Do students need to do homework?

Prior to recently, only students had voiced dissatisfaction with the practice of assigned homework. For many years, parents and educators saw homework as an essential component of educating kids. But because research on the effectiveness of homework have been contradictory and ambiguous, some adults have argued that it should be phased away.

What the Evidence Suggests About Homework

Harris Cooper, a professor at Duke, believes it’s critical for students to have homework. His meta-analysis of homework studies revealed a link, at least in older grades, between finishing homework and academic success. He suggests adhering to the “10 minute rule”: first-graders should have 10 minutes of homework every day, followed by 10 more minutes each year until they are doing 120 minutes of homework every day by the end of twelfth grade.

His investigation only demonstrated a correlation; it did not establish that students performed better as a result of doing their assignments. This could simply imply that students who complete their assignments are more dedicated to performing well in class. Cooper also discovered that some data indicated that doing homework contributed to unfavorable attitudes toward learning as well as physical and mental stress. He proposed that further study be done on the impact of schoolwork on children.

According to some researchers, the issue is not whether or not children should have homework. The amount and type of homework given to kids is more important. The needs of the pupils must be met for homework to be productive. For instance, some middle school teachers have had success using online math assignments that are customized to each student’s comprehension level. However, middle school pupils’ test results in math and science decreased when they had more than an hour and a half of homework.

The grades of students who completed their math and science assignments were found to be higher on standardized tests, but there was no difference in their course grades between the two groups of students, according to Indiana University researchers. According to these researchers, doing homework increases students’ familiarity with the types of questions that would be asked on standardized examinations rather than their topic mastery. One of the study’s authors, Professor Adam Maltese, said, “Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be.”

Therefore, despite the widespread endorsement of daily homework from instructors and parents, there is little concrete proof that the long-standing practice is effective.

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