaboration and in 2008 he received the Ingram Olkin Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Research Synthesis from the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology. In 2007, Dr. Cooper was appointed to membership on the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Social Science Evidence in Use. This committee gives sustained attention to issues and actions aimed at promoting high quality social science research with an eye toward improving evidence used in public policy decision-making. He is also a member of the NAS Committee on Advancing Social Science Theory: The Importance of Common Metrics. In 2007-08, he chaired the Journal Article Reporting Standards Working Group that developed guidelines for what information about research should be included in manuscripts submitted to journals published by the American Psychological Association (American Psychologist, in press). Dr. Cooper authored the chapter on “Research Questions and Research Design” in the Handbook of Research in Educational Psychology. He is co-author of the Study Design and Implementation Assessment Device (DIAD), an instrument for assessing the correspondence between the features and conduct of social science research and its ability to draw inferences about causal relationships (Psychological Methods, 2008). He recently agreed to be the editor of the American Psychological Association’s three-volume Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology. Dr. Cooper is also interested in the application of social and developmental psychology to educational policy issues. In particular, he studies how the activities that children and adolescents engage in when they are not in school influence their academic achievement. His research synthesis titled Homework (1989) was published as a monograph and provided the evidence base for a guide to policy and practice (The Battle over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents, 3rd edition, 2007). He and his students recently updated the synthesis of homework research (Review of Educational Research, 2006) and the resulting article received the 2007 Outstanding Review of Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. Dr. Cooper ´s research on homework has had an impact on policies and practices nationwide. In addition to working directly with schools and school districts, his work has been highlighted frequently in national media. Dr. Cooper has been a guest on NBC Dateline, CBS This Morning, ABC Nightly News and Good Morning America, CNN Headline News, Nickelodeon Nick News, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. On radio, he has appeared on The Larry King Show, NPR’s Talk of the Nation and the Mitch Ablom Show. Coverage of his work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Readers´ Digest, and USA Today Weekend, as well as every major metropolitan newspaper. More specialized publications also have provided coverage of his work, including Parents, Parenting, and Child magazines, NEA Today, and The American Teacher. Dr. Cooper and his students also study the impact of school calendars and calendar variations on students and their families. Their research syntheses on summer learning loss (1996) and modified school calendars (2003) were published in Review of Educational Research. In 2000, their monograph entitled Making the Most of Summer School was published by the Society for Research on Child Development. This monograph reported a synthesis of over 90 evaluations of the effectiveness of summer school. Dr. Cooper and his students are currently working on syntheses of research regarding the effects of all-day kindergarten, extending the school year, and lengthening the school day on students’ academic achievement and related outcomes. In 2003, Dr. Cooper became Editor for the Psychological Bulletin and will serve through mid-2009. The Institute for Scientific Information (2006) ranked the Psychological Bulletin 1st among all multidisciplinary psychology journals with regard to both the number of times it is cited and the impact of articles on the field. It ranked 5th among all social science journals (n=1768) in total citations and 3rd in impact factor. He has been Associate Editor of Social Psychology of Education, and an Advisory Editor for the Journal of Educational Psychology, the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Elementary School Journal, Journal of Experimental Education, and the American Educational Research Journal. Dr. Cooper is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association Divisions 3 and 15, the American Psychological Society, and the American Educational Research Association. His research grants include three awards from the National Science Foundation, five from the Department of Education, two from the Russell Sage Foundation, two from the Smith Richardson Foundation, and one each from the Spencer Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In 1984, Dr. Cooper received the first Raymond B. Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Dr. Cooper served a three-year term as the Chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. This academic unit had over 30 regular faculty members and 20 non-regular faculty members and trained over 70 graduate students and 800 undergraduate majors each year. As Director of Duke University’s Program in Education, he oversaw teacher licensure programs at both the elementary and secondary level. From 1992 to 1998, he served as an elected member of the Columbia, MO, Board of Education, a school district with a $100 million budget serving 16,000 students. In 1997, he won the AERA Award for Interpretive Scholarship for his article “Speaking Power to Truth: Reflections of an Educational Researcher after Four Years of School Board Service.” Dr. Cooper served for six years (1999-2005) as the chair of the methods groups for the Campbell Collaboration and as their representative on the Campbell Collaboration International Steering Committee. His national service includes sitting on two committees on afterschool programs for the C.S. Mott Foundation and on the Steering Committee of the National Partnership for Quality Afterschool Programs. He was the Chair of the APA Council of Editors in 2006 and is a member of its committee revising the APA Publication Manual. He is on the Steering Committee of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness and on the Governing Board of the Regional Educational Laboratory serving the Appalachian region.

Primary Interests:

• Applied Social Psychology
• Causal Attribution
• Motivation, Goal Setting
• Research Methods, Assessment
• Social Cognition

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Image Gallery

• Cooper, H. (2007). The battle over homework: Common ground for administrators, teachers, and parents (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
• Cooper, H. (2010). Reporting research in psychology: How to meet journal article reporting standards. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
• Cooper, H. (2009). Research synthesis and meta-analysis: A step by step approach (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Cooper, H. (Ed.). (2012). APA handbook of research methods in psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
• Cooper, H., Hedges, L. V., & Valentine, J. C. (Eds.). (2009). The handbook of research synthesis and meta-analysis (2nd ed.). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Journal Articles:

• Anderson, K., Cooper, H. M., & Okamura, L. (1997). Individual differences and attitudes toward rape: A metaanalytic review. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 295-315.
• Conn, V. S., Valentine, J. C., & Cooper, H. (2002). Interventions to increase physical activity among aging adults: A meta-analysis. Annals of Behavior Medicine, 24, 190-200.
• Cooper, H., DeNeve, K., & Charlton, K. (1997). Finding the missing science: The fate of studies submitted for review by a human subjects committee. Psychological Methods, 2, 447-452.
• Cooper, H. M., & Patall, E. A. (2009). The relative benefits of meta-analysis using individual participant data and aggregate data. Psychological Methods, 14, 165-176.
• 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, 1-62.
• Cooper, H., Valentine, J. C., Charleton, K., & Barnett, A. (2003). The effects of modified school calendars on student achievement and school community attitudes: A research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 73, 1-52.
• DeNeve, K. M., & Cooper, H. (1998). The happy personality: A meta-analysis of 143 personality traits and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 197-229.
• DePaulo, B. M., Charleton, K., Cooper, H., Lindsay, J. J., & Muhlenbruck, L. (1997). The accuracy-confidence correlation in the detection of deception. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1, 346-357.
• DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003). Cues to deception. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 74-118.
• DuBois, D. L., Holloway, B. E., Valentine, J. C., & Cooper, H. (2002). Effectiveness of mentoring programs for youth: A meta-analytic review. American Journal of Community Psychology, 30, 157-197.
• Journal Article Reporting Standards Working Group. (2008). Reporting standards for research in psychology: Why do we need them? What might they be? American Psychologist, 63(9), 839-851.
• Patall, E. A., Cooper, H., & Robinson, J. C. (2008). The effects of choice on intrinsic motivation and related outcomes: A meta-analysis of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 270-300.
• Valentine, J. C., DuBois, D. L., & Cooper, H. (2004). The relations between self-beliefs and academic achievement: A systematic review. Educational Psychologist, 39, 111-133.

Other Publications:

• Wynn, S., & Cooper, H. (2007). Bob Dylan. In G. L. Anderson & K. Herr, (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (pp. 489-492). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Courses Taught:

• Research Design
• Research Methods (graduate)
• Research Methods in Psychological Science (undergraduate)
• Research Synthesis

Harris Cooper Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Box 90086 Duke University Durham, North Carolina 27708 United States of America

• Work: (919) 660-5664
• Home: (919) 401-5550
• Fax: (919) 660-5726

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