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Why homework doesn't seem to boost learning--and how it could.

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Some schools are eliminating homework, citing research showing it doesn’t do much to boost achievement. But maybe teachers just need to assign a different kind of homework.

In 2016, a second-grade teacher in Texas delighted her students—and at least some of their parents—by announcing she would no longer assign homework. “Research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance,” she explained.

The following year, the superintendent of a Florida school district serving 42,000 students eliminated homework for all elementary students and replaced it with twenty minutes of nightly reading, saying she was basing her decision on “solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students.”

Many other elementary schools seem to have quietly adopted similar policies. Critics have objected that even if homework doesn’t increase grades or test scores, it has other benefits, like fostering good study habits and providing parents with a window into what kids are doing in school.

Those arguments have merit, but why doesn’t homework boost academic achievement? The research cited by educators just doesn’t seem to make sense. If a child wants to learn to play the violin, it’s obvious she needs to practice at home between lessons (at least, it’s obvious to an adult). And psychologists have identified a range of strategies that help students learn, many of which seem ideally suited for homework assignments.

For example, there’s something called “ retrieval practice ,” which means trying to recall information you’ve already learned. The optimal time to engage in retrieval practice is not immediately after you’ve acquired information but after you’ve forgotten it a bit—like, perhaps, after school. A homework assignment could require students to answer questions about what was covered in class that day without consulting their notes. Research has found that retrieval practice and similar learning strategies are far more powerful than simply rereading or reviewing material.

One possible explanation for the general lack of a boost from homework is that few teachers know about this research. And most have gotten little training in how and why to assign homework. These are things that schools of education and teacher-prep programs typically don’t teach . So it’s quite possible that much of the homework teachers assign just isn’t particularly effective for many students.

Even if teachers do manage to assign effective homework, it may not show up on the measures of achievement used by researchers—for example, standardized reading test scores. Those tests are designed to measure general reading comprehension skills, not to assess how much students have learned in specific classes. Good homework assignments might have helped a student learn a lot about, say, Ancient Egypt. But if the reading passages on a test cover topics like life in the Arctic or the habits of the dormouse, that student’s test score may well not reflect what she’s learned.

The research relied on by those who oppose homework has actually found it has a modest positive effect at the middle and high school levels—just not in elementary school. But for the most part, the studies haven’t looked at whether it matters what kind of homework is assigned or whether there are different effects for different demographic student groups. Focusing on those distinctions could be illuminating.

A study that looked specifically at math homework , for example, found it boosted achievement more in elementary school than in middle school—just the opposite of the findings on homework in general. And while one study found that parental help with homework generally doesn’t boost students’ achievement—and can even have a negative effect— another concluded that economically disadvantaged students whose parents help with homework improve their performance significantly.

That seems to run counter to another frequent objection to homework, which is that it privileges kids who are already advantaged. Well-educated parents are better able to provide help, the argument goes, and it’s easier for affluent parents to provide a quiet space for kids to work in—along with a computer and internet access . While those things may be true, not assigning homework—or assigning ineffective homework—can end up privileging advantaged students even more.

Students from less educated families are most in need of the boost that effective homework can provide, because they’re less likely to acquire academic knowledge and vocabulary at home. And homework can provide a way for lower-income parents—who often don’t have time to volunteer in class or participate in parents’ organizations—to forge connections to their children’s schools. Rather than giving up on homework because of social inequities, schools could help parents support homework in ways that don’t depend on their own knowledge—for example, by recruiting others to help, as some low-income demographic groups have been able to do . Schools could also provide quiet study areas at the end of the day, and teachers could assign homework that doesn’t rely on technology.

Another argument against homework is that it causes students to feel overburdened and stressed.  While that may be true at schools serving affluent populations, students at low-performing ones often don’t get much homework at all—even in high school. One study found that lower-income ninth-graders “consistently described receiving minimal homework—perhaps one or two worksheets or textbook pages, the occasional project, and 30 minutes of reading per night.” And if they didn’t complete assignments, there were few consequences. I discovered this myself when trying to tutor students in writing at a high-poverty high school. After I expressed surprise that none of the kids I was working with had completed a brief writing assignment, a teacher told me, “Oh yeah—I should have told you. Our students don’t really do homework.”

If and when disadvantaged students get to college, their relative lack of study skills and good homework habits can present a serious handicap. After noticing that black and Hispanic students were failing her course in disproportionate numbers, a professor at the University of North Carolina decided to make some changes , including giving homework assignments that required students to quiz themselves without consulting their notes. Performance improved across the board, but especially for students of color and the disadvantaged. The gap between black and white students was cut in half, and the gaps between Hispanic and white students—along with that between first-generation college students and others—closed completely.

There’s no reason this kind of support should wait until students get to college. To be most effective—both in terms of instilling good study habits and building students’ knowledge—homework assignments that boost learning should start in elementary school.

Some argue that young children just need time to chill after a long day at school. But the “ten-minute rule”—recommended by homework researchers—would have first graders doing ten minutes of homework, second graders twenty minutes, and so on. That leaves plenty of time for chilling, and even brief assignments could have a significant impact if they were well-designed.

But a fundamental problem with homework at the elementary level has to do with the curriculum, which—partly because of standardized testing— has narrowed to reading and math. Social studies and science have been marginalized or eliminated, especially in schools where test scores are low. Students spend hours every week practicing supposed reading comprehension skills like “making inferences” or identifying “author’s purpose”—the kinds of skills that the tests try to measure—with little or no attention paid to content.

But as research has established, the most important component in reading comprehension is knowledge of the topic you’re reading about. Classroom time—or homework time—spent on illusory comprehension “skills” would be far better spent building knowledge of the very subjects schools have eliminated. Even if teachers try to take advantage of retrieval practice—say, by asking students to recall what they’ve learned that day about “making comparisons” or “sequence of events”—it won’t have much impact.

If we want to harness the potential power of homework—particularly for disadvantaged students—we’ll need to educate teachers about what kind of assignments actually work. But first, we’ll need to start teaching kids something substantive about the world, beginning as early as possible.

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Student Opinion

Should We Get Rid of Homework?

Some educators are pushing to get rid of homework. Would that be a good thing?

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

Do you like doing homework? Do you think it has benefited you educationally?

Has homework ever helped you practice a difficult skill — in math, for example — until you mastered it? Has it helped you learn new concepts in history or science? Has it helped to teach you life skills, such as independence and responsibility? Or, have you had a more negative experience with homework? Does it stress you out, numb your brain from busywork or actually make you fall behind in your classes?

Should we get rid of homework?

In “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong, ” published in July, the Times Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that homework may be imperfect, but it still serves an important purpose in school. The essay begins:

Do students really need to do their homework? As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?” I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.” The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Mr. Kang argues:

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility. A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Should we get rid of homework? Why, or why not?

Is homework an outdated, ineffective or counterproductive tool for learning? Do you agree with the authors of the paper that homework is harmful and worsens inequalities that exist between students’ home circumstances?

Or do you agree with Mr. Kang that homework still has real educational value?

When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Do you think the amount is appropriate, too much or too little? Is homework, including the projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or, in your opinion, is it not a good use of time? Explain.

In these letters to the editor , one reader makes a distinction between elementary school and high school:

Homework’s value is unclear for younger students. But by high school and college, homework is absolutely essential for any student who wishes to excel. There simply isn’t time to digest Dostoyevsky if you only ever read him in class.

What do you think? How much does grade level matter when discussing the value of homework?

Is there a way to make homework more effective?

If you were a teacher, would you assign homework? What kind of assignments would you give and why?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Senior Contributing Editor

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

She can be reached at [email protected] .

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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August 16, 2021

Is it time to get rid of homework? Mental health experts weigh in

by Sara M Moniuszko

It's no secret that kids hate homework. And as students grapple with an ongoing pandemic that has had a wide-range of mental health impacts, is it time schools start listening to their pleas over workloads?

Some teachers are turning to social media to take a stand against homework .

Tiktok user @misguided.teacher says he doesn't assign it because the "whole premise of homework is flawed."

For starters, he says he can't grade work on "even playing fields" when students' home environments can be vastly different.

"Even students who go home to a peaceful house, do they really want to spend their time on busy work? Because typically that's what a lot of homework is, it's busy work," he says in the video that has garnered 1.6 million likes. "You only get one year to be 7, you only got one year to be 10, you only get one year to be 16, 18."

Mental health experts agree heavy work loads have the potential do more harm than good for students, especially when taking into account the impacts of the pandemic. But they also say the answer may not be to eliminate homework altogether.

Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold, says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health."

"More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies," she says, adding that staying up late to finish assignments also leads to disrupted sleep and exhaustion.

Cynthia Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Talkspace, says heavy workloads can also cause serious mental health problems in the long run, like anxiety and depression.

And for all the distress homework causes, it's not as useful as many may think, says Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist and CEO of Omega Recovery treatment center.

"The research shows that there's really limited benefit of homework for elementary age students, that really the school work should be contained in the classroom," he says.

For older students, Kang says homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night.

"Most students, especially at these high-achieving schools, they're doing a minimum of three hours, and it's taking away time from their friends from their families, their extracurricular activities. And these are all very important things for a person's mental and emotional health."

Catchings, who also taught third to 12th graders for 12 years, says she's seen the positive effects of a no homework policy while working with students abroad.

"Not having homework was something that I always admired from the French students (and) the French schools, because that was helping the students to really have the time off and really disconnect from school ," she says.

The answer may not be to eliminate homework completely, but to be more mindful of the type of work students go home with, suggests Kang, who was a high-school teacher for 10 years.

"I don't think (we) should scrap homework, I think we should scrap meaningless, purposeless busy work-type homework. That's something that needs to be scrapped entirely," she says, encouraging teachers to be thoughtful and consider the amount of time it would take for students to complete assignments.

The pandemic made the conversation around homework more crucial

Mindfulness surrounding homework is especially important in the context of the last two years. Many students will be struggling with mental health issues that were brought on or worsened by the pandemic, making heavy workloads even harder to balance.

"COVID was just a disaster in terms of the lack of structure. Everything just deteriorated," Kardaras says, pointing to an increase in cognitive issues and decrease in attention spans among students. "School acts as an anchor for a lot of children, as a stabilizing force, and that disappeared."

But even if students transition back to the structure of in-person classes, Kardaras suspects students may still struggle after two school years of shifted schedules and disrupted sleeping habits.

"We've seen adults struggling to go back to in-person work environments from remote work environments. That effect is amplified with children because children have less resources to be able to cope with those transitions than adults do," he explains.

'Get organized' ahead of back-to-school

In order to make the transition back to in-person school easier, Kang encourages students to "get good sleep, exercise regularly (and) eat a healthy diet."

To help manage workloads, she suggests students "get organized."

"There's so much mental clutter up there when you're disorganized... sitting down and planning out their study schedules can really help manage their time," she says.

Breaking assignments up can also make things easier to tackle.

"I know that heavy workloads can be stressful, but if you sit down and you break down that studying into smaller chunks, they're much more manageable."

If workloads are still too much, Kang encourages students to advocate for themselves.

"They should tell their teachers when a homework assignment just took too much time or if it was too difficult for them to do on their own," she says. "It's good to speak up and ask those questions. Respectfully, of course, because these are your teachers. But still, I think sometimes teachers themselves need this feedback from their students."

©2021 USA Today Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Credit: August de Richelieu

Does homework still have value? A Johns Hopkins education expert weighs in

Joyce epstein, co-director of the center on school, family, and community partnerships, discusses why homework is essential, how to maximize its benefit to learners, and what the 'no-homework' approach gets wrong.

By Vicky Hallett

The necessity of homework has been a subject of debate since at least as far back as the 1890s, according to Joyce L. Epstein , co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. "It's always been the case that parents, kids—and sometimes teachers, too—wonder if this is just busy work," Epstein says.

But after decades of researching how to improve schools, the professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education remains certain that homework is essential—as long as the teachers have done their homework, too. The National Network of Partnership Schools , which she founded in 1995 to advise schools and districts on ways to improve comprehensive programs of family engagement, has developed hundreds of improved homework ideas through its Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program. For an English class, a student might interview a parent on popular hairstyles from their youth and write about the differences between then and now. Or for science class, a family could identify forms of matter over the dinner table, labeling foods as liquids or solids. These innovative and interactive assignments not only reinforce concepts from the classroom but also foster creativity, spark discussions, and boost student motivation.

"We're not trying to eliminate homework procedures, but expand and enrich them," says Epstein, who is packing this research into a forthcoming book on the purposes and designs of homework. In the meantime, the Hub couldn't wait to ask her some questions:

What kind of homework training do teachers typically get?

Future teachers and administrators really have little formal training on how to design homework before they assign it. This means that most just repeat what their teachers did, or they follow textbook suggestions at the end of units. For example, future teachers are well prepared to teach reading and literacy skills at each grade level, and they continue to learn to improve their teaching of reading in ongoing in-service education. By contrast, most receive little or no training on the purposes and designs of homework in reading or other subjects. It is really important for future teachers to receive systematic training to understand that they have the power, opportunity, and obligation to design homework with a purpose.

Why do students need more interactive homework?

If homework assignments are always the same—10 math problems, six sentences with spelling words—homework can get boring and some kids just stop doing their assignments, especially in the middle and high school years. When we've asked teachers what's the best homework you've ever had or designed, invariably we hear examples of talking with a parent or grandparent or peer to share ideas. To be clear, parents should never be asked to "teach" seventh grade science or any other subject. Rather, teachers set up the homework assignments so that the student is in charge. It's always the student's homework. But a good activity can engage parents in a fun, collaborative way. Our data show that with "good" assignments, more kids finish their work, more kids interact with a family partner, and more parents say, "I learned what's happening in the curriculum." It all works around what the youngsters are learning.

Is family engagement really that important?

At Hopkins, I am part of the Center for Social Organization of Schools , a research center that studies how to improve many aspects of education to help all students do their best in school. One thing my colleagues and I realized was that we needed to look deeply into family and community engagement. There were so few references to this topic when we started that we had to build the field of study. When children go to school, their families "attend" with them whether a teacher can "see" the parents or not. So, family engagement is ever-present in the life of a school.

My daughter's elementary school doesn't assign homework until third grade. What's your take on "no homework" policies?

There are some parents, writers, and commentators who have argued against homework, especially for very young children. They suggest that children should have time to play after school. This, of course is true, but many kindergarten kids are excited to have homework like their older siblings. If they give homework, most teachers of young children make assignments very short—often following an informal rule of 10 minutes per grade level. "No homework" does not guarantee that all students will spend their free time in productive and imaginative play.

Some researchers and critics have consistently misinterpreted research findings. They have argued that homework should be assigned only at the high school level where data point to a strong connection of doing assignments with higher student achievement . However, as we discussed, some students stop doing homework. This leads, statistically, to results showing that doing homework or spending more minutes on homework is linked to higher student achievement. If slow or struggling students are not doing their assignments, they contribute to—or cause—this "result."

Teachers need to design homework that even struggling students want to do because it is interesting. Just about all students at any age level react positively to good assignments and will tell you so.

Did COVID change how schools and parents view homework?

Within 24 hours of the day school doors closed in March 2020, just about every school and district in the country figured out that teachers had to talk to and work with students' parents. This was not the same as homeschooling—teachers were still working hard to provide daily lessons. But if a child was learning at home in the living room, parents were more aware of what they were doing in school. One of the silver linings of COVID was that teachers reported that they gained a better understanding of their students' families. We collected wonderfully creative examples of activities from members of the National Network of Partnership Schools. I'm thinking of one art activity where every child talked with a parent about something that made their family unique. Then they drew their finding on a snowflake and returned it to share in class. In math, students talked with a parent about something the family liked so much that they could represent it 100 times. Conversations about schoolwork at home was the point.

How did you create so many homework activities via the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program?

We had several projects with educators to help them design interactive assignments, not just "do the next three examples on page 38." Teachers worked in teams to create TIPS activities, and then we turned their work into a standard TIPS format in math, reading/language arts, and science for grades K-8. Any teacher can use or adapt our prototypes to match their curricula.

Overall, we know that if future teachers and practicing educators were prepared to design homework assignments to meet specific purposes—including but not limited to interactive activities—more students would benefit from the important experience of doing their homework. And more parents would, indeed, be partners in education.

Posted in Voices+Opinion

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What’s the Right Amount of Homework?

Decades of research show that homework has some benefits, especially for students in middle and high school—but there are risks to assigning too much.

Many teachers and parents believe that homework helps students build study skills and review concepts learned in class. Others see homework as disruptive and unnecessary, leading to burnout and turning kids off to school. Decades of research show that the issue is more nuanced and complex than most people think: Homework is beneficial, but only to a degree. Students in high school gain the most, while younger kids benefit much less.

The National PTA and the National Education Association support the “ 10-minute homework guideline ”—a nightly 10 minutes of homework per grade level. But many teachers and parents are quick to point out that what matters is the quality of the homework assigned and how well it meets students’ needs, not the amount of time spent on it.

The guideline doesn’t account for students who may need to spend more—or less—time on assignments. In class, teachers can make adjustments to support struggling students, but at home, an assignment that takes one student 30 minutes to complete may take another twice as much time—often for reasons beyond their control. And homework can widen the achievement gap, putting students from low-income households and students with learning disabilities at a disadvantage.

However, the 10-minute guideline is useful in setting a limit: When kids spend too much time on homework, there are real consequences to consider.

Small Benefits for Elementary Students

As young children begin school, the focus should be on cultivating a love of learning, and assigning too much homework can undermine that goal. And young students often don’t have the study skills to benefit fully from homework, so it may be a poor use of time (Cooper, 1989 ; Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). A more effective activity may be nightly reading, especially if parents are involved. The benefits of reading are clear: If students aren’t proficient readers by the end of third grade, they’re less likely to succeed academically and graduate from high school (Fiester, 2013 ).

For second-grade teacher Jacqueline Fiorentino, the minor benefits of homework did not outweigh the potential drawback of turning young children against school at an early age, so she experimented with dropping mandatory homework. “Something surprising happened: They started doing more work at home,” Fiorentino writes . “This inspiring group of 8-year-olds used their newfound free time to explore subjects and topics of interest to them.” She encouraged her students to read at home and offered optional homework to extend classroom lessons and help them review material.

Moderate Benefits for Middle School Students

As students mature and develop the study skills necessary to delve deeply into a topic—and to retain what they learn—they also benefit more from homework. Nightly assignments can help prepare them for scholarly work, and research shows that homework can have moderate benefits for middle school students (Cooper et al., 2006 ). Recent research also shows that online math homework, which can be designed to adapt to students’ levels of understanding, can significantly boost test scores (Roschelle et al., 2016 ).

There are risks to assigning too much, however: A 2015 study found that when middle school students were assigned more than 90 to 100 minutes of daily homework, their math and science test scores began to decline (Fernández-Alonso, Suárez-Álvarez, & Muñiz, 2015 ). Crossing that upper limit can drain student motivation and focus. The researchers recommend that “homework should present a certain level of challenge or difficulty, without being so challenging that it discourages effort.” Teachers should avoid low-effort, repetitive assignments, and assign homework “with the aim of instilling work habits and promoting autonomous, self-directed learning.”

In other words, it’s the quality of homework that matters, not the quantity. Brian Sztabnik, a veteran middle and high school English teacher, suggests that teachers take a step back and ask themselves these five questions :

• How long will it take to complete?
• Have all learners been considered?
• Will an assignment encourage future success?
• Will an assignment place material in a context the classroom cannot?
• Does an assignment offer support when a teacher is not there?

More Benefits for High School Students, but Risks as Well

By the time they reach high school, students should be well on their way to becoming independent learners, so homework does provide a boost to learning at this age, as long as it isn’t overwhelming (Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). When students spend too much time on homework—more than two hours each night—it takes up valuable time to rest and spend time with family and friends. A 2013 study found that high school students can experience serious mental and physical health problems, from higher stress levels to sleep deprivation, when assigned too much homework (Galloway, Conner, & Pope, 2013 ).

Homework in high school should always relate to the lesson and be doable without any assistance, and feedback should be clear and explicit.

Teachers should also keep in mind that not all students have equal opportunities to finish their homework at home, so incomplete homework may not be a true reflection of their learning—it may be more a result of issues they face outside of school. They may be hindered by issues such as lack of a quiet space at home, resources such as a computer or broadband connectivity, or parental support (OECD, 2014 ). In such cases, giving low homework scores may be unfair.

Since the quantities of time discussed here are totals, teachers in middle and high school should be aware of how much homework other teachers are assigning. It may seem reasonable to assign 30 minutes of daily homework, but across six subjects, that’s three hours—far above a reasonable amount even for a high school senior. Psychologist Maurice Elias sees this as a common mistake: Individual teachers create homework policies that in aggregate can overwhelm students. He suggests that teachers work together to develop a school-wide homework policy and make it a key topic of back-to-school night and the first parent-teacher conferences of the school year.

Parents Play a Key Role

Homework can be a powerful tool to help parents become more involved in their child’s learning (Walker et al., 2004 ). It can provide insights into a child’s strengths and interests, and can also encourage conversations about a child’s life at school. If a parent has positive attitudes toward homework, their children are more likely to share those same values, promoting academic success.

But it’s also possible for parents to be overbearing, putting too much emphasis on test scores or grades, which can be disruptive for children (Madjar, Shklar, & Moshe, 2015 ). Parents should avoid being overly intrusive or controlling—students report feeling less motivated to learn when they don’t have enough space and autonomy to do their homework (Orkin, May, & Wolf, 2017 ; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008 ; Silinskas & Kikas, 2017 ). So while homework can encourage parents to be more involved with their kids, it’s important to not make it a source of conflict.

Are You Down With or Done With Homework?

• Posted January 17, 2012
• By Lory Hough

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.

Homework Policy Still Going Strong

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Less Homework = More Learning

Learning, according to that almost automatic view, is what children do in school and, maybe, in other adult-directed activities. Playing is, at best, a refreshing break from learning. From that view, summer vacation is just a long recess, perhaps longer than necessary. But here’s an alternative view, which should be obvious but apparently is not: playing is learning. At play, children learn the most important of life’s lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school. To learn these lessons well, children need lots of play — lots and lots of it, without interference from adults.

Why Homework  I s Not the Answer, and What Is   by Lynn Collins

I once believed  that, through homework,  my child would learn more and , therefore,  achieve more  academically.   If he   beca me a high achiever, he would  later   gain admission to a great college. He would be   set up   for a successful and happy life .    . Over the course of my 20 years as a  teacher  and parent of two, I have come to see things very differently .     . Homework  does not lead to greater achievement , in school or in  life.    . Why Homework i s Not the Answer    . Fi rst , homework   kill s  that natural desire to learn that kids are born with.   Our children spend 6-7 hours in school every day where they   engage in multiple lessons and assignments, and then we give them take-home work.  We  want our kids to work hard and achieve, yet we overload them with work until th ey no longer enjoy  school ,   and learning becomes   “lame ,”  or   overwhelming.   This s chool burn-out is the antithesis to curiosity. And burn-out does not lead to school success.    . Alfie Kohn, a widely popular writer and lecturer on education, summed it up by saying , “Homework may be the greatest extinguisher of curiosity ever invented.”      . Second ,   hundreds of research studies, hundreds, do  not support homework.  According to   Denise Pope , senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and author of  Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids ,   “The research clearly shows  [at the elementary level]   that there is no correlation between academic achievement and homework , especially in the lower grades.”   A  small correlation exists between homework and achievement in middle school, and only two hours is supported by research at the high school level.    . Interestingly,  a study  from Penn State University ,   conducted by researchers Gerald  LeTendre  and David Baker,  showed that students in high performing countries like Japan, Denmark, and the Czech Republic are given less homework than students in the United  States.  Students with the lowest scores came from countries like Iran, Greece, and Thailand, where large amounts of homework were given.    . The  research condemning homework goes on and on.      . Homework often impacts sleep.  After  a long school day, an activity, and   dinner,   children  often take longer to finish their work than they do in school , as they’re tired from the long day; thus, they go to bed later, losing precious sleep, which  is  backed up by  research  as a necessary component to learning.    . “ When we are sleep deprived, our focus, attention, and vigilance drift, making it more difficult to receive information,” wrote the researchers at the  Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  “Without adequate sleep and rest, over-worked neurons can no longer function to coordinate information properly, and we lose our ability to access previously learned information.”    . Additionally, families often disagree and argue over homework, leading to great stress at  home.  The parent becomes the teacher (without credentials) and is expected to know the methods the teacher used in class,  an unfair burden to place on parents. Children deal with the burden of their parents’  disappointment when they don’t understand a concept.   Evenings should not be a stressful time for families but, rather, a chance to bond.    . Finally , k ids who struggle in school  spend so much time  simply   get ting  through the homework that there is no time left to work on the basic skills they need .  How are these kids expected to achieve if they have no time to master the basics?     . What IS the Answer?    . How about learning in other ways? Learning from a teacher who is credentialed and knowledgeable is wonderful, and worksheets can help students work toward mastering the material, but traditional schooling shouldn’t be the only way our kids learn.  How about  an activity  that  is   backed up by research: nightly reading. Kids  can also learn by   watching  interesting documentaries , do ing  math through cooking  and grocery shopping with  a parent ,  play ing  Scrabble, go ing  to museums , and so on .   By learning in other ways, our children will use their brain in new ways ,  and they will see that learning is not just something that happens inside a classroom.     . How about   giving them some down-time after school, or after their activity, so they can recover mentally from the long day? If our kids go to school refreshed rather than stressed every day, their natural curiosity  will return and  they will have more mental energy to learn.  By protecting that   down-time for your kids, you’re also giving them time to think for themselves and discover who they are, rather than being robots who do as they are told from morning until night.      . How about having them do chores?   According  to  the  Harvard Grant Study , the longest longitudinal study of humans ever conducted, the number one predictor of professional success in life is having done chores as a child.  By helping out around the house, children  feel that they are contributing to their family.  This translates to an attitude of, “How can I contribute to the  group ,” as an adult rather than an attitude of, “What can I do for myself?”        . How about changing what homework looks like to  re ignite  that natural desire to learn? Professionals on both sides of the issue agree on   the importance of nightly reading. With a reading-only homework policy, kids would actually have time to do the reading and would enjoy it rather than squeezing  their mandatory minutes into a packed schedule.  A reading-only homework policy  would also allow time for   kids who struggle to work on their basic skills.     . Vicki  Abeles , education advocate and creator of , “Race to Nowhere,”  a powerful documentary on our high-pressure education system and what it is doing to our children, created  guidelines , with her team (a lawyer,  a   professor, and  an   education advocate),  for what homework should be, if assigned at all .   Their guidelines include: project-based, student-led work within the student’s interests, experiences “that cannot be had within the confines of the school setting or school day,” and assignments that “advance a spirit of learning, curiosity, and inquiry among students .”    . Many educators a nd entire schools  a cross  the country  have abolished   homework with great success. Others are hesitant, often because the parents still demand homework without understanding the issue.   If we don’t make a change now, our children will pay the price later. Please go to your child’s teachers and principal and share your thoughts on this crucial issue .   

 . Freedom  in learning, rather than traditional homework, will bring  back our   kids’  natural desire to  learn , setting them up for   greater achievement and fulfillment, both in school and later in life.   . She wouldn’t get more out of organizing a game of hopscotch with her friends? Social skills, focus, movement? Executive function? Joy?  .

Collins , homework , Lynn Collins

64 Responses to Less Homework = More Learning

Homework should be used as a tool, not a requirement. If the child DOES need extra practice then yes, give THAT child homework.

Well there would be more learning if they didn’t drag girls out of class. Oh but we can’t let boys be distracted even when they make inappropriate comments. They say boys only a few styles compared to girls so that makes okay to mess up the girls education. And that look professional isn’t going to do anyone any good if they don’t the brains to go with the job. Plus the whole college ready doesn’t work because no student dress code in college.

Do they want points from the government for good grades which can’t happen if you drag the kid out of class all the time? More points means more money.

I share the concern over too much homework. I am not, however, ready to condemn homework outright.

Some learning requires repetition and practice. These subjects need homework. Music and foreign languages, for example, would be “poster children” for this idea. Bi-lingual children get that way because they hear (and use) multiple languages in their daily life… not just in school.

Another good use of homework is those topics where some children grasp things right away, and others need much more work. By moving that “much more work” to the child’s home, rather than the classroom, you avoid wasting the time of the kids who already got it. In high-school and college level, you can do this by putting some kids in the “we move quick, so keep up” class and others in the “we’ll slow down so you can get it, but it means we won’t have time to even see some of the stuff those other kids get.”

Finally, I worked in education for adults. We expected students to read an assignment and thus be at least familiar with terminology and concepts before coming to class. We also had adult students… we expect that students can and do make their own judgment about how they spend their time, and if preparation for school wasn’t at the top of the list, there’s probably a good reason for that. Adults have adult responsibilities. If you don’t come to class prepared, you won’t get the full value of the education you are paying for… this is choice for you to make, not for me. You have a textbook for a reason, and no, we are NOT going to spend our time in class reading from the textbook. It’s the value proposition… if you could learn everything you need to know about the subject by reading a book, you should go read a book instead of paying ten or twelve times as much for a class.

Some homework is useful. Among other things, it leads to the student learning to estimate time requirements and budget time properly. Some (most) skills benefit from repetition, and the benefits from repetition grow if the repeated incidences are separate in time and context (because we remember things by association, so the more associations we have with something, the easier it is to recall it when we need it. I can have full confidence in my ability to drive a car because I repeat this task frequently. I have somewhat less confidence in my ability to solve an equation involving finding the area under a complex curve, because this isn’t something I repeat.

I had to learn the value of homework the hard way. As a youngster, I was able to learn quickly and retain most of what I learned. This made me believe that homework was a waste of my time. Eventually, however, I started running into academic topics that I couldn’t just absorb by being in the room while they were talked about… My undergraduate GPA shows the effects of learning to value the homework… and it took me an extra year to finish, too.

The application to real life: When my daughter was in school, the school district switched to a grading policy that valued testing… and only testing… in grading, with few exceptions. This effectively made homework 100% optional. As a result, my kid had the same challenge I did, only at the high-school level rather than the college level, because of trying to do the minimum necessary effort, and occasionally (increasingly frequently) underestimating what the minimum required level of effort actually was. So I took her out of high-school, and into college, as soon as the college would take her… in part because they graded homework (but had a better understanding of when homework was required to learn something.)

One final note: While I agree that cooperative play gives valuable learning to children, it does not necessarily follow that less homework means more of that valuable cooperative play. It can just as likely mean more screen time, and there’s a danger to having children learn about the real world from what they see on TV.

This is relevant for you…

http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/22/schools-failures-gifted-children-drive-test-prep-industry/

Remember… Who benefits from more and more testing, more and more sports leagues? Free time and free play does not put money in anyone’s pockets.

Most of those would involve giving parents more responsibility / flexibility, and we just aren’t trusted with that nowadays.

I have to say that if my kids got little homework, I’d give them more work to do myself, because we have a need for it. I don’t care what others do. When I was a kid, I had no problem remembering stuff; I felt the school did too much review as it was. My own kids are different. One of them forgets stuff and flat out needs the practice. The other does not need much outside practice, but she loves to read and do science projects anyway, so that’s what she would do regardless. While it might be nice for the home to have total control over this, it’s also nice to be able to blame the school, vs. having kids resentful at their parents over practice work. 😉

But I do wish they would give more flexibility re *when* the homework gets done. It is stupid to randomly have several hours one night and none the next. Why not give the assignments (or at least some of them) well in advance so the kids can learn how to plan and pace themselves? But that’s a personal rant I suppose ….

@James Pollock: “Another good use of homework is those topics where some children grasp things right away, and others need much more work. By moving that “much more work” to the child’s home, rather than the classroom, you avoid wasting the time of the kids who already got it.”

But that’s not how homework is actually done anywhere that I’ve ever experienced. Instead everybody is given the work – which unfortunately, is all too often pointless busy-work. As the article points out, this ironically often means kids who are truly struggling don’t have time to work on the basic skills they actually need to work on, because they’re already too busy doing the busy-work handouts. Giving a struggling student work specially targeted to his needs is not what anybody normally means by “homework” in contemporary schooling.

As for your point about repetition, yes there are subjects that require it. That’s why teachers should structure that into the many hours of the day they are given to teach kids those subjects.

Well there would be more learning if they didn’t drag girls out of class. Oh but we can’t let boys be distracted even when they make inappropriate comments. They say boys only a few styles compared to girls so that makes okay to mess up the girls education. And that look professional isn’t going to do anyone any good if they don’t the brains to go with the job. Plus the whole college ready doesn’t work because no student dress code in college.

Do they want points from the government for good grades which can’t happen if you drag the kid out of class all the time? More points means more money.

^Are you high?

Okay, girls don’t generally get dragged out of class. There are pull out programs for special ed, and Gifted/Talented and in some cases, enrichment. The only college level schools that might even possibly entertain a uniform/dress code style of sorts would be religious Universities. However, there’s no plausible link between public schools forcing kids to wear uniforms while in elementary and performance later in life.

It’s not based on points, it’s based on attendance.

What does this have to do with homework?

Read “Hard Times” by Dickens. It’s all about the triumph of imagination and humanity over being “crammed with facts.”

Ok art what do you think happens when they dress code girls? Homework is filling those brains with as much information as possible so the tests will have great scores and the government seeing those great scores will give more money. But if kid is dragged out class because the horror they have a collar bone they will more trouble doing any of the work. When kids are dress coded they have to wait till their parents show with something that the school likes in the office which means no learning going on while they wait.

Well, some homework is important. Kids increase their math skills by working out the problems they learned in class that day. BUT I see no need for teachers to assign homework on Friday afternoon to be due on Monday morning. Goodness, weekends should be family time for the kids and school s/b the last thing on their minds till Monday morning!

SO good! When will people start paying attention to the research? There are now lots of studies showing that homework in elementary school has NO benefit. But it does have plenty of downsides.

Really upsetting that parents got up in arms when it was eliminated in favor of more playtime — which has PLENTY of benefit.

This country of ours creates lots of Ph.D.’s in science and engineering, and we have all sorts of advanced technology to show for it — super fast computers, cars that practically drive themselves, and ATM’s that allow me to just stick in a check and it actually reads the amount of the check and deposits it in my account. That still blows my mind.

This country of ours creates lots of Ph.D.’s in the health and wellness fields, and we have all sorts of life-saving medical advancements to show for it. (We can’t afford most of them, but that’s for another blog.)

This country of ours churns out Ph.D. after Ph.D. in education, and what do we have to show for it? Almost nothing, as far as I can tell.

I get so frustrated by “busywork” homework.

I could get behind the teacher having the kids type their spelling words into a “word search generator” – practicing spelling and typing.

I disliked when a teacher handed out a spelling word search she generated and made the kids solve it. If the kid knew how to spell the word, it was worthless busywork. If the kid didn’t know how to spell the words, it was pure torture for them and didn’t really help them learn the spelling.

My high school daughter had an interesting setup in her biology class. Homework didn’t count toward the grade – kids could do what they needed. So my kid did the homework in her head (she hates physically writing things out) and had the memory to remember her answer when they checked the work in class. Then for the tests, it was standards based – as long as the kids followed the prescribed process requesting retakes, they could retake tests as many times as they wished to – and each time the test was different. The point was to iteratively go back over what they didn’t understand and keep trying until they had a fluent understanding. Later tests would revisit earlier standards at random to ensure retention.

^Strict/nonsensical dress codes usually come about because of the idiocy of the Administration of that school. Under most circumstances, a common sense guideline is set. Such as no flip flops for safety reasons, or forbidding skirts so high they show their panties when they sit. Common sense guidelines. At the high school level, if the girl breaks a dress code,it’s generally caught at or before first period,she’s sent home to change. To be blunt, the girl generally knows the dress code, and if she breaks it, it’s her own fault.

Same thing for boys.

Schools are graded not on points, but on accountability. That’s what the whole testing thing is about. If an entire school fails too much of the standardized test, that school can be taken over BY the government, usually at the state level. If a school is taken over by the government, it’s given a certain amount of time to fix their problem, or face closure.

One more time, Schools for the most part, DO NOT get money from the government for test scores, it’s based on attendance, and to some extent,Title IX, and Special Ed. In Texas, schools are primarily paid for by local taxes, and rich districts sending money to poor districts. New buildings, etc, are dealt with through bond elections.

When it comes to test art we can easily grade the kids doing it the old fashion way. You either learn the lesson being taught or you got left behind when your classmates who did learn move up. I would love a simple dress code in schools but anything the school deems a distraction is one. It doesn’t have be in the rules the school opinion is what counts. Tell me when was the last time a collar bone distracted you? Yes a no breasts or butts and no underclothes dress code would be perfect but something so simple will never be.

The teacher who set this homework over the summer holidays has the right idea http://blog.pobble.com/the-best-homework-ever/

Homework is the bane of my existence. My teens hate it and either don’t do it, and fail classes, or fight with us about it, or if they do actually do it, it takes literally all the time there is. I get home at 5:30 or so. If we finish dinner at 6:30, I don’t see the kids again for the rest of the night. They’re in their rooms doing homework until bedtime. I leave before they get up, so during school days we see each other for about 45 minutes tops. Day after day after day. If they want to do sports, or scouts, or anything else that isn’t school, then they’re sleep deprived on top of it. Of course everyone says they should just do homework right after school. But they need time to decompress, to chat with friends, to shoot a few hockey goals in the backyard – all that stuff that keeps them sane. There is no time to watch a movie together, chat about anything, play a game together, anything. Another school year is starting in a week and I am literally having panic attacks about homework, and the fighting and arguing, and the emails from teachers, and all that. If I could homeschool my kids I would, but we need two full time working parents to pay the bills, and I don’t think I have the patience to homeschool (know thyself !). So I will just keep chugging the antidepressants and resign myself to another year of hell.

I do have to add that I agree that some homework is useful. I’m a professor. I give homework that makes students prepare for lab and learn to do research. However, I literally give all of the homework on the first day. In fact, it is up on my website before class starts. My students know everything they need to do, for the whole year, on day one, so they can plan their lives. But I also do a ton of problems in class, so they can practice and get feedback right away. It does no good for them to practice on homework, and then not get the graded feedback for days or weeks. They collaborate and teach each other, and that is much more effective than sheets and sheets of busywork.

It appears, at least in the districts with which I am familiar, that homework is eithe r busywork or making up for lack of teaching. In these districts, children are actually in class only about four hours a day (‘way back in the “olden days” when I was in school it was 6+ hours). This doesn’t take into account that amlost every week the class time is reduced to allow teachers to “attend conferences”, and each time there’s a three-day government holiday–Sat-Sun-Mon–there’s no school on Friday because that’s a “preparation day”. Maybe this explains why our kids know so little about our nearest neighbors, Canada and México; one simply cannot learn much about either of these nations in a couple of weeks. I’m always dismayed when “educated” adults are surprised to learn that these countries have states/provinces, even TV! The kids do seem to spend a lot of time outside. Waiting for the bus or mom to take them those three or four blocks home because “everyone know” walking in a residential or rural neighborhood is so dangerous >sarcasm off<.

Absolutely agree! How can you make the teachers listen? I am tired of hearing “this is the way we have always done it”.

Art – you sound like a mansplainer. I’m a young woman who has first hand experience with the arbitrary nature of school dress codes and their sexist approach. And my observations are repeatedly backed up when these dress codes are subjected to scrutiny. We’re super off topic at this point, but I grabbed the concept presented when this tangent first appeared – we are losing sight of what is best for kids.

It’s not just reducing or eliminating homework that accounts for the dramatic differences in the listed countries and ours. We can change course in how we teach and promote learning – by following the examples of others who have changed their perspective rather than by doubling down on inefficient methods.

Children are extraordinary, their ability to think dynamically decreases with traditional schooling in the US. It is time to stop looking at adult education methods and applying them to children. We need to embrace all their potential!! So, let them play. Let them grow.

And yeah, say no to the consumer based education & sports complex.

Oh gimme a break about the dress codes. I’m a woman raising two daughters. Every time I see an example of “those horrible rape apologists picking on me for dress code,” it’s always a trashy outfit designed to show off what ought to be covered. It’s always a case where the dress code was published and ignored. Ignored because someone thought they were too good to follow the rules. School is not the beach. It’s not that hard to find clothes that meet dress code. Just do it and stop the attention seeking.

So skl you know where to find shorts that touch the knee. Plus with gangs today it becomes twice as hard to find something the school likes. Plus not all schools have air-conditioning which means the school isn’t the place you want to wear pants and long sleeves. You want to wear shorts and no sleeves but that considered not modest. And while they are dragging girls out for the crime of having shoulders the girls aren’t getting an education. Schools says teenager who are boys can’t resist the site of a girl’s skin so go nuts . So when they act like animals no one in school tells them off.

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

I’m confused.

The post was about homework.

Perhaps the discussion can continue about the evils (or benefits) of homework, and whether schools should assign shoulder-breaking amounts of paperwork to children when research indicates children do better without that level of homework.

Or, you know, you could continue the tirade about dress codes and drive off commenters who want nothing to do the topic.

Workshop how many kids do you think can do the homework if they are stuck in the office with the fashion police?

Theresa, Homework, being defined as “work done at home,” means that your question is oxymoronic.

Exactly where will they get the knowledge to do the homework if they are never in class because the fashion police keep dragging them out of class?

>>Theresa, Homework, being defined as “work done at home,” means that your question is oxymoronic.<<

No, it isn't. Let's say Susie gets kicked out of math class and sent to the principal's office because her collarbone is showing, or whatever (and yes, a lot of dress codes these days ARE too strict, arbitrary, and tend to disproportionately target girls). She then has to wait for one of her parents to bring her a different shirt, and she misses the rest of the class period. During math class, the teacher explains the concept of the day, and then assigns homework. Let's say that the teacher wrote the homework on the board at the beginning of class, so Susie managed to at least copy that down before she got sent to the office. So, Susie goes home, and attempts to do the homework, but she doesn't understand it, because she missed most of math class, because her collarbone was showing. So, Workshop, that's what Theresa meant by dress codes interfering with students being able to do their homework (or classwork, for that matter), so her question isn't oxymoronic.

How did a homework discussion get hijacked by *fashion police*? Why do certain posters (Theresa Hall) insist on inserting sex in every thread??

On homework: Our district believes in 10 minutes of homework per grade level, so my 6th grader can expect to do 60 minutes each night, which is too much, imo. Often my elementary child has more homework than the high schooler- he gets a free period during the school day to get his assignments done. I wish the elementary kids had the chance to get things done during the school day.

Also, the *everyday math* being taught now has caused more breakdowns for my daughter and for me (need to pour a glass of wine to understand some of these word problems!) I show her the way I learned and it makes so much more sense to her! I do get that different approaches work for students, but holy hell who are these people making math so confusing and frustrating for young learners?!

I managed to survive to the age of 50 without ever once going sleeveless or wearing shorts in school. And no, we did not have air conditioning.

Yes, you can find long enough shorts and skirts if you look for them.

If you have that much trouble following the dress code, perhaps home schooling is a better fit for you.

I am a 2nd grade teacher. The last few years I’ve been culling homework as much as possible. Last year, I was able to cull it down to the spelling list and tracking of reading minutes, a school-wide requirement. That requirement is gone this year…

So now they got a copy of their spelling words and only if they want to bring it home to study.

Yup, I am attempting to build “wild reading” this year. In my experience, kids are going to read or not and a little box to check off doesn’t change that. Instead I plan to chat up the assumption they’re all reading.

Exactly! I glad you get it Emily. And if you are a black kid watch out for the hair police. No poofy hair no braids no extensions even if they are good for hair. We need less dress codes so kids can devote more time to learning. And oh no you don’t look like what a boy or girl are supposed to look like. Time for a dress code.

Theresa… yes, I understand it’s a problem, but stop it. This post is about homework, stick to that.

I was reading this thinking, ‘At what age? Give us an age!’, knowing that homework is only ineffective up to a certain age that I thought was ~12 and someone else thought was 14-15 or so (last week?). Only thing I found was “[at the elementary level]”, which is up to age… ? Though of course teens, too, would do better if they didn’t have so much homework that it affected their sleep.

Also… if ‘elementary’ children seem to need homework to practice their maths, it always makes me wonder if they’re reaaly old enough to grasp the concept in the first place… Could be a wrong impression of the USA school system though.

What?? Terribly sorry to bring it up again, but if even “sleeveless or wearing shorts in school” is a problem (wtf!??), plenty of my female TEACHERS would have been in trouble as well…!!!

Today my kids’ vision doctor said (in front of said kid) that homework is statistically ineffective. I didn’t really appreciate that, because statistics have nothing to do with the specific child sitting in front of her, who wants to do well in school but WILL NOT if she doesn’t practice at home.

My kids’ school didn’t really overdo homework at least through 4th grade. They could have done a better job of spreading it out, but it was a reasonable amount and it was not just busy work. Those kids who were so smart that they didn’t need the practice were also smart enough to get the work done very quickly and then go play (most days). I would not have complained if they had not given homework, but again, I would have supplemented at home anyway.

I’ve heard that middle school is where statistically homework is helpful on average. For those outside of the US, middle school here usually means grades 5-8 or 6-8.

As a kid, 40+ years ago, I started getting a little bit of homework in the 3rd grade. Again, I was a person who learned quickly and retained easily, so I didn’t need the review. Some other kids struggled. It was not unusual to have a couple kids in our classroom fail the grade. Some kids got extra help outside of school. Many parents used corporal punishment thinking that it would make the kids try harder. Also, the public school standards had taken a dip around that time. So I’m not prepared to say that the “no homework in primary” days were the golden age of childhood.

I think we have to be realistic about what teachers can accomplish during the school day, and also what kids are capable of, i.e., most kids will not be harmed by doing a half hour of homework. For those who cannot do it, there is a process to go through to get an exception.

Art – you sound like a mansplainer. I’m a young woman who has first hand experience with the arbitrary nature of school dress codes and their sexist approach. And my observations are repeatedly backed up when these dress codes are subjected to scrutiny. We’re super off topic at this point, but I grabbed the concept presented when this tangent first appeared – we are losing sight of what is best for kids.

^Abigail, I sub teach in Elementary, my Dad was a high school teacher for 45 years. In fact, in my hometown, this exact situation about dress codes is going on as we speak. It’s a small of 4,000. Parents are up in arms because Administration threatened to highly restrict what the kids wore right before school started. This was after the parents had gone clothes shopping.

My mom actually owns a small clothing boutique. She sells nice perfectly reasonable clothes that teens would wear, However, too many times, she’ll stock but then half of the stuff she stocks suddenly can’t be worn by the kids because of some arbitrary rule. It’s beyond frustrating.

And yes, kids can be unbelievable sometimes in what they can do. I once taught basic electronics to a group of 5th graders in the 90’s. I was also a mobile DJ using vintage amplifiers. I had a gig and I knew one of them had a problem but kept putting it off. I tested the amp before the gig based on a gut feeling, and found it had died. This 5th grade girl saved my butt. She pulled the amp apart, removed the old part, put the new one in, and the amp was good to go.

It’s not just reducing or eliminating homework that accounts for the dramatic differences in the listed countries and ours. We can change course in how we teach and promote learning – by following the examples of others who have changed their perspective rather than by doubling down on inefficient methods.

^ we are on the same page here, the current way of teaching is creating a stressed out generation who cannot think for themselves, where creativity is frowned up. The new way of teaching math is pure bullshiat. We have 3rd Graders who can’t even make change or can barely read clocks.

When it comes to test art we can easily grade the kids doing it the old fashion way. You either learn the lesson being taught or you got left behind when your classmates who did learn move up. I would love a simple dress code in schools but anything the school deems a distraction is one. It doesn’t have be in the rules the school opinion is what counts. Tell me when was the last time a collar bone distracted you? Yes a no breasts or butts and no underclothes dress code would be perfect but something so simple will never be.

^What the hell?

Theresa, even the 70’s, there was standardized testing, but it wasn’t as high stakes as today. Blame No Child Left Behind for that one. Social promotion happened in the 70’s., but it was not real prevalent. As for the collar bone statement, considering my students are under ten years old, and your point is?

Uniforms, can up to an extent, improve behavior, but that is the only difference.

Exactly! I glad you get it Emily. And if you are a black kid watch out for the hair police. No poofy hair no braids no extensions even if they are good for hair. We need less dress codes so kids can devote more time to learning. And oh no you don’t look like what a boy or girl are supposed to look like. Time for a dress code.

^everything you say is a contradiction. Black kids are definitely allowed to wear their hair they want to. Even white blonde girls will sometimes do cornrows. However, Mohawks are generally frowned upon.

Great job. I say let parents help interpret the world! Do it through Math, Social Science, History an other subjects.

Art maybe you should search dress code before you insist that I’m wrong about dress codes. Elementary school kids are rarely called out probably because their bodies are similar shapes. It when they start turning into teens that the biggest coding happen. Telling girls that they are a distraction and mustn’t distract the boys. This will not give a good education to them.

Art maybe you should search dress code before you insist that I’m wrong about dress codes. Elementary school kids are rarely called out probably because their bodies are similar shapes. It when they start turning into teens that the biggest coding happen. Telling girls that they are a distraction and mustn’t distract the boys. This will not give a good education to them.

^did you not read what I said? My dad was a high school teacher. My nephew just finished 8th grade and I asked him about this tonight at supper. He said that the girl is usually given something to wear from the lost and found or told to turn the shirt inside out. Or if the shirt has a bad word, they cover with a sticky note. THEY DON’T GET PULLED OUT at any great length for this. The time dealt with this is minimal. 10 to 15 min at best, and it doesn’t happen enough to be a real problem. They’ll spend more time than that IN THE BATHROOM.

As I mentioned before, each school is different, with different dress codes. Strict/too conservative dress codes usually come from idiot Administration.

As for Elementary, yes there are dress codes, for instance, girls can’t show up in bathing suits (though field days are an exception) or a nightgown (though I have seen a combo of a nightgown and jeans) or if the shirt they are wearing is too loose. Again, its about common sense.

In High School, don’t be naive about girls. They will purposely dress to attract boys if given the chance. They will dress nice to go party or on dates. They most definitely know what they are doing.

I love the article!! I give very very little homework. I teach 3-5 self contained Emotional Behavior Disorder. I’m really trying to wean the parents – they are the ones that want the homework. I assign 20 minutes reading- student choice, Your article inspired other types of homework I could assign – like playing a board game with parent. Great article!

“Art maybe you should search dress code before you insist that I’m wrong about dress codes. ” I’ll do it. Here is the actual policy for the local school district. I found it at https://www.beaverton.k12.or.us/schools/cedar-park/for-parents/Documents/BSDMiddleSchoolDressCode.pdf

With which element(s) of this dress code, specifically, do you object?

I raised a daughter. She occasionally wore skirts that were too short to school. This happened because she had favorites that STAYED favorites even as she grew taller, and they stayed the same length. So a skirt that was long enough because one that was barely long enough became one that was not long enough, without the skirt changing at all. What would usually happen is she’d get dressed for school, I’d see that another skirt was due for retirement, and when it came in for laundry it didn’t go back again. When she got a bit older, we had one of those talks about clothes that are appropriate for some places, of which school is not one. Yes, because those poor boys will be distracted. They can’t help it, the poor dummies.

As a homeschool mom, my viewpoint is largely theoretical and a small percentage concerned for my nephews and niece! I think much of the homework ought to go, but not necessarily 100%. Studying spelling words, larger projects (especially hands-on type) and anything to be memorized such as poetry (if any schools still do that), math facts, or lines for a play, are all right.

I can remember plenty of interesting projects, mostly from 4th grade and from high school Latin!

I have a question (this is a real question, not a “point”): For little kids, what happens if the family never does the homework? My son just finished kindergarten, so I’m looking ahead. In high school, of course, you could fail the class, but young students don’t have a pass-fail system. What happens when a parent goes to the 2nd-grade teacher and respectfully explains that your family is opting out of homework?

Jessica, I really have no idea.

However, my second grade son has homework, and I will be going to the parent-teacher conference to ask specifically why, given the data that indicates homework isn’t effective for 2nd graders, she assigns homework.

My son also happens to be one of the older kids in class since his birthday fell the way it did, and so he gets good scores when he wants to (the fact that he likes to write slowly is a different issue, and easily corrected).

My younger son is the youngest in his class, again due to the weird rules regarding birthday cut-offs. I am interested in seeing how he does with regards to grades and work, given their genetics and home-situation are about as similar as can be.

If I have an interesting story to tell, I’ll be sure to share it.

When I said to search dress code I didn’t mean the rules I meant those who have live with these rules. Yes they are those who will next to nothing but that doesn’t mean boys can’t control themselves. And is really going to make a difference whether your shirt straps are 3 fingers wide or two fingers? Yikes she has a collar bone. Yikes she has legs. Yikes she has shoulders. Come on we can be better than this.

@Jessica – I did exactly that. Trying to get my girl to do homework was roughly as easy as convincing the Pope to convert to satanism. I was NOT going to spend the little time I got to spend with her after work in pitched battles every night. So we just didn’t do it. Ever. My kid scored in the 95th percentile on all the standardized tests, so they really couldn’t say it was affecting her learning. Really, if they’re learning, there isn’t much they can do. They tried taking away recess before they figured out that was a reward for her (she’d much rather stay in and read).

Last year, one of the most effective homework scenarios I saw for my hs freshman was the online math textbook and homework (yes, the school had an adequate plan for kids that could not access the internet at home). The online homework had a variety of problem types (multiple choice, free response, etc.), and once the kids answered the questions, they could “submit” and see right away if they got the question wrong. If wrong, they could try again multiple times. Links were provided back to the relevant section of the textbook.

So kids didn’t run into the problem of doing the whole series of questions wrong (actually practicing the WRONG way to do it) and not knowing for a few days. It kept kids better caught up.

Also, the teacher had a report in the morning as to which problems had multiple attempts or lots of people with no correct answer – customized by class period. So she was able to spend a few minutes at the start of class to allow questions or cover a needed topic and then move on. She said it was really working well. The students agreed.

Dress code – the basics of ours is simple enough: school is your place of “work” and one should dress professionally – polo tucked in (in one of two colors), khakis, and a belt required. On Fridays, one may wear a tshirt (clubs, sports, etc that include the school logo – all approved by school before printing) with the khakis and belt. Similar rules for teachers.

Julie I wish all schools could keep simple. So many seem to be encouraging boys to be future rapists. And being afraid of collar bones and shoulders only messes up girls. Truth be told I don’t think the boys are noticing those things. Just the idiots in charge.

Yes, keeping it simple works well – keep the focus on the positive reasons.

So many kids and adults argue that dress codes inhibit self-expression. I don’t remember why, but one of the students was sharing her thoughts on the dress code. She commented that by having a uniform way of dressing, it challenged her to express herself in other ways that were more based in her character and personal choices. She felt it had inspired tremendous self-growth.

“But I do wish they would give more flexibility re *when* the homework gets done. It is stupid to randomly have several hours one night and none the next. Why not give the assignments (or at least some of them) well in advance so the kids can learn how to plan and pace themselves? But that’s a personal rant I suppose ….”

– Oh, that’s not just you at all, SKL – I definitely feel the same way! My son’s homework schedule last year was a mess. Some nights he would have nothing and others I’d have to insist that he go to bed even though it wasn’t all done.

“I do have to add that I agree that some homework is useful. I’m a professor. I give homework that makes students prepare for lab and learn to do research. However, I literally give all of the homework on the first day. In fact, it is up on my website before class starts. My students know everything they need to do, for the whole year, on day one, so they can plan their lives. But I also do a ton of problems in class, so they can practice and get feedback right away. It does no good for them to practice on homework, and then not get the graded feedback for days or weeks. They collaborate and teach each other, and that is much more effective than sheets and sheets of busywork.”

– I love this, BMS!

As a parent, I would definitely like to see less homework. I have a son who says he’d actually like high school if it didn’t follow him home! And I can see the difference in his curiosity in the summer when he has time to breathe and can learn about whatever interests him, at his own pace.

As a substitute teacher, I’ve seen a lot of different homework policies come and go. If I ever started my own school, I’d encourage homework to be optional, individualized, and limited!

My daughter is about to start kindergarten. She will be six in October. She missed our state’s cut-off day (Virginia, five by Sept 30) by 12 days. When she was a baby and showed signs of being very intelligent we wondered if it would have been better for her to have been born so she could start kindergarten a year earlier. Since then I have become much more educated about the issue and am not only glad she missed the date, but if she had been born in time I still would have kept her back another year not to “red shirt” her but to give her more time to enjoy playing a lot every day and being allowed to learn at her own pace. I have educated her well I think by taking her to parks and teaching her to love animals and bugs. She will learn other things in time but this has been her to time to learn solely from life. I am sad it is at an end and have some trepidation about how she will do in an institutionalized environment. It may be time to start trying harder to pray.

Andrea Drummond,

Redshirting ( or whatever you want to call it )has been shown to be a pretty bad idea across the board. While redshirted students have an initial gain, this is reversed later on, with the students who were the youngest in their class outperforming them. Additionally, such children often lose a year in the labor force. And as far as homework is concerned, with this continued upward drift in the school starting age, this makes the kindergartens even less play-based. This goes especially if you have a gifted child. You may find that your child will need to skip grades ( or have some sort of advanced work ) at some point, and that despite what people tell you about grade skipping, all of the myths about social development have been debunked, and it has been shown to be a very positive experience for most who do it, since grade skippers are with their intellectual peers rather than just age peers. I think that the cutoff system should be much more flexible than it already is.

Mya http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/18/544483397/oldest-kids-in-class-do-better-even-through-college

I think you are correct that different studies in this area seem to produce different results. Here is one report I looked at:

https://www.noodle.com/articles/new-data-suggest-redshirting-in-kindergarten-doesnt-help138

I think that what I was referencing may have compared same age children, one grade level apart- redshirted children, and non-redshirts in the grade above.

But someone has to be the youngest right?

But regardless, I think that the decision should be based on intellectual and social capabilities, rather than birthdays, and that laws should contain assessment procedures for anyone who doesn’t want to start on time, be that early or late. A required assessment for redshirting and early entrance would provide a little bit more objectivity than a parent’s desire to compete, to hothouse, or to shelter, though it would need some funding.

Also, here is an anecdotal perspective: I started kindergarten on time, and it was not a good fit. My parents had considered an early start, but decided not to get tangled up in the legality of it. I was constantly getting pulled out, as I was already reading all sorts of fiction, and working several-digit artithmetic, while my classmates were learning to count to 10, and spell their names. I also didn’t particularly get along with these classmates of mine. 1st or 2nd grade would have definitely been a more natural fit. I ended up skipping two grades later on, and wish I had skipped even more.

While of course, everyone’s situation is different, just know that later isn’t better for everyone.

I love no homework policies and I love dress codes. My kids had very little homework last year and are doing fine. They had time to rest and play and do chores at home. Only had to bring work home if they didn’t finish in class.

I love dress codes and uniforms because I was once the poor kid who never had the right clothes. I was very distracted by trying and failing to keep up with fashion and being left out socially because I didn’t look right. The problem is not girls, it is the fashion industry constantly promoting styles that are not appropriate for the life kids lead. Form should follow function – kids should learn to dress for the occasion and audience. I have a son and a daughters so yes, I’ve considered both sides of that coin.

Yeah I wouldn’t hold a kid back just to delay the inevitable.

My kids were 4yo entering [full-time] KG. They got homework in KG and every year after that. In KG they were fully able to do their own homework in aftercare, which is what I required them to do. So it did not cut into our evenings. Anyway it was the type of thing they would have done for fun if they didn’t have homework – cutting, coloring, copying.

There is so much drama around homework these days. I know it’s rough for some kids, who genuinely run out of mental steam by 3pm. I don’t think most kids have that problem though. I think sometimes it’s the parents who set the tone to be negative and anxious about homework. Making a mountain out of a molehill.

My kids’ school tried a new policy last year of little to no homework every night. My kids’ grades were unchanged from the year before when there was homework (both get straight A’s, with maybe one B per year). They had a lot more free time at home and we all spent more time as a family. They played outside more, and also practiced piano more. On the flip side, I was not as connected to what they were doing in class. I’m hoping the school keeps this policy, but perhaps amends it to 10 minutes of homework per night, maybe a different subject each night, just so we can see firsthand how they are doing in each subject and give any help if needed. The kids are going into 3rd and 5th grades.

BMS says “They’re in their rooms doing homework until bedtime.”

BMS, I wonder how long their homework would take if they did it at the kitchen table? Do they take their cell phones to the bedroom with them? How sure are you that they are actually doing homework all that time? I know from personal experience that the less I want to do something, the more distractions I can find, and the longer that odious task will take.

How is it that homework (educational practice at home) is seen as having little value, but music practice (scales, arpeggios, practicing a piece over and over again) and sports skills drills (soccer dribbling, basketball free throws, etc.) are absolutely crucial to being the best at music or sports?

I’ll agree that homework has little value if it is busywork and/or it repeats what the child has already learned.

But kids that haven’t learned the material may benefit from more practice. However, perhaps supervised practice would be more helpful, which I guess rules out homework in cases where there’s no one home who can help.

Skip, I think that the reason that sports and music require so much drill and kill, is because they are physical activities in which one must build a very specialized set of fine motor skills. You can mentally grasp what a 3-octave C major scale, or penalty kick is long before your brain can signal your body to execute it with ease. And when you stop practicing, even for a few days, things start to get rusty.

As far as I am concerned, once you know how to do long division, it sticks for many years, if not a whole lifetime, and doesn’t start to deteriorate after as little as a week of non-use.

Skip–music and sports practice are valuable up to a certain point, but you wouldn’t send a child to a music day camp, or a sports day camp, for six, seven, eight hours each day, and then require them to do hours of additional practice at home, so that they have little or no time for anything else, right? Even a child who LOVES, say, basketball, or orchestra, or choir, is going to get burned out on that. Now, imagine if this “camp” ran from September through June each year, except during breaks, when there might still be copious amounts of mandatory home practice assigned. Most people would say that such a schedule would be excessive, and ultimately harmful to children. However, that’s how it is (or at least how it feels to a young person) when it comes to “academic practice.”

For example, you may have a five-year-old child who starts kindergarten genuinely wanting to make new friends and learn–learn about the three R’s, about making handprint-turkeys for Thanksgiving, and handprint wreaths at Christmas, and handprint Valentines for Valentine’s Day (seriously, ECE teachers, why all the handprints?), and about the world around them, but gosh darn it, learning is HARD, and it takes the better part of the daylight hours–when Five gets home, it’s time to eat a snack, play outside, or even just rest and decompress for a bit, even if there’s a screen involved. But that can’t happen if poor Five is inundated with tons of worksheets and readers and “reinforcement” assignments. See Dick run, see Jane jump, see Five develop premature ulcers, because it’s Five who should be running and jumping around after a full day of school. Now, see this pattern play itself out year after year, from kindergarten through grade twelve, with the content becoming more difficult. Now, fast-forward to high school–the subject matter might actually be quite interesting (even if it is harder to grasp), but it’s much harder to reach a young person who’s been turned off of learning, than it is to try to prevent that disengagement from happening in the early years. So, now let’s say that Dick and Jane have been replaced by Romeo and Juliet, but now Five (who might actually be fifteen or sixteen by now) is checked out, and is paradoxically missing out on some really great literature, because it’s just another step in the endless parade of required reading and mandatory schoolwork that extends into home hours. Five will memorize just enough to pass the test (maybe with the help of Coles’ Notes/Cliff’s Notes/SparkNotes.Com/whatever), but probably won’t really enjoy it. Even if Five finds it interesting, there’s no time to really get into it, because after that, there’s calculus to tackle, French verbs to conjugate, and so on, and so forth. With things like sports and music, we can usually recognize when a young person has had “too much of a good thing” (usually around the time when frustration and repeated injuries happen, or when that activity monopolizes the child’s or the family’s schedule, or when the child is just plain miserable), and so, we adjust things at that point. However, it’s not really possible to do that with school–at least in a public school setting, everyone attends full-time, or not at all, in the absence of a doctor’s note or an IEP that allows for part-time hours.

@Melissa–You say that homework keeps you up to speed with regards to what your children are learning in school. What about just asking them? You might not get as many specific details as you would by checking a child’s homework, but asking out of interest would probably procure more enthusiastic answers, such as, “today we learned about dinosaurs,” or “I scored a goal in soccer during gym class.” I don’t have kids, but my dad got really awful about me and math when I was in high school. He’d go into my room, into my backpack, and look through my books, to see what I was doing, and make me redo everything that wasn’t perfect, no matter how long ago it was. It would take hours, sometimes days, and there’d be fights and tears, and I wasn’t a slacker; I just wasn’t great at math, even though I tried. My parents required me to take advanced math in grade ten and eleven (grade nine was destreamed), even though I didn’t have the aptitude for it, and I was miserable. I was finally allowed to drop math after grade eleven–the teacher gave me a mercy 50% (minimum passing mark in Canada) because he saw I wasn’t enrolled in math for grade twelve, because my parents finally saw how miserable it made me. Other than that, I liked school–I had friends, and I did band, student government, and various other activities, like newspaper and theatre, and I was a good student in my other subjects; I just struggled with math. Even if someone was visiting the family, like my uncle, and they asked me how school was, within earshot of my dad, he’d always “override” my positive answer with, “Oh, that’s a sore subject; Emily doesn’t try hard enough in math,” and he’d make a whole big deal of it and completely embarrass me. If I’d been allowed to take general math instead of advanced, or if I wasn’t inundated with tons of math work to do at home when I hadn’t understood the material at school (one teacher in particular would brush me off when I said I didn’t understand, saying I “shouldn’t have had problems with that question” if he thought it was too easy), then I might have done better. A no-homework policy would have been amazing for me, if it meant actually teaching the material thoroughly at school instead.

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OPINION: Why Students Should Have Significantly Less Homework

The opinions published by  The Match  are solely those of the author, and not of the entire publication, its staff, or Collegiate School.  The Match  welcomes thoughtful commentary and response to our content. You can respond in the comments below, but please do so respectfully. Letters to the Editors will be published, but they are subject to revision based on content or length. Letters can be sent to [email protected].

By Ava Lingerfelt

15-year-old boy doing homework. Photo credit: David R. Frazier Photolibrary, Inc.

During the past school year, I have struggled with mental health due to excessive amounts of homework. Although I am grateful for my education and my experience at Collegiate, it is difficult to balance school work, sports, a social life, and college preparation. I know some students struggle more than others with school-life balance, but I am not the only one whose mental health is affected by excessive amounts of school work. 

In 2021, Tyler Brand (‘23) wrote a Match opinion piece, “ Why should students have less homework ?” He wrote about the history of homework and the negative impact it has on teens. He included teacher and student opinions about excessive homework, and many students expressed their desire for less homework. His article highlights that some teachers agree that students should have less homework, and some students strongly feel that they should be assigned less work for the sake of their mental health and stress levels. 

Similarly, I believe students should be assigned less homework to improve their mental health and stress levels. I understand that homework is assigned in order for students to learn the skill of completing work individually, which is why I don’t believe homework should be taken away completely. Homework is beneficial because it teaches students about time management and working independently, which is a crucial life skill. However, I think that students need a break from homework from time to time in order to clear their heads or deal with other things that may be going on in their lives.

One possible solution to this is the idea that students shouldn’t be assigned homework on the weekends so that students truly get a break from school and the stress that comes with it. An alternative would be only having homework due Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so that students have a greater amount of time to manage their workload. 

Cherry Hill High School West (New Jersey) junior Jessica Amble, in an article last year on her school news site titled “ How Homework is Destroying Teens’ Mental Health ,” agreed, writing that according to a study by Stanford University , “Students in high-achieving communities who spend too much time on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, a lack of balance and even alienation from society.” 

Amble questions whether or not it makes sense to continue assigning homework if many studies have shown that it has harmful effects on students. She says, “According to The Washington Post , the estimated number of teenagers suffering from at least one mental illness is 1 in 5.” There are many different factors that can contribute to mental illness, but one of the leading factors is school and the work and pressure that comes with it. 

In 2021, USA Today’s Sara Moniuszko wrote an article related to homework affecting mental health in teens titled “ Is it time to get rid of homework ?” She writes about how homework “ takes away time from friends, family,  and extracurricular activities; which are all very important things for a person’s mental and emotional health.” In order to maintain satisfactory mental health, teens require time to do the things they enjoy, and homework often impedes their ability to do so. 

Cynthia Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Talkspace , worked with students abroad, in France, whe re the students had a no-homework policy. She says, “Not having homework was something that I always admired from the French students (and) the French schools, because that was helping the students to really have the time off and really disconnect from school.”

Two kids doing homework. Photo credit: TEK image, Science Photo Library.

Similarly, Sydney Trebus, then a senior at Boulder High School in Colorado, wrote in 2019, “ Is Excessive Homework the Cause of Many Teen Issues ?” She said, “ homework over a certain time limit can cause stress, depression, anxiety, lack of sleep, and more.” This contributes to the idea that homework can cause a variety of problems in teens and their mental health.

Trebus mentions another study done by Stanford, which shows, “56 percent of students considered homework a primary source of stress, 43 percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while less than one percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.” Although homework may be beneficial towards students’ education, Trebus explained that it is, “detrimental to their attitude towards school, their grades, their self-confidence, their social skills, and their quality of life.” 

Since homework is a primary stressor for students, Trebus says, “ if schools keep making homework more prominent in the learning system, students will lose their passion for learning.” I think school is something that students should be passionate and excited about, but the immense amounts of work that comes with it makes it significantly less enjoyable. Sydney says, “the more time taken away from the emotional and physical health of a student, the more resentful they will be towards school.”

I find it fascinating that there are multiple students that have expressed their opinions about excessive stress due to homework, but there haven’t been many changes made to solve the problem. Students and mental health professionals agree about how homework largely affects teens’ mental health.

Collegiate students agree. Abby Rosenstock (’24), says, “I am constantly stressed out during the week and usually during the weekends too.” She also says, “It feels like I can never catch a break.” I agree with Rosenstock, which is why I propose that students deserve no homework days to relax and focus on their mental health. 

Tired teenager falling asleep while doing homework Photo credit: David Davis.

Meredith Lanning (’24), says, “It would be nice if students had time to relax a little bit and get more sleep every once in a while.” She also says, “if we had less homework, we could get more sleep and maybe have a little bit of time to relax.” I agree; students currently aren’t getting enough sleep and have little to no time to relax. By the time students finish sports, showering, dinner, and homework, it is late and time to go to bed. 

Upper School English teacher and Match advisor Vlastik Svab says, “ I have definitely seen student stress levels rise, in general, in my 20 years teaching in high schools. I think schools like Collegiate ask a great deal of our students, and many are overwhelmed with all of their commitments. Homework can have value, but we as teachers should always be evaluating whether what we’re asking students to do has real educational value. I have found myself assigning less homework over time and having students write more in class, as that gives me the opportunity to workshop their writing with them in person.” 

I thoroughly agree with Svab’s response; I am also one of his students this semester, and I have appreciated the amount of class time he gives us to complete assignments. It definitely helps lighten the homework load and lower my stress levels. 

I hope more teachers recognize the importance of mental health and the excessive stress homework is causing on teens. I hope one day teachers start listening to students’ concerns and act on it. I hope one day students won’t see school and homework as a stressor, but instead as an exciting opportunity to learn new things. 

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Ava is a member of the class of 2024

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Less Work, More Learning: The Promise of Effective Feedback

Misconception #1: The harder a teacher works, the more a student learns.

Misconception #2: feedback is objective and experienced the same way by all students., misconception #3: lots of teacher comments lead to lots of student learning., misconception #4: grades are feedback., bringing it all together.

Premium Resource

Students learn from our comments if and only if they do significant intellectual work in dialogue with our feedback.

Postponing the Grade

To remove the temptation for students to focus on a grade, teachers can wait to give them out until students have first spent time reading and reflecting on their feedback.

Brookhart, S. (2017).  How to give effective feedback to your students  (2nd Ed.). ASCD.

Dickson, B., & Housiaux, A. (2021).  Feedback in practice: Research for teachers . Tang Institute.

Guskey, T. (2019). Grades versus comments: Research on student feedback.  Phi Delta Kappan ,  101 (3).

Hammond, Z. (2015).  Culturally responsive teaching and the brain . Corwin.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback.  Review of Educational Research ,  77 (1).

Kleinfeld, J. (1975). Effective teachers of Eskimo and Indian students.  The School Review ,  83 (2).

Kuepper-Tetzel, C., & Gardner, P. (2021, March 9). Effects of temporary mark withholding on academic performance.  Psychology Learning and Teaching .

Wiggins, G. (2012). Seven keys to effective feedback.  Educational Leadership ,  70 (1).

Wiliam, D. (2016). The secret of effective feedback.  Educational Leadership ,  73 (7).

Wiliam, D. (2018).  Embedded formative assessment  (2nd Ed.). Solution Tree.

Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., et al. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General ,  143 (2).

Andrew Housiaux teaches philosophy and religious studies and is the Currie Family Director of the Tang Institute at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

Bowman Dickson is a high school mathematics teacher at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C.

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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Our commitment to delivering trustworthy and engaging content is at the heart of what we do. Each fact on our site is contributed by real users like you, bringing a wealth of diverse insights and information. To ensure the highest standards of accuracy and reliability, our dedicated editors meticulously review each submission. This process guarantees that the facts we share are not only fascinating but also credible. Trust in our commitment to quality and authenticity as you explore and learn with us.

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First refuelling for Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov floating NPP

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The FNPP includes two KLT-40S reactor units. In such reactors, nuclear fuel is not replaced in the same way as in standard NPPs – partial replacement of fuel once every 12-18 months. Instead, once every few years the entire reactor core is replaced with and a full load of fresh fuel.

The KLT-40S reactor cores have a number of advantages compared with standard NPPs. For the first time, a cassette core was used, which made it possible to increase the fuel cycle to 3-3.5 years before refuelling, and also reduce by one and a half times the fuel component in the cost of the electricity produced. The operating experience of the FNPP provided the basis for the design of the new series of nuclear icebreaker reactors (series 22220). Currently, three such icebreakers have been launched.

The Akademik Lomonosov was connected to the power grid in December 2019, and put into commercial operation in May 2020.

Electricity generation from the FNPP at the end of 2023 amounted to 194 GWh. The population of Pevek is just over 4,000 people. However, the plant can potentially provide electricity to a city with a population of up to 100,000. The FNPP solved two problems. Firstly, it replaced the retiring capacities of the Bilibino Nuclear Power Plant, which has been operating since 1974, as well as the Chaunskaya Thermal Power Plant, which is more than 70 years old. It also supplies power to the main mining enterprises located in western Chukotka. In September, a 490 km 110 kilovolt power transmission line was put into operation connecting Pevek and Bilibino.

Image courtesy of TVEL

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Electrostal History and Art Museum - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

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