When I ran for election to my local school board, one of my campaign planks was to promote homework. I lost. Many parents objected to my platform, often because homework would interfere with their kids' extracurricular activities or with their part-time job. One parent said to me, "We don't want any homework. My son needs that time to work at his job." I asked, "Why does he need to work?" She said, "Well, to pay for his truck for one thing." "Why does he need a truck?" I asked. Her reply: "Well, you dufus, to get to his job!"
A Duke University neuroscientist, Harris Cooper, posted in The Sacremento Bee on Jan. 17, 2010 some of his findings from research on this topic. He pointed out that an earlier Associated Press poll found that 57% of parents thought their kids got about the right amount of homework. Another 23% thought there was too little homework and 19% thought there was too much.
Harris was interested, not so much in parent opinion, but about the question of whether or not homework helps test performance. When he and his helpers looked at various published homework studies, they found that the effect varied by grade level. Comparing students who were assigned homework with students assigned no homework but who were similar in other ways suggested that homework can improve students' scores on the class tests that come at the end of a topic. Students assigned homework in second grade did better on math, third- and fourth-graders did better on English skills and vocabulary, fifth-graders on social studies, ninth- through 12th-graders on American history and 12th-graders on Shakespeare.
He finds that practice assignments do improve scores on class tests at all grade levels. A little amount of homework may help elementary school students build study habits. Homework for junior high students appears to reach the point of diminishing returns after about 90 minutes a night. For high school students, the positive line continues to climb until between 90 minutes and 2 1/2 hours of homework a night, after which returns diminish.
What nobody seems to have studied is the question of what kind of homework is most effective. Options include busy work such as filling out work sheets, problems to solve, projects to complete, Web quests, essays to write, and various other kinds of tasks. I would expect that the nature of the homework makes a big difference in the effectiveness of learning and in attitude about school.
All forms of homework can help memory formation. Rehearsal of learned material soon after it is learned is a key to efficient memory formation. In my opinion, failure of a teacher to assign homework is educational malpractice.
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