Homework
From dioramas and book reports to algebraic word problems and research projects, whether students should be given homework, as well as the type and amount of homework, has been debated for more than a century. [1]
While we are unsure who invented homework, we do know that the word “homework” dates back to ancient Rome. Pliny the Younger asked his followers to practice their speeches at home. Enlightenment philosophers and Middle Age monks all read, memorized, and studied at home long before the formalization of “school work.” [45]
In the 19th century, German students of the Volksschulen (“People’s Schools”) were given assignments to complete outside of the school day. This concept of homework quickly spread across Europe and was brought to the United States by Horace Mann, who encountered the idea in Prussia.[45]
In the early 1900s progressive education theorists, championed by the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal, decried homework’s negative impact on children’s physical and mental health, leading California to ban homework for students under 15 from 1901 until 1917. In the 1930s homework was portrayed as child labor, which was newly illegal, and the prevailing argument was that kids needed time to do household chores. [1][2][45][46]
Public opinion swayed again in favor of homework in the 1950s because of concerns about keeping up with the Soviet Union’s technological advances during the Cold War. But resistance to homework was still strong, with a May 14, 1960, issue of the Saturday Evening Post bemoaning that “certain schools have answered the challenge of Sputnik with busy work — meaning more history dates to memorize, more arithmetic problems to copy at home. It is homework hysteria. Often it is unplanned and gives students impossible loads of work one night and little the next. Busywork bores the bright student—and overwhelms the average.” However, seven months later, by December 1960, the Saturday Evening Post had reversed course, recommending that the U.S. “lengthen our school year and increase the amount of homework required.”[3][45][56]
A 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education report, “A Nation at Risk,” concluded “homework is good and more is better.” In 1986, the U.S. Department of Education included homework in its pamphlet “What Works,” as a strategy to boost education. By 1993, a larger homework load was being assigned in 27 percent of high schools, 30 percent of middle schools, and 32 percent of elementary schools. [56]
Determining the average amount of homework assigned and completed is a difficult task in a country with over 115,000 schools and over 50 million students. A 2014 study found that kindergarteners to fifth graders averaged 2.9 hours of homework per week, sixth to eighth graders 3.2 hours per teacher per week, and ninth to twelfth graders 3.5 hours per teacher per week. A 2014–19 study found that teens spent about an hour a day on homework. This one-hour pattern was confirmed by a 2020 Washington Post article that reported that “high-performing schools” were requiring about 2.7 hours of homework per night, but that the average across schools was about an hour per night. [4][44][53][57]
As explained by Education Week, the accepted guideline, supported by both the National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association, is the 10-minute rule: “Children should have no more than 10 minutes of homework each day for each grade reached. In 1st grade, children should have 10 minutes of daily homework; in 2nd grade, 20 minutes; and so on to the 12th grade, when on average they should have 120 minutes of homework each day, which is about 10 hours a week.” [54]
Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the very idea of homework, as students were schooling remotely and many were doing all school work from home. Washington Post journalist Valerie Strauss asked, “Does homework work when kids are learning all day at home?” While students were mostly back in school buildings in fall 2021, the debate remained over the effectiveness of homework as an educational tool. [47]
Estimates show students spending less time on homework post-pandemic. Tenth graders spent 15 fewer minutes a day from 2021 to 2023 (a 24 percent drop) on homework, and eighth graders spent 7 fewer minutes a day (a 17 percent drop). What is unknown is whether teachers are assigning less homework, students are using artificial intelligence or other technology to complete homework more quickly, or whether students are simply not completing their assignments. [55]
So, is homework beneficial? Explore the debate below.
Pros and Cons at a Glance
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| Pro 1: Homework improves student achievement. Read More. | Con 1: Too much homework is harmful. Read More. |
| Pro 2: Homework helps to reinforce classroom learning while developing good study habits and life skills. Read More. | Con 2: Homework exacerbates the digital divide, or homework gap. Read More. |
| Pro 3: Homework allows parents to be involved with their children’s learning. Read More. | Con 3: Homework does not help younger students and may not help high schoolers. Read More. |
Pro Arguments
(Go to Con Arguments)Pro 1: Homework improves student achievement.
Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.
Research published in the High School Journal indicated 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.” [6]
Students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69 percent of students who didn’t have homework on both standardized tests and grades. A majority of studies on homework’s impact—64 percent in one meta-study and 72 percent in another—showed that take-home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. [7][8]
Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better grade point averages (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 compared to boys who didn’t attend college. [10]
Some studies have also showed that increasing the frequency of homework, not the duration of homework—meaning more homework of shorter duration—may be especially effective in improving student outcomes.[62]
Pro 2: Homework helps to reinforce classroom learning while developing good study habits and life skills.
Students typically retain only 50 percent of the information teachers provide in class, and they need to apply that information in order to truly learn it. As Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer, cofounders of Teachers Who Tutor NYC, explained, “at-home assignments help students learn the material taught in class. Students require independent practice to internalize new concepts.…[And] these assignments can provide valuable data for teachers about how well students understand the curriculum.”[11][49]
Elementary school students who were taught “strategies to organize and complete homework,” such as prioritizing homework activities, collecting study materials, note-taking, and following directions, showed increased grades and more positive comments on report cards. [17]
Research by the City University of New York noted that “students who engage in self-regulatory processes while completing homework,” such as goal-setting and time management, “are generally more motivated and are higher achievers than those who do not use these processes.”[18]
Homework also helps students develop key skills that they’ll use throughout their lives: accountability, autonomy, discipline, time management, self-direction, critical thinking, and independent problem-solving. Freireich and Platzer noted that “homework helps students acquire the skills needed to plan, organize, and complete their work.” [12][13][14][15][49]
Pro 3: Homework allows parents to be involved with their children’s learning.
Thanks to take-home assignments, parents are able to track what their children are learning at school as well as their academic strengths and weaknesses. [12]
Data from a nationwide sample of elementary school students show that parental involvement in homework can improve class performance, especially among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students. [20]
Research from Johns Hopkins University found that an interactive homework process known as TIPS (Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork) improves student achievement: “Students in the TIPS group earned significantly higher report card grades after 18 weeks (1 TIPS assignment per week) than did non-TIPS students.” [21]
Homework can also help clue parents in to the existence of any learning disabilities their children may have, allowing them to get help and adjust learning strategies as needed. Duke University professor Harris Cooper noted, “Two parents once told me they refused to believe their child had a learning disability until homework revealed it to them.”[12]
Pro Quotes
The Centre for Educational Neuroscience stated:
The consensus is clear: quality matters more than quantity. Short, well-designed assignments are far more effective than lengthy, poorly constructed ones, which risk undermining learning altogether. Assigning homework that spark a student’s interest and creativity tend to engage them more effectively. However, what constitutes a “quality assignment” can differ based on the subject. For instance, areas like spelling, vocabulary, and foreign language often require practice and memorisation. While these assignments might not seem very exciting, they play a crucial role, nonetheless.
The key for parents, educators, and researchers is to focus on tailoring homework to students’ needs and contexts, ensuring it is purposeful, balanced, and meaningful. By identifying strategies that enhance the positive effects while mitigating the negative ones, homework can become a more effective tool for fostering learning and development. [61]
Researchers Nathan McJames, Andrew Parnell, and Ann O’Shea, all of Maynooth University in Ireland, stated:
Our results demonstrate a clear positive effect of increasing homework frequency, but not homework duration. We therefore recommend that frequent homework assignments of short duration may be most effective for improving student outcomes. This strategy can help to promote academic achievement whilst avoiding the potential drawbacks associated with many hours spent on homework. Our second research finding was that students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds did not benefit less from homework than their peers. This has important implications for homework policy, as it challenges the suggestion from some researchers that homework may contribute to widening achievement gaps across socioeconomic groups. As a result, we also recommend that homework should continue to play an important role in the learning process, as we find no evidence of disparate impacts across socioeconomic groups. [62]
Barb Waterman, English teacher at Hebron Academy in Maine, stated:
I think that homework is important, especially in an English classroom because reading is an individual pursuit and you interact with the text, you embody the characters that you are reading, and you live their experiences. We do that independently and as an individual. I think that assigning reading and then having kids annotate while they’re reading, answer questions while they’re reading, write questions while they’re reading, or draw a picture to interact with the text in some way is really important so that they can then come to class and learn from each other, ask their questions, challenge each other, and have all that material prepared for a really in-depth, sophisticated class discussion, activity, writing assignment, or whatever we do in class with that. It would be so hard for the class to move forward if you weren’t doing that independent leg work on your own the night before. The other reason I really assign a lot of homework and believe in homework is because I tell kids in high school you are in class eight hours a day and you have two hours to do homework at night time, give or take. But in college, which is what we are all preparing you for, it’s really an inverse relationship where you have class for only two hours but you spend about eight hours prepping for that class. The volume of homework that you are going to receive at the institutions where you guys are all hoping to go off to and attend one day just exponentially increases so much so I think if we’re not assigning homework at this level we’re doing you a disservice for what comes down the road. [58]
Con Arguments
(Go to Pro Arguments)Con 1: Too much homework is harmful.
A poll of California high schoolers found that 59 percent thought they had too much homework. 82 percent of respondents said that they were “often or always stressed by schoolwork.” High-achieving high schoolers said too much homework leads to sleep deprivation and other health problems such as headaches, exhaustion, weight loss, and stomach problems.[24][28][29]
As Alfie Kohn, an education and parenting expert, argues, “Kids should have a chance to just be kids … it’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.” [27]
Emmy Kang, a mental health counselor, agreed. “More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress,” she reports, “and we know what stress can do on our bodies.”[48]
Excessive homework can also lead to cheating: 90 percent of middle schoolers and 67 percent of high schoolers admit to copying someone else’s homework, and 43 percent of college students engaged in “unauthorized collaboration” on out-of-class assignments. Even parents take shortcuts on homework: 43 percent of those surveyed admitted to having completed a child’s assignment for them.[30][31][32]
Con 2: Homework exacerbates the digital divide, or homework gap.
Kiara Taylor, a financial expert, defined the digital divide as “the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology and those that don’t. Though the term now encompasses the technical and financial ability to utilize available technology—along with access (or a lack of access) to the Internet—the gap it refers to is constantly shifting with the development of technology.” For students, this is often called the homework gap. [50][51]
30 percent (about 15-16 million) public school students either did not have an adequate Internet connection or an appropriate device, or both, for distance learning. Completing homework for these students is more complicated (having to find a safe place with an Internet connection, or borrowing a laptop, for example) or impossible.[51]
A Hispanic Heritage Foundation study found that 96.5 percent of students across the country needed to use the Internet for homework, and nearly half reported they were sometimes unable to complete their homework due to lack of access to the Internet or a computer, which often resulted in lower grades.[37][38]
One study concluded that homework increases social inequality because it “potentially serves as a mechanism to further advantage those students who already experience some privilege in the school system while further disadvantaging those who may already be in a marginalized position.” [39]
Con 3: Homework does not help younger students and may not help high schoolers.
We’ve known for a while that homework does not help elementary students. A 2006 study found that “homework had no association with achievement gains” when measured by standardized tests results or grades. [7]
Fourth-grade students who did no homework got roughly the same score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam as those who did 30 minutes of homework a night. Students who did 45 minutes or more of homework a night actually did worse. [41]
Temple University professor Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek said that homework is not the most effective tool for young learners to apply new information: “They’re learning way more important skills when they’re not doing their homework.” [42]
In fact, homework may not be helpful at the high-school level either. Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, said he “interviewed high school teachers who completely stopped giving homework and there was no downside, it was all upside.” As he explained, “just because the same kids who get more homework do a little better on tests, doesn’t mean the homework made that happen.” [52]
Con Quotes
Chris McNutt, co-founder and executive director of Human Restoration Project, stated:
At Human Restoration Project, one of the core systemic changes we suggest is the elimination of homework.
Journalist Anne Thériault stated:
Not all students have a quiet, well-lit space in their homes where they can work. Many parents aren’t home in the afternoons and evenings—due to shift work or because they attend evening classes—and students in those households are often expected to care for younger siblings and cook dinner after school. Students may not have access to computers at home, meaning that they can’t complete work assigned online. Since work assigned to be done at home may make up a portion of a student’s overall grade, those whose home lives aren’t conducive to homework may struggle to maintain a high grade point average. [Etta] Kralovec [professor emerita at the University of Arizona and author of The End of Homework and Schools That Do Too Much] says this creates “a system of homework which further advances kids who are privileged.”[60]
Lisa Ragatz, chemistry teacher at Hebron Academy in Maine, stated:
“There are several reasons I’m not especially fond of homework.
Discussion Questions
- Is homework beneficial? Consider the study data, your personal experience, and other types of information. Explain your answer(s).
- If homework was banned, what other educational strategies would help students learn classroom lessons? Explain your answer(s).
- How has homework been helpful or unhelpful to you personally? List reasons for both sides of the question.
Take Action
- Examine an argument in favor of quality homework assignments from Janine Bempechat.
- Explore Oxford Learning’s infographic on the effects of homework on students.
- Consider Joseph Lathan’s argument that homework promotes inequality.
- Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.
- Push for the position and policies you support by writing U.S. senators and representatives.
Sources
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- Edward Bok, “A National Crime at the Feet of American Parents,” The Ladies Home Journal(January 1900)
- Tim Walker, “The Great Homework Debate: What’s Getting Lost in the Hype” (September 23, 2015) neatoday.org
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