Alfie kohn the homework myth
Compelling exposé of homework – how it fails our children, why it’s so widely accepted, and what we can do about and taxes come later; what seems inevitable for children is the idea that, after spending the day at school, they must then complete more academic assignments at home. In the homework myth, alfie kohn systematically examines the usual defenses of homework – that it promotes higher achievement, “reinforces” learning, teaches study skills and responsibility. Kohn’s incisive analysis reveals how a mistrust of children, a set of misconceptions about learning, and a misguided focus on competitiveness have all left our kids with less free time and our families with more conflict. Pointing to parents who have fought back – and schools that have proved educational excellence is possible without homework — kohn shows how we can rethink what happens during and after school in order to rescue our families and our children’s love of : the truth about homework. Parents take note: this is a stinging jeremiad against the assignment of homework, which the author, a prominent educator, convincingly argues is a wasteful, unimaginative, and pedagogically bankrupt practice that initiates kids into a soul-sucking rat race long before their time. The homework myth should be required reading for every teacher, principal, and school district head in the country. Kohn has never been better at challenging the status quo and declaring that the emperor has no clothes. Kohn takes many of the things we assume about homework and shreds them, showing over and over how little research there is to back up all the accepted theories. He] chip[s] away at the conventional thinking that homework improves achievement, that homework improves grades, that homework builds character and all the other things we’ve heard about it since we were doing it . Because, in the end, what kohn wants parents and teachers to do, if nothing else, is think about this homework issue. For a more detailed look at the issues discussed here — including a comprehensive list of citations to relevant research and a discussion of successful efforts to effect change– please see the book the homework myth. Many parents lament the impact of homework on their relationship with their children; they may also resent having to play the role of enforcer and worry that they will be criticized either for not being involved enough with the homework or for becoming too involved. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits. Homework in most schools isn’t limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important. Ve heard from countless people across the country about the frustration they feel over homework. And teachers who have long harbored doubts about the value of homework feel pressured by those parents who mistakenly believe that a lack of afterschool assignments reflects an insufficient commitment to academic achievement. They need principals who question the slogans that pass for arguments: that homework creates a link between school and family (as if there weren’t more constructive ways to make that connection! All, principals need to help their faculties see that the most important criterion for judging decisions about homework (or other policies, for that matter) is the impact they’re likely to have on students’ attitudes about what they’re doing. Most of what homework is doing is driving kids away from learning,” says education professor harvey daniels. Let’s face it: most children dread homework, or at best see it as something to be gotten through. Make sure you know what the research really says – that there is no reason to believe that children would be at any disadvantage in terms of their academic learning or life skills if they had much less homework, or even none at all. Requiring teachers to give a certain number of minutes of homework every day, or to make assignments on the same schedule every week (for example, x minutes of math on tuesdays and thursdays) is a frank admission that homework isn’t justified by a given lesson, much less is it a response to what specific kids need at a specific time. Many parents are understandably upset with how much time their children have to spend on homework. As one mother told me, “it’s cheating to say this is 20 minutes of homework if only your fastest kid can complete it in that time.
Then work on reducing the amount of homework irrespective of such guidelines and expectations so that families, not schools, decide how they will spend most of their ty, however, is not the only issue that needs to be addressed. Teachers should be invited to reflect on whether any given example of homework will help students think deeply about questions that matter. This, of course, is a reversal of the current default state, which amounts to an endorsement of homework for its own sake, regardless of the content, a view that simply can’t be justified. Find out what students think of homework and solicit their suggestions – perhaps by distributing anonymous questionnaires. Many adults simply assume that homework is useful for promoting learning without even inquiring into the experience of the learners themselves! On those days when homework really seems necessary, teachers should create several assignments fitted to different interests and capabilities. But it’s better to give no homework to anyone than the same homework to everyone. Students should have something to say about what they’re going to learn and the circumstances under which they’ll learn it, as well as how (and when) their learning will be evaluated, how the room will be set up, how conflicts will be resolved, and a lot is true of education in general is true of homework in particular. A reasonable first question for a parent to ask upon seeing a homework assignment is “how much say did the kids have in determining how this had to be done, and on what schedule, and whether it really needed to be completed at home in the first place? Discussion about whether homework might be useful (and why) can be valuable in its own right. Teachers who consult with their students on a regular basis would shake their heads vigorously were you to suggest that kids will always say no to homework – or to anything else that requires effort. When students are treated with respect, when the assignments are worth doing, most kids relish a , on the other hand, students groan about, or try to avoid, homework, it’s generally because they get too much of it, or because it’s assigned thoughtlessly and continuously, or simply because they had nothing to say about it. As the eminent educator martin haberman observed, homework in the best classrooms “is not checked – it is shared. If students conclude that there’s no point in spending time on assignments that aren’t going to be collected or somehow recorded, that’s not an argument for setting up bribes and threats and a climate of distrust; it’s an indictment of the homework itself. Ask teachers who are reluctant to rethink their long-standing reliance on traditional homework to see what happens if, during a given week or curriculum unit, they tried assigning none. Surely anyone who believes that homework is beneficial should be willing to test that assumption by investigating the consequences of its absence. Considerable gumption is required to take on an issue like homework, particularly during an era when phrases like “raising the bar” and “higher standards” are used to rationalize practices that range from foolish to inappropriate to hair-raising. But of course a principal’s ultimate obligation is to do what’s right by the children, to protect them from harmful mandates and practices that persist not because they’re valuable but merely because they’re anyone willing to shake things up in order to do what makes sense, beginning a conversation about homework is a very good place to are awash in articles and books that claim homework is beneficial – or simply take the existence or value of homework for granted and merely offer suggestions for how it ought to be assigned, or what techniques parents should use to make children complete it. The case against homework: how homework is hurting our children and what we can do about it (new york: crown, 2006). The homework myth: why our kids get too much of a bad thing (cambridge, ma: da capo press, 2006). The end of homework: how homework disrupts families, overburdens children, and limits learning (boston: beacon press, 2000). You might think that open-minded people who review the evidence should be able to agree on whether homework really does so, you’d be wrong. Researchers have been far from unanimous in their assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of homework as an instructional technique,” according to an article published in the journal of educational psychology. The conclusions of more than a dozen reviews of the homework literature conducted between 1960 and 1989 varied greatly. Their assessments ranged from homework having positive effects, no effects, or complex effects to the suggestion that the research was too sparse or poorly conducted to allow trustworthy conclusions. You think about it, any number of issues could complicate the picture and make it more or less likely that homework would appear to be beneficial in a given study: what kind of homework are we talking about?
The fact that there isn’t anything close to unanimity among experts belies the widespread assumption that homework helps. It demonstrates just how superficial and misleading are the countless declarations one hears to the effect that “studies find homework is an important contributor to academic achievement. Casting doubt on that assumption goes back at least to 1897, when a study found that assigning spelling homework had no effect on how proficient children were at spelling later on. 2] by 1960, a reviewer tracked down 17 experimental studies, most of which produced mixed results and some of which suggested that homework made no difference at all. One found that homework helped, two found that it didn’t, and two found mixed results. The authors, who included a long-time advocate of traditional educational policies, claimed the results demonstrated that homework had “powerful effects on learning. 5] but another researcher looked more carefully and discovered that only four of those fifteen studies actually compared getting homework with getting no homework, and their results actually didn’t provide much reason to think it helped. 8] cooper included seventeen research reports that contained a total of 48 comparisons between students who did and did not receive homework. He also reviewed surveys that attempted to correlate students’ test scores with how much homework they did. Forty-three of fifty correlations were positive, although the overall effect was not particularly large: homework accounted for less than 4 percent of the differences in students’ scores. Those that compared students with and without homework found a stronger association with achievement than the earlier studies had, but these new experiments measured achievement by students’ scores on tests that had been designed to match the homework they had just done. As for more recent studies looking for a relationship between achievement and time spent on homework, the overall correlation was about the same as the one found in 1989. The recent studies not included in cooper’s new review: one, using a methodology associated with economics, concluded that the amount of math homework given to teenagers was a very good predictor of these students’ standardized test scores in math. 11] but another study – the same one that found younger students are spending a lot more time doing homework these days (see chapter 1) — discovered that the extent of that time commitment was “not associated with higher or lower scores on any [achievement] tests. The bottom line, i’ll argue in this chapter, is that a careful examination of the data raises serious doubts about whether meaningful learning is enhanced by homework for most students. Of the eight reasons that follow, the first three identify important limitations of the existing research, the next three identify findings from these same studies that lead one to question homework’s effectiveness, and the last two introduce additional data that weaken the case even tions of the research. Nevertheless, most research purporting to show a positive effect of homework seems to be based on the assumption that when students who get (or do) more homework also score better on standardized tests, it follows that the higher scores were due to their having had more are almost always other explanations for why successful students might be in classrooms where more homework is assigned – let alone why these students might take more time with their homework than their peers do. Even cooper, a proponent of homework, concedes that “it is equally plausible,” based on the correlational data that comprise most of the available research on the topic, “that teachers assign more homework to students who are achieving better . 13] in still other cases, a third variable – for example, being born into a more affluent and highly educated family – might be associated with getting higher test scores and with doing more homework (or attending the kind of school where more homework is assigned). Or that a complete absence of homework would have any detrimental effect at mes it’s not easy to spot those other variables that can separately affect achievement and time spent on homework, giving the impression that these two are causally related. One of the most frequently cited studies in the field was published in the early 1980s by a researcher named timothy keith, who looked at survey results from tens of thousands of high school students and concluded that homework had a positive relationship to achievement, at least at that age. But a funny thing happened ten years later when he and a colleague looked at homework alongside other possible influences on learning such as quality of instruction, motivation, and which classes the students took. When all these variables were entered into the equation simultaneously, the result was “puzzling and surprising”: homework no longer had any meaningful effect on achievement at all. 14] in other words, a set of findings that served – and, given how often his original study continues to be cited, still serves – as a prominent basis for the claim that homework raises achievement turns out to be l studies have actually found a negative relationship between students’ achievement (or their academic performance as judged by teachers) and how much time they spend on homework (or how much help they receive from their parents). 16] what’s really going on here, we’re assured, is just that kids with academic difficulties are taking more time with their homework in order to catch sounds plausible, but of course it’s just a theory. One study found that children who were having academic difficulties actually didn’t get more homework from their teachers,[17] although it’s possible they spent longer hours working on the homework that they did get.
But even if we agreed that doing more homework probably isn’t responsible for lowering students’ achievement, the fact that there’s an inverse relationship seems to suggest that, at the very least, homework isn’t doing much to help kids who are struggling. In any event, anyone who reads the research on this topic can’t help but notice how rare it is to find these same cautions about the misleading nature of correlational results when those results suggest a positive relationship between homework and achievement. It’s only when the outcome doesn’t fit the expected pattern (and support the case for homework) that they’re carefully explained short, most of the research that’s cited to show that homework is academically beneficial really doesn’t prove any such thing. The studies claiming that homework helps are based on the assumption that we can accurately measure the number and length of assignments. But many of these studies depend on students to tell us how much homework they get (or complete). When cooper and his associates looked at recent studies in which the time spent on homework was reported by students, and then compared them with studies in which that estimate was provided by their parents, the results were quite different. In fact, the correlation between homework and achievement completely disappeared when parents’ estimates were used. 18] this was also true in one of cooper’s own studies: “parent reports of homework completion were . 19] the same sort of discrepancy shows up again in cross-cultural research — parents and children provide very different accounts of how much help kids receive[20] — and also when students and teachers are asked to estimate how much homework was assigned. 21] it’s not clear which source is most accurate, by the way – or, indeed, whether any of them is entirely first two flaws combine to cast doubt on much of the existing data, according to a damning summary that appears in the encyclopedia of educational research: “research on homework continues to show the same fundamental weaknesses that have characterized it throughout the century: an overdependence on self-report as the predominant method of data collection and on correlation as the principal method of data analysis. It turns out that what’s actually being measured – at least in all the homework research i’ve seen — is one of three things: scores on tests designed by teachers, grades given by teachers, or scores on standardized exams. Each is seriously flawed in its own studies that involve in-class tests, some students are given homework – which usually consists of reviewing a batch of facts about some topic – and then they, along with their peers who didn’t get the homework, take a quiz on that very material. The outcome measure, in other words, is precisely aligned to the homework that some students did and others didn’t do — or that they did in varying amounts. If you remembered more of them after cramming, the researcher would then conclude that “learning in the evening” is the second kind of study, course grades are used to determine whether homework made a difference. Bad as grades are in general, they are particularly inappropriate for judging the effectiveness of homework for one simple reason: the same teacher who handed out the assignments then turns around and evaluates the students who completed them. The final grade a teacher chooses for a student will often be based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, that student did the homework. Thus, to say that more homework is associated with better school performance (as measured by grades) is to provide no useful information about whether homework is intrinsically valuable. The studies that use grades as the outcome measure, not surprisingly, tend to show a much stronger effect for homework than studies that use standardized test scores. They also looked at how much homework was assigned by the teacher as well as at how much time students spent on their homework. Here’s how they came out:Effect on grades of amount of homework assigned no sig. On grades of amount of homework done negative on test scores of amount of homework done no sig. On grades of amount of homework done positive on test scores of amount of homework done no sig. These eight comparisons, then, the only positive correlation – and it wasn’t a large one – was between how much homework older students did and their achievement as measured by grades. 26] if that measure is viewed as dubious, if not downright silly, then one of the more recent studies conducted by the country’s best-known homework researcher fails to support the idea of assigning homework at any last, and most common, way of measuring achievement is to use standardized test scores. The limitations of these tests are so numerous and so serious that studies showing an association between homework and higher scores are highly misleading. M unaware of any studies that have even addressed the question of whether homework enhances the depth of students’ understanding of ideas or their passion for learning.
To use them anyway calls to mind the story of the man who looked for his lost keys near a streetlight one night not because that was where he dropped them but just because the light was better our children’s ability to understand ideas from the inside out is what matters to us, and if we don’t have any evidence that giving them homework helps them to acquire this proficiency, then all the research in the world showing that test scores rise when you make kids do more schoolwork at home doesn’t mean very much. That’s particularly true if the homework was designed specifically to improve the limited band of skills that appear on these tests. It’s probably not a coincidence that, even within the existing test-based research, homework appears to work better when the assignments involve rote learning and repetition rather than real thinking. The available homework research defines “beneficial” in terms of achievement, and it defines achievement as better grades or standardized test scores. It allows us to conclude nothing about whether children’s learning for the moment that we weren’t concerned about basing our conclusions on studies that merely show homework is associated with (as opposed to responsible for) achievement, or studies that depend on questionable estimates of how much is actually completed, or studies that use deeply problematic outcome measures. Even taken on its own terms, the research turns up some findings that must give pause to anyone who thinks homework is valuable. The longer the duration of a homework study, the less of an effect the homework is shown to have. 30] cooper, who pointed this out almost in passing, speculated that less homework may have been assigned during any given week in the longer-lasting studies, but he offered no evidence that this actually happened. View a small, unrepresentative slice of a child’s life and it may appear that homework makes a contribution to achievement; keep watching and that contribution is eventually revealed to be illusory. In cooper’s review, as i’ve already pointed out, homework could explain only a tiny proportion of the differences in achievement scores. 31] and in a more recent investigation of british secondary schools, “the payoff for working several more hours per week per subject would appear to be slight, and those classes where there was more homework were not always those classes which obtained better results. 32] as one scholar remarked, “if research tells us anything” about homework, it’s that “even when achievement gainshave been found, they have been minimal, especially in comparison to the amount of work expended by teachers and students. Even if you were untroubled by the methodological concerns i’ve been describing, the fact is that after decades of research on the topic, there is no overall positive correlation between homework and achievement (by any measure) for students before middle school – or, in many cases, before high school. More precisely, there’s virtually no research at all on the impact of homework in the primary grades – and therefore no data to support its use with young children – whereas research has been done with students in the upper elementary grades and it generally fails to find any absence of evidence supporting the value of homework before high school is generally acknowledged by experts in the field – even those who are far less critical of the research literature (and less troubled by the negative effects of homework) than i am. In fact, it’s with younger children, where the benefits are most questionable, if not altogether absent, that there has been the greatest increase in the quantity of homework! 1989, cooper summarized the available research with a sentence that ought to be e-mailed to every parent, teacher, and administrator in the country: “there is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students. It, too, found minuscule correlations between the amount of homework done by sixth graders, on the one hand, and their grades and test scores, on the other. The point was to see whether children who did math homework would perform better on a quiz taken immediately afterward that covered exactly the same content as the homework. The second study, a master’s thesis, involved 40 third graders, again in a single school and again with performance measured on a follow-up quiz dealing with the homework material, this time featuring vocabulary skills. The fourth graders who had been assigned homework on this material performed better on the textbook’s unit test, but did not do any better on a standardized test. And the third graders who hadn’tdone any homework wound up with higher scores on the standardized test. 36] like the other three studies, the measure of success basically involved memorizing and regurgitating seems safe to say that these latest four studies offer no reason to revise the earlier summary statement that no meaningful evidence exists of an academic advantage for children in elementary school who do homework. If the raw correlation between achievement (test scores or grades) and time spent on homework in cooper’s initial research review is “nearly nonexistent” for grades 3 through 5, it remains extremely low for grades 6 through 9. A correlation would be a prerequisite for assuming that homework provides academic benefits but i want to repeat that it isn’t enough to justify that conclusion. Indeed, i believe it would be a mistake to conclude that homework is a meaningful contributor to learning even in high school. Remember that cooper and his colleagues found a positive effect only when they looked at how much homework high school students actually did (as opposed to how much the teacher assigned) and only when achievement was measured by the grades given to them by those same teachers.
Also recall that keith’s earlier positive finding with respect to homework in high school evaporated once he used a more sophisticated statistical technique to analyze the of the cautions, qualifications, and criticisms in this chapter, for that matter, are relevant to students of all ages. But it’s worth pointing out separately that absolutely no evidence exists to support the practice of assigning homework to children of elementary-school age – a fact that cooper himself rather oddly seems to overlook (see chapter 4). 39] that development may strike us as surprising – particularly in light of how japan’s educational system has long been held out as a model, notably by writers trying to justify their support for homework. Students who take this test also answer a series of questions about themselves, sometimes including how much time they spend on homework. For any number of reasons, one might expect to find a reasonably strong association between time spent on homework and test scores. Even students who reported having been assigned no homework at all didn’t fare badly on the er the results of the 2000 math exam. Fourth graders who did no homework got roughly the same score as those who did 30 minutes a night. In eighth grade, the scores were higher for those who did between 15 and 45 minutes a night than for those who did no homework, but the results were worse for those who did an hour’s worth, and worse still for those did more than an hour. Comparisons allow us to look for correlations between homework and test scores within each country and also for correlations across countries. In some countries more time spent on homework was associated with higher scores; in others, it was not. Again, the results were not the same in all countries, even when the focus was limited to the final years of high school (where the contribution of homework is thought to be strongest). Usually it turned out that doing some homework had a stronger relationship with achievement than doing none at all, but doing a little homework was also better than doing a lot. Cities: “there was no consistent linear or curvilinear relation between the amount of time spent on homework and the child’s level of academic achievement. These researchers even checked to see if homework in first grade was related to achievement in fifth grade, the theory being that homework might provide gradual, long-term benefits to younger children. 46] the reasoning, in other words, goes something like this:Premise 1: our students get significantly less homework than their counterparts across the e 2: other countries whup the pants off us in international sion: premise 1 explains premise onal conclusion: if u. Teachers assigned more homework, our students would perform step of this syllogism is either flawed or simply false. When they published their findings in 2005, they could scarcely conceal their surprise:Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships, [but] the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in the frequency, total amount, and percentage of teachers who used homework in grading are all negative! If these data can be extrapolated to other subjects – a research topic that warrants immediate study, in our opinion – then countries that try to improve their standing in the world rankings of student achievement by raising the amount of homework might actually be undermining their own success. States or districts as well as 37 other countries, meanwhile, “there was little relationship between the amount of homework assigned and students’ performance. Reviews of homework studies tend to overlook investigations that are primarily focused on other topics but just happen to look at homework, among several other variables. At first they found a very small relationship between the amount of homework that students had had in high school and how well they were currently doing. The same researchers then embarked on a similar study of a much larger population of students in college science classes – and found the same thing: homework simply didn’t help. Among her findings: the exceptional teachers not only tended to give less homework but also were likely to give students more choices about their ’s interesting to speculate on why this might be true. Or perhaps the researchers who reviewed the timms data put their finger on it when they wrote, “it may be the poorest teachers who assign the most homework [because] effective teachers may cover all the material in class. It certainly took time for phil lyons, the social studies teacher i mentioned earlier who figured out that homework was making students less interested in learning for its own sake – and who then watched as many of them began to “seek out more knowledge” once he stopped giving them homework. At the beginning of lyons’s teaching career, he assigned a lot of homework “as a crutch, to compensate for poor lessons.
Homework is an obvious burden to students, but assigning, collecting, grading, and recording homework creates a tremendous amount of work for me as well. But when all these observations are combined with the surprising results of national and international exams, and when these, in turn, are viewed in the context of a research literature that makes a weak, correlational case for homework in high school – and offers absolutely no support for homework in elementary school – it gradually becomes clear that we’ve been sold a bill of who never bought it will not be surprised, of course. I have a good education and a decent job despite the fact that i didn’t spend half my adolescence doing homework,” said a mother of four children whose concern about excessive homework eventually led to her becoming an activist on the issue. 55] on the other hand, some will find these results not only unexpected but hard to believe, if only because common sense tells them that homework should help. But just as a careful look at the research overturns the canard that “studies show homework raises achievement,” so a careful look at popular beliefs about learning will challenge the reasons that lead us to expect we will find unequivocal research support in the first place. The absence of supporting data actually makes sense in retrospect, as we’ll see in chapter 6 when we examine the idea that homework “reinforces” what was learned in class, along with other declarations that are too readily accepted on ’s true that we don’t have clear evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that homework doesn’t help students to learn. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what that evidence might look like – beyond repeated findings that homework often isn’t even associated with higher achievement. To borrow a concept from the law, however, the burden of proof here doesn’t rest with critics to demonstrate that homework doesn’t help. When a principal admits that homework is “taking away some of the years of adolescence and childhood” but then says that requiring it from the earliest grades “give[s] us an edge in standardized testing,” we have to wonder what kind of educator – indeed, what kind of human being – is willing to accept that trade-off even if the latter premise were true. Proponents, of course, aren’t saying that all homework is always good in all respects for all kids – just as critics couldn’t defend the proposition that no homework is ever good in any way for any child. The prevailing view — which, even if not stated explicitly, seems to be the premise lurking behind our willingness to accept the practice of assigning homework to students on a regular basis — might be summarized as “most homework is probably good for most kids. What’s more, even studies that seem to show an overall benefit don’t prove that more homework – or any homework, for that matter — has such an effect for most students. Put differently, the research offers no reason to believe that students in high-quality classrooms whose teachers give little or no homework would be at a disadvantage as regards any meaningful kind of is there some other benefit, something other than academic learning, that might be cited in homework’s defense? The third found benefits at two of three grade levels, but all of the students in this study who were assigned homework also received parental help. The last study found that students who were given math puzzles (unrelated to what was being taught in class) did as well as those who got traditional math homework. There is reason to question whether this technique is really appropriate for a topic like homework, and thus whether the conclusions drawn from it would be valid. The proportion of variance that can be attributed to homework is derived by squaring the average correlation found in the studies, which cooper reports as +. It’s also theoretically possible that the relationship is reciprocal: homework contributes to higher achievement, which then, in turn, predisposes those students to spend more time on it. Interestingly, herbert walberg, an avid proponent of homework, discovered that claims of private school superiority over public schools proved similarly groundless once other variables were controlled in a reanalysis of the same “high school and beyond” data set (walberg and shanahan). 1998, “there was some evidence that teachers in grades 2 and 4 reported assigning more homework to classes with lower achievement, but students and parents reported that teachers assigned more homework to higher achieving students, especially when grades were the measure of achievement” (p. Several surveys have found that students consistently report their homework time to be higher than teachers’ estimates” (ziegler 1986, p. 161), too, describes the quality of homework research as “far from ideal” for a number of reasons, including the relative rarity of random-assignment studies. For a more detailed discussion about (and review of research regarding) the effects of grades, see kohn 1999a, 1999b. See kohn 1999b, 2000, which includes analysis and research to support the claims made in the following paragraphs. On the other hand, a study reporting a modest correlation between achievement test scores and the amount of math homework assigned also found that “repetitive exercises” of the type intended to help students practice skills actually “had detrimental effects on learning” (trautwein et al. An additional hour of homework each night results in an increase in english [grade point average] of 0.
When the researchers compared classes rather than individuals – which is probably the more appropriate unit of analysis for a homework study — the average a-level grades in heavy-homework classes were no different than those in light-homework classes, once other variables were held constant (pp. 20) speculates that it’s because younger children have limited attention spans and poor study skills, but this explanation proceeds from – and seems designed to rescue — the premise that the problem is not with the homework itself. Rather, it’s the “cognitive limitations” of children that prevent them from taking advantage of the value that’s assumed to inhere in homework. While it wouldn’t be sufficient to substantiate this account, it would certainly be necessary to show that homework usually is valuable for older students. When cooper and his colleagues reviewed a new batch of studies in 2006, they once again found that “the mean correlation between time spent on homework and achievement was not significantly different from zero for elementary school students” (cooper et al. Please write to the address indicated on the contact us and press “enter” to r 2 of the homework myth.