The Problem with Grading

  • Posted May 19, 2023
  • By Lory Hough
  • Education Reform
  • Student Achievement and Outcomes

Illustration of a magician's hat by Nate Williams

My son’s binder was a mess. Loose papers were falling out, others looked like they had been balled up or stepped on, some more than once. The binder itself was bent in one corner. But he was a seventh-grader and to him, it looked just fine.

Unfortunately, his seventh-grade math teacher didn’t agree and deducted points from his grade for being messy. This same teacher also took off points when homework was completed with something other than a pencil or if a student needed a second copy of an assignment. If a student was asked to move their seat during class, she slashed five points. Points were earned back if a parent signed the list of rules, and it was returned in a timely manner.

Being organized and not misbehaving in class are skills students need to figure out, for sure, and I certainly wanted my son to be neater, but factoring these behaviors into grades — especially for middle-schoolers just learning to come into their own — didn’t make sense to me.

And so, when I learned, a few years later, that my son’s high school was rethinking their grading practice, I decided it was time to dig deeper into what Grading for Equity author Joe Feldman, Ed.M.’93, calls “one of the most challenging and emotionally charged conversations in today’s schools.”

Grades Are What?

I started by asking a question that seems simple on the surface: What is a grade?

Feldman, a former teacher and principal, says that on a really basic level, grades are the way teachers calculate and report student performances. Typically, it’s an accumulation of points (0 to 100) with corresponding letters (A through F, minus E). Earn an 89 on a test and your grade is a B+, for example. Believed to date back to 1785, when Yale President Ezra Stiles gave four grades to his seniors ( optimi , second optimi , inferiors , and pejores ), grades have long been a part of our education system in the United States. In fact, Feldman says, grades have become “the main criteria in nearly every decision that schools make about students,” from whether they get promoted to the next class or held back, to which course level a student should be taking, such as college prep, honors, or AP. It’s how many high schools tally GPA and student rank, and one of the main ways that colleges decide who they’ll even consider for admissions.

“Grading is evaluation, putting a value on something,” says Denise Pope, Ed.M.’89, a senior lecturer at Stanford who runs a project called Challenge Success. Pope stresses, however, that grades are not the same as assessment, and to really talk about grading, we have to make the distinction between the two terms.

“Assessment is feedback so that students can learn,” Pope says. “It’s helping them see where they are and helping them move toward a point of greater understanding or mastery. Grading doesn’t always do that, but assessment should.”

When she hosts professional development workshops to help schools rethink their assessment practices, she likes to point out that the Latin root of assessment is assidere , which means to sit beside. Assessment is seeing where a student is with their understanding — what they don’t know, what they do know — and then using that to determine what they need. “Sometimes a grade does that,” Pope says, “but a lot of times students have no idea what that grade means.”

And that’s what seems to be at the heart of the debate about grading, and what rubbed me the wrong way when my son was in that math class: Students, teachers, parents, and college admissions officers have no idea what a letter grade — this thing we are saying is really important in a student’s school life — is really saying. Does an A mean a student has truly mastered that history lesson? Does the C+ mean the student was “sort of” getting the math they were learning, or did it mean they were an ace at math, but just couldn’t keep a neat binder?

What’s the Problem?

The confusion starts with consistency, as in, there is none. At most schools, there’s no consistency about what’s included in a grade or what’s left out, even among teachers teaching the same subject in the same school to students in the same grade at the same level. This creates what is often called “grade fog” — we’re not sure what the grade means because we’re asking that A or that C+ to communicate too much disparate information.

“It’s radically inconsistent from teacher to teacher,” says A.J. Stitch, Ed.M.’12, the founding principal of the Greater Dayton School, a private school in Ohio for kids from low-income backgrounds that doesn’t use traditional grades. At public schools where he has worked in the past, he says “most teachers had different approaches to weighting homework, classwork, quizzes, and tests.”

For example, he says, “a student may demonstrate mastery of content on a test, quiz, and classwork, yet still fails a course because the teacher decides to weigh homework 40%, and the student, for one reason or another, struggles in that regard. Obviously, that’s inequitable, and it illustrates the variation of weighted grade scales and how it impacts a student’s success or failure, regardless of whether they mastered the standards taught in the course. Sadly, I made this mistake myself as a young teacher, and as a principal I’ve seen too many teachers make this mistake, too.”

Jason Merrill, the principal of Melrose High School, where my son currently goes to school, says this is one of the biggest reasons they started looking at their teaching and learning practices, and why they applied to become one of five schools in the multi-year Rethinking Grading Pilot program sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Man with watering cans illustration by Nate Williams

“Your son has eight teachers right now that all have their own way to grade. Completely their own,” he says. “The average kid often gives up trying to figure it out. Some teachers count homework, some teachers don’t. Some teachers grade homework, some teachers grade it as completion. Some teachers count large tests for a lot more than others. What we want to do is not have 85 different ways to respond to a fire alarm.”

Feldman says we also don’t want to include non-academics in grades — things like messy binders and not coming to class with a pencil, or the one that is commonly factored in: late work.

“A student who writes an A-quality essay but hands it in late gets her writing downgraded to a B, and the student who writes a B-quality essay turned in by the deadline receives a B. There’s nothing to distinguish those two B grades, although those students have very different levels of content mastery,” he says.

Traditional grading also invites biases, he says, especially around behavior. “When we include a student’s behavior in a grade, we’re imposing on all of our students a narrow idea of what a ‘successful’ student is,” Feldman says, and “you start to misrepresent and warp the accuracy.” For example, a student who participates in discussions and always brings their pencil to class earns five points, but they get a C on the test. Adding the five behavior points lifts that C test grade to something in the low B range. Although students and parents are happy the grade is a B and that the student’s all-important GPA remains intact, this warping can create longer term problems.

“You’re telling the student that they’re at a B level in content, and they’re actually at a C,” Feldman says. “They don’t think there’s a problem, the counselors don’t think there’s a problem, and the student goes to the next grade level and gets crushed by the content. They had no idea that they weren’t prepared for the rigor of that class because they kept getting the message that they were getting B’s.”

It can be especially confusing for parents, says Christopher Beaver, one of the assistant principals at Melrose High. “I knew what my own kids could do skill-based wise, but if I’m a parent and I don’t know what my kids can do because the teachers haven’t laid that out for me on a report card, then I can’t look at a report card and say, ‘See that. My kid is proficient at this skill or my kid is proficient at that skill,’” he says. “I’m going to focus on something like the GPA because that’s all I have. And I’m going to assume, if my kid has a high GPA, that my kid’s skillset is at a proficient level. But that is not always the case.”

As a parent, I was confused earlier this year when my son’s overall grade in a class was low, even though he seemed to get the content. We looked online at the grading portal the district uses and sure enough, he had Bs and As. But then there was that one grade: a 44 on a test he didn’t have enough time to finish. That one low test score brought the whole grade down because of another impossible part of how we grade: averaging.

“We have this ridiculous system of averaging things out,” Pope says, “which doesn’t make any sense because the goal is to get students to learn material. Same with the case against zero, right? Why would you give a kid a zero? A zero is worse than an F.”

The “case against zero” idea is that when using a 0-to-100-point scale in grading, a student should never receive a zero, even if they didn’t turn in an assignment. Sounds odd, given that a zero for not turning in work is how we’ve long operated, but as author Doug Reeves wrote in 2004 in “The Case Against the Zero” in Phi Delta Kappan , “assigning a zero is disproportionate punishment.”

Why? Because mathematically, with a 0-to-100 scale, failing a class is more likely than passing a class. Think about it. Each letter grade is 10 points — an A is 90-100, a B is 80- 89, a C is 70-79, and a D is 60-69 — but the scale’s one failing grade, an F, spans not 10 points, but 60 (0 to 59). The result is that a zero disproportionally pulls down an average and makes it that much harder to pull a grade up significantly. A student with two 85s, for example, is averaging a B. If that student gets a 0 on one assignment, their average drops to 56, an F. Even if the student gets 85s on the next two assignments, their average still only jumps to a 68. So, four Bs and one zero means the student’s averaged overall grade is a D+.

This averaging especially penalizes students who start out a semester slower with lower grades. Even if they figure out the material and fully master content later, averaging won’t necessarily reflect what they truly know. In his book, Feldman gives an example of a student who, coming into ninth grade, had never learned to write a persuasive essay. The ninth-grade teacher gives an assignment early in September, revealing this student’s writing inexperience.

“The essay gets a D-. But it’s early in September, and you, as the teacher, provide instruction and guided practice with feedback,” Feldman writes. The student’s writing improves, and their grade goes up with each new assignment. The student eventually learns how to write an amazing persuasive essay. They are doing A work. However, when the grades are averaged, that early D- drags down the overall grade and though the student mastered persuasive writing, their A drops to a B-.

Add Stress to the Mix

Beyond the problems with how we grade or what a grade means, Robin Loewald, Ed.M.’19, an English teacher at Melrose High, also worries about the effect grades have on student mindset, especially for middle- and high-schoolers.

“Grading in general is tough because of the expectations for students with college applications,” she says. “There tends to be a lot of stress around grades and the minute difference between a 93 and 94. In truth, it’s hard to really delineate the difference between those two numbers in terms of student understanding and mastery of the subject.”

Pope focuses her work extensively on the stress students take on trying to chase “good” grades and the extrinsic motivation — driven by external rewards — that takes over. In an op-ed she co-authored in February for The Hechinger Report about the furor over ChatGPT, she wrote that instead of asking how to stop students from cheating using bot programs, we should instead be asking “why” students are cheating in the first place. Chasing those good grades is part of that “why.”

“We have this real system of you need to get the grades and the test scores in order to please your parents, go to college, get the merit scholarship, get a good job — whatever it is,” she says. “There’s this extrinsic motivation that’s tied to grades, which adds to student stress, and in some cases can lead to really unhealthy practices like perfectionism or great anxiety, paralysis. And it could also really turn kids off. ‘Well, I got a C so I’m bad at math. I’m not a math person so clearly, I shouldn’t try anymore.’”

As Feldman said during an interview in 2019 with the Harvard EdCast , for students, even attempting to follow the range of grading practices each of their six or seven teachers follows can be stressful.

“For the student, it adds to my cognitive load,” he says. “I not only have to understand the content and try and perform at high levels of the content, but now I also have to navigate a grading structure that may not be totally transparent, and may be different for every teacher, and particularly for students who are historically underserved and have less education background and fewer resources and understanding of how to navigate those really foreign systems. It places those additional burdens on them, which we shouldn’t do.”

Are There Alternatives?

If traditional grades say little about a student’s mastery of the material, are often inequitable, and can add more stress, what are better ways for teachers and schools to capture a student’s skills and understanding of the material? And given the long history of using numbers and letter grades, are schools even ready to change?

Back in 2005, Chester Finn Jr., M.A.T’67, Ed.D.’70, then president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, told The Washington Post that “high schools will keep using them if college admissions offices keep requiring them, which they likely will.”

But nearly two decades since Finn made that observation, it’s clear that some schools, like my son’s, are ready for change and have ideas on how to do that.

At the Greater Dayton School, Stitch says their ability to work outside the structure and limitations of a public school gave them the liberty to design whatever grading scale they thought was best for kids. They chose not to use the A to F scale.

“The traditional grading system is not aligned to learning outcomes,” he says. “Traditional grading is one-and-done in terms of you’ve learned the content, or you haven’t, and the grade you get is the grade you get. A better grading system allows for multiple attempts of content mastery.”

Which is why his school uses only two grades — “mastered” and “in progress,” and students have unlimited chances to learn the material and become proficient, he says. Students also learn at their own pace and the school’s standards are broken into kid friendly “I can” statements so parents and students know exactly what skills a student “can” do and which skills they are working on.

A few years ago, Melrose High started allowing students to redo their work if the grade was below a certain number. The idea was that learning shouldn’t be punitive — it was about mastering content, even if that took more than one try.

As Merrill says, “At the end of the day, we want all kids to learn. We don’t want to prove that they don’t know something. We want to be like, you need to do some work to retake this again to show us that you do know it.”

Loewald says the school’s English department additionally has an extended revision policy around writing assignments, where students can meet with their teachers to edit, revise, and resubmit their writing work. She allows students to revise almost every assignment.

“I think that the process of learning through revision is really helpful and allows there to be less pressure on the initial submission of work,” she says. “Students are graded on rubrics and can use those rubrics to guide their revisions of assignments. The only assignments that I do not allow students to revise are their reading checks since those are things we talk about and reference in the class in which they’re due.”

Merrill says the school’s revision policy is a work in progress — it needs its own revision — because there is currently too much variation in what students can redo. “We are working to build a single, consistent retake policy. If we de-emphasize the weighting for formative assessment and practice materials, such as homework and classwork, then we can have a retake policy that addresses summative assessments only,” he says.

Caitlin Reilly, Ed.M.’14, recently started as a deputy principal at Revere High School, located just north of Boston and part of the state’s Rethinking Grading Pilot. She says the school is moving toward a full competency-based model. Although there’s variation on how competency-based is defined, it generally means that instead of evaluating students as proficient based on the amount of time they spend on a subject — 58 minutes for factoring polynomials or three years taking a foreign language — time allotment is shifted to how well students can define what they actually know about a subject. And those competencies aren’t vague — they’re clearly spelled out by a school.

“For us, competency learning is a matter of equity for students because it makes apparent to all students, what are you working toward?” says Reilly. “Where do you not yet have the skills? What support do you need? And students should be seeing their progress to the standards of the course. Knowing that is incredibly important for all students, versus the hidden game of school when you have this letter grade, and you don’t know where it’s generated from, or you have a test that you got 10 points just for writing your name.”

One of the areas Revere High is working on with the grant, she says, is rethinking report cards. Their current approach mimics, in some ways, what elementary schools typically do, which is to include comments about student strengths or areas that need improving in their habits-of-work, not just the letter grade. They are working on transitioning course grades from a single letter to a report of proficiency on course competencies.

“Our current report card is a one-pager that has letter grades … but for every class students have, there’s a habits-of-work box that includes the four habits-of-work that we assess: active learning, respect, collaboration, and ownership,” she says. For each habit, there’s a scale of proficient, some proficiency, or not yet proficient, with rubric-defined criteria that guides the understanding of what it is to be proficient in each category.” In that way, it’s not just a teacher’s general “sense” of which category to pick or a parent’s guess as to what each habit actually means.

As I talked to educators about other ways to rethink how we grade, some suggested dropping the lowest grade in a class or not grading assignments done early in a semester. Many mention not grading homework but instead allowing that work to be a place where students can figure things out and make mistakes, especially when new concepts are introduced. Others talk about doing away with the 0-to-100 scale. In Melrose, Loewald says the English Department has already shifted to a 1-to-4 scale.

“A four meaning the student is exceeding expectations, three is meeting, two is approaching, and one is developing,” she says. “It’s much more accurate in terms of assessing student learning to use a smaller scale.”

Feldman says that with any change around such an entrenched topic like grading, “We are learning that you actually have to invest in teacher understanding along with policy development in order to change practice around grading.”

It’s something my son’s school has already jumped on with a core group of administrators and teachers examining current practices and testing out some of the changes they want to make.

“They’ve all set goals for themselves and are participating in regular coaching,” says Melanie Acevedo, the district’s director of instructional technology and personalized learning. “They come to a meeting once a month and talk about what’s working, what’s not working. They are a group that’s trying things out. They’re being the people that are booted on the ground, really experimenting so that we can come back to the bigger faculty and say, here are some things that people have tried. Do you want to try that? We’re building this idea from the staff and from the teachers because they’re the ones that know best.”

One of the things Melrose High isn’t doing, at least not yet, is blowing up the entire grading system or even doing away with traditional A to F grades.

Instead, says Merrill, they’ve set a goal so that by next fall they have “a very clear, consistent, transparent grading practice and policy in place for all teachers,” he says, and can answer questions like: How do we assess kids? How do we communicate that? How do kids know where they stand? How do they reflect and retake or do revisions? How do we count homework? Is that grading equitable? “There are so many pieces that go into it,” he says, “but we’re not looking to make any of our kids a trial.”

Luckily, there’s broader interest in “rethinking grading,” as the Massachusetts pilot is called. Sales for Feldman’s Grading for Equity book are robust enough that he’s working on a second, updated edition, and, he says, “I am not any less confident that this is one of the most important levers that schools and districts can use to not only improve student achievement, but also reduce achievement and opportunity disparities.”

Rethinking grading may even keep some teachers in the profession longer.

“We’ve heard, and we have some data, that this work actually increases the likelihood that some teachers would stay in their district,” Feldman says. “We see a real crisis in the retention of the teaching force. Knowing that there’s a learning opportunity that can engage them more directly with why they went into teaching in the first place, and gets them more excited about teaching, I think is really important.” Teachers, he says, don’t want to be the bean counters or police officers they often become when it comes to grading.

“The  five participation points every day. The, you turned it in late one day, so you lose 10% or you turned it in two days late so 20%,” he says. “None of us went into teaching to do that.”

Extra Credit

Man with watering cans illustration by Nate Williams

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Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

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

child doing homework

“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.

Janine Bempechat

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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Sara Rimer

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?

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Does homework really work?

by: Leslie Crawford | Updated: December 12, 2023

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Does homework help

You know the drill. It’s 10:15 p.m., and the cardboard-and-toothpick Golden Gate Bridge is collapsing. The pages of polynomials have been abandoned. The paper on the Battle of Waterloo seems to have frozen in time with Napoleon lingering eternally over his breakfast at Le Caillou. Then come the tears and tantrums — while we parents wonder, Does the gain merit all this pain? Is this just too much homework?

However the drama unfolds night after night, year after year, most parents hold on to the hope that homework (after soccer games, dinner, flute practice, and, oh yes, that childhood pastime of yore known as playing) advances their children academically.

But what does homework really do for kids? Is the forest’s worth of book reports and math and spelling sheets the average American student completes in their 12 years of primary schooling making a difference? Or is it just busywork?

Homework haterz

Whether or not homework helps, or even hurts, depends on who you ask. If you ask my 12-year-old son, Sam, he’ll say, “Homework doesn’t help anything. It makes kids stressed-out and tired and makes them hate school more.”

Nothing more than common kid bellyaching?

Maybe, but in the fractious field of homework studies, it’s worth noting that Sam’s sentiments nicely synopsize one side of the ivory tower debate. Books like The End of Homework , The Homework Myth , and The Case Against Homework the film Race to Nowhere , and the anguished parent essay “ My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me ” make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers.

One Canadian couple took their homework apostasy all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. After arguing that there was no evidence that it improved academic performance, they won a ruling that exempted their two children from all homework.

So what’s the real relationship between homework and academic achievement?

How much is too much?

To answer this question, researchers have been doing their homework on homework, conducting and examining hundreds of studies. Chris Drew Ph.D., founder and editor at The Helpful Professor recently compiled multiple statistics revealing the folly of today’s after-school busy work. Does any of the data he listed below ring true for you?

• 45 percent of parents think homework is too easy for their child, primarily because it is geared to the lowest standard under the Common Core State Standards .

• 74 percent of students say homework is a source of stress , defined as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems.

• Students in high-performing high schools spend an average of 3.1 hours a night on homework , even though 1 to 2 hours is the optimal duration, according to a peer-reviewed study .

Not included in the list above is the fact many kids have to abandon activities they love — like sports and clubs — because homework deprives them of the needed time to enjoy themselves with other pursuits.

Conversely, The Helpful Professor does list a few pros of homework, noting it teaches discipline and time management, and helps parents know what’s being taught in the class.

The oft-bandied rule on homework quantity — 10 minutes a night per grade (starting from between 10 to 20 minutes in first grade) — is listed on the National Education Association’s website and the National Parent Teacher Association’s website , but few schools follow this rule.

Do you think your child is doing excessive homework? Harris Cooper Ph.D., author of a meta-study on homework , recommends talking with the teacher. “Often there is a miscommunication about the goals of homework assignments,” he says. “What appears to be problematic for kids, why they are doing an assignment, can be cleared up with a conversation.” Also, Cooper suggests taking a careful look at how your child is doing the assignments. It may seem like they’re taking two hours, but maybe your child is wandering off frequently to get a snack or getting distracted.

Less is often more

If your child is dutifully doing their work but still burning the midnight oil, it’s worth intervening to make sure your child gets enough sleep. A 2012 study of 535 high school students found that proper sleep may be far more essential to brain and body development.

For elementary school-age children, Cooper’s research at Duke University shows there is no measurable academic advantage to homework. For middle-schoolers, Cooper found there is a direct correlation between homework and achievement if assignments last between one to two hours per night. After two hours, however, achievement doesn’t improve. For high schoolers, Cooper’s research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in a class with no homework.

Many schools are starting to act on this research. A Florida superintendent abolished homework in her 42,000 student district, replacing it with 20 minutes of nightly reading. She attributed her decision to “ solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students .”

More family time

A 2020 survey by Crayola Experience reports 82 percent of children complain they don’t have enough quality time with their parents. Homework deserves much of the blame. “Kids should have a chance to just be kids and do things they enjoy, particularly after spending six hours a day in school,” says Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth . “It’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.”

By far, the best replacement for homework — for both parents and children — is bonding, relaxing time together.

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Should we ease grading and homework rules? Dangers lurk.

Experienced teachers say that could cripple all-important learning in class..

why is homework graded

Along the bumpy return to normalcy in our pandemic -battered schools, I see an interesting movement to ease grading and homework requirements. Many educators have been promoting such changes for years, but more education writers like me are beginning to notice.

That’s often not a good sign. We journalists like to portray new stuff as exciting in part because that increases our chances of getting prominent play and attracting readers. There is a long list of movements we once publicized — such as New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language, No Child Left Behind — that did not live up to expectations.

A recent Los Angeles Times editorial sums up the latest movement well. “Schools have stuck to an outdated system that relies heavily on students’ compliance — completing homework, behaving in class, meeting deadlines and correctly answering questions on a one-time test — as a proxy for learning, rather than measuring the learning itself.”

The big handicap for journalists as well as everyone else in the discussion is a lack of useful data on how many teachers use these allegedly worn-out methods and what are the measurable results. I asked four experienced public school teachers in southern California, northern California, Texas and Virginia how they handled grading and homework and what they thought of the notion that the old ways were wrong.

In some aspects, the four teachers are in sync with the suggested reforms. None of them assign much homework, except as a way to complete work begun in class. They don’t emphasize one-time tests.

How to recover from our school disaster: Top curriculums, training and resolve

But when making sure everyone is behaving in class, they are firm traditionalists. Class time to them is vital because, in their minds, the give-and-take between students and teachers during those precious hours is the essence of what they do.

Mark Ingerson, a social studies teacher at Salem (Va.) High School, said, “You are kidding yourself if you think you have any control over what happens once that child leaves your class. … So my sole focus has been maximizing every single second of class so it results in student mastery of skills and knowledge.”

The best teachers I know do their best to make sure everyone contributes every day, even if they have to insist that the most reluctant students answer questions and keep up with the discussion.

D’Essence Grant, an eighth-grade English and language arts teacher at the KIPP Academy Middle school in Houston, said, “My content requires meaningful conversations about the text to help support text comprehension and character development. Grading these conversations and pushing students to articulate their thoughts helps prepare students for college and beyond. Making claims, supporting claims with evidence, and listening, building and challenging other student claims verbally is just as important as writing them on paper.”

Mary Stevens is the English and language arts department chair at Marshall Fundamental Secondary School in Pasadena, Calif. Enrollment at that school is by lottery. Seventy percent of the students are from low-income families. “I mostly only assign the work and/or reading we didn’t complete in class as homework,” she said. She doesn’t like the phrase “behaving in class.” She said “it has negative connotations for students. I center responsibility, hence productivity, and try not to frame my expectations around outdated ideas such as behavior.”

Greg Jouriles, a social studies teacher at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, Calif., noted reformers’ argument that homework “discriminates socioeconomically and racially” and might be “unfair to students with household obligations and no quiet place to work.” He said that “while all of these factors carry weight, I don’t see a problem with some homework or why practicing academics isn’t as worthwhile as practicing extracurriculars, to which students will devote hours and hours. Most of what I grade is based on what happens in class.”

He said: “I disagree with the people who say time and practice and repetition don’t matter, that once a student exhibits a skill, they’ve achieved a standard. If that were the case, a basketball coach would end practice after each player made one free throw. Teachers face the ongoing challenge of making the homework they assign as engaging as extracurriculars.”

His argument suggests a weakness in the push for mastery learning, which is part of the new thinking on school work and grading. Each child, reformers say, should get a grade of completion once they have mastered a skill or subject. That leaves open the possibility that schools could dumb down the definition of mastery to make sure everyone graduates on time.

Author of teacher bestsellers warns against flawed social justice concepts

The traditional approach to grading — assessing every paper and assignment, giving zeros for work not turned in — has been abandoned by many teachers and their districts in the past two decades. Ingerson said he dropped the tough approach in 2004 because he found “many students just got destroyed” by his grading sledgehammer.

“I had students scoring advanced on the Virginia Standards of Learning tests, but had a D in the class … because of missing notebook checks or homework assignments,” he said. His intense class discussions make sure that all his students know the material, or realize he is going to be hovering over them until they do.

Many teachers I know don’t see any difference between the mastery learning embraced by the new movement and what they do with traditional grading. They use zeros to motivate students but erase those horrible marks when they see improvement. They have assignments and class discussions every week. They repeatedly let students know how they are doing. The emphasis on mastery is obvious in the way they teach. They don’t see the point of disposing of the grading tools they have.

We will be hearing more about this new movement to promote learning. If changes are made, we will need as usual some reliable measure of how much students know and understand.

I don’t see how we can do that without challenging and independently graded tests, such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, to ensure assessments are accurate. SAT and ACT exams appear to be fading away. I never liked them because they were not tied to classes where our teachers could make sure every student was engaged every day.

We need some measure of learning we can trust. The latest educational buzz words may suggest otherwise, but we have learned enough during the pandemic to know that if productive class work is not happening for everyone, we have to do something about that.

why is homework graded

Study: Homework Doesn’t Mean Better Grades, But Maybe Better Standardized Test Scores

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Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at UVA's Curry School of Education

The time students spend on math and science homework doesn’t necessarily mean better grades, but it could lead to better performance on standardized tests, a new study finds.

“When Is Homework Worth The Time?” was recently published by lead investigator Adam Maltese, assistant professor of science education at Indiana University, and co-authors Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education , and Xitao Fan, dean of education at the University of Macau. Maltese is a Curry alumnus, and Fan is a former Curry faculty member.

The authors examined survey and transcript data of more than 18,000 10th-grade students to uncover explanations for academic performance. The data focused on individual classes, examining student outcomes through the transcripts from two nationwide samples collected in 1990 and 2002 by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Contrary to much published research, a regression analysis of time spent on homework and the final class grade found no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not. But the analysis found a positive association between student performance on standardized tests and the time they spent on homework.

“Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be,” Maltese said.

Tai said that homework assignments cannot replace good teaching.

“I believe that this finding is the end result of a chain of unfortunate educational decisions, beginning with the content coverage requirements that push too much information into too little time to learn it in the classroom,” Tai said. “The overflow typically results in more homework assignments. However, students spending more time on something that is not easy to understand or needs to be explained by a teacher does not help these students learn and, in fact, may confuse them.

“The results from this study imply that homework should be purposeful,” he added, “and that the purpose must be understood by both the teacher and the students.”

The authors suggest that factors such as class participation and attendance may mitigate the association of homework to stronger grade performance. They also indicate the types of homework assignments typically given may work better toward standardized test preparation than for retaining knowledge of class material.

Maltese said the genesis for the study was a concern about whether a traditional and ubiquitous educational practice, such as homework, is associated with students achieving at a higher level in math and science. Many media reports about education compare U.S. students unfavorably to high-achieving math and science students from across the world. The 2007 documentary film “Two Million Minutes” compared two Indiana students to students in India and China, taking particular note of how much more time the Indian and Chinese students spent on studying or completing homework.

“We’re not trying to say that all homework is bad,” Maltese said. “It’s expected that students are going to do homework. This is more of an argument that it should be quality over quantity. So in math, rather than doing the same types of problems over and over again, maybe it should involve having students analyze new types of problems or data. In science, maybe the students should write concept summaries instead of just reading a chapter and answering the questions at the end.”

This issue is particularly relevant given that the time spent on homework reported by most students translates into the equivalent of 100 to 180 50-minute class periods of extra learning time each year.

The authors conclude that given current policy initiatives to improve science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education, more evaluation is needed about how to use homework time more effectively. They suggest more research be done on the form and function of homework assignments.

“In today’s current educational environment, with all the activities taking up children’s time both in school and out of school, the purpose of each homework assignment must be clear and targeted,” Tai said. “With homework, more is not better.”

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November 20, 2012

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Adolescent girl doing homework.

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.

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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?

why is homework graded

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

Should Kids Get Homework?

Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.

Mother helping son with homework at home

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Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful.

How much homework students should get has long been a source of debate among parents and educators. In recent years, some districts have even implemented no-homework policies, as students juggle sports, music and other activities after school.

Parents of elementary school students, in particular, have argued that after-school hours should be spent with family or playing outside rather than completing assignments. And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students.

But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When done well, it can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills. The key to effective homework, they say, is keeping assignments related to classroom learning, and tailoring the amount by age: Many experts suggest no homework for kindergartners, and little to none in first and second grade.

Value of Homework

Homework provides a chance to solidify what is being taught in the classroom that day, week or unit. Practice matters, says Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University 's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

"There really is no other domain of human ability where anybody would say you don't need to practice," she adds. "We have children practicing piano and we have children going to sports practice several days a week after school. You name the domain of ability and practice is in there."

Homework is also the place where schools and families most frequently intersect.

"The children are bringing things from the school into the home," says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California—Berkeley and the author of "The End of American Childhood." "Before the pandemic, (homework) was the only real sense that parents had to what was going on in schools."

Harris Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework," examined more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that — when designed properly — homework can lead to greater student success. Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary.

"Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing should be appropriate for their developmental level," he says. "For teachers, it's a balancing act. Doing away with homework completely is not in the best interest of children and families. But overburdening families with homework is also not in the child's or a family's best interest."

Negative Homework Assignments

Not all homework for elementary students involves completing a worksheet. Assignments can be fun, says Cooper, like having students visit educational locations, keep statistics on their favorite sports teams, read for pleasure or even help their parents grocery shop. The point is to show students that activities done outside of school can relate to subjects learned in the classroom.

But assignments that are just busy work, that force students to learn new concepts at home, or that are overly time-consuming can be counterproductive, experts say.

Homework that's just busy work.

Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful, experts say. Assignments that look more like busy work – projects or worksheets that don't require teacher feedback and aren't related to topics learned in the classroom – can be frustrating for students and create burdens for families.

"The mental health piece has definitely played a role here over the last couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the last thing we want to do is frustrate students with busy work or homework that makes no sense," says Dave Steckler, principal of Red Trail Elementary School in Mandan, North Dakota.

Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.

With the pressure to cover all topics on standardized tests and limited time during the school day, some teachers assign homework that has not yet been taught in the classroom.

Not only does this create stress, but it also causes equity challenges. Some parents speak languages other than English or work several jobs, and they aren't able to help teach their children new concepts.

" It just becomes agony for both parents and the kids to get through this worksheet, and the goal becomes getting to the bottom of (the) worksheet with answers filled in without any understanding of what any of it matters for," says professor Susan R. Goldman, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois—Chicago .

Homework that's overly time-consuming.

The standard homework guideline recommended by the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association is the "10-minute rule" – 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level. A fourth grader, for instance, would receive a total of 40 minutes of homework per night.

But this does not always happen, especially since not every student learns the same. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy found that primary school children actually received three times the recommended amount of homework — and that family stress increased along with the homework load.

Young children can only remain attentive for short periods, so large amounts of homework, especially lengthy projects, can negatively affect students' views on school. Some individual long-term projects – like having to build a replica city, for example – typically become an assignment for parents rather than students, Fass says.

"It's one thing to assign a project like that in which several kids are working on it together," she adds. "In (that) case, the kids do normally work on it. It's another to send it home to the families, where it becomes a burden and doesn't really accomplish very much."

Private vs. Public Schools

Do private schools assign more homework than public schools? There's little research on the issue, but experts say private school parents may be more accepting of homework, seeing it as a sign of academic rigor.

Of course, not all private schools are the same – some focus on college preparation and traditional academics, while others stress alternative approaches to education.

"I think in the academically oriented private schools, there's more support for homework from parents," says Gerald K. LeTendre, chair of educational administration at Pennsylvania State University—University Park . "I don't know if there's any research to show there's more homework, but it's less of a contentious issue."

How to Address Homework Overload

First, assess if the workload takes as long as it appears. Sometimes children may start working on a homework assignment, wander away and come back later, Cooper says.

"Parents don't see it, but they know that their child has started doing their homework four hours ago and still not done it," he adds. "They don't see that there are those four hours where their child was doing lots of other things. So the homework assignment itself actually is not four hours long. It's the way the child is approaching it."

But if homework is becoming stressful or workload is excessive, experts suggest parents first approach the teacher, followed by a school administrator.

"Many times, we can solve a lot of issues by having conversations," Steckler says, including by "sitting down, talking about the amount of homework, and what's appropriate and not appropriate."

Study Tips for High School Students

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Why Homework Matters: It's Not Just About Grades

A local school teacher on why homework is more important than you think.

jenna-vandenberg

By Jenna Vandenberg

Published on: april 16, 2019.

Teenage boy doing homework

High school is when many students first learn about calculus, dating , and the technicalities of parallel parking. In the future, high school may come with yet another first: the first homework assignment.

In recent years, the homework debate has been raging among elementary school communities: to assign or not to assign. Those in the anti-homework camp are quick to point to Harris Cooper’s research , which suggests that homework is ineffective and has little academic value for elementary-aged children.  

The equity gap  

Equity issues are also central to the debate. Low-income students spend considerably less time on take-home assignments than their peers in higher-income households. Citing these equity and productivity concerns, several Seattle-area elementary schools have eschewed homework in recent years.

Canceling homework in the name of equity is a lazy and ineffective move. Equity issues don’t disappear when homework does. When Orchard School in Vermont eliminated homework , they added the caveat that extra time should be spent reading, playing outside and having quality family time — activities that are more likely to take occur if a parent is at home to support them. For students without constant parental presence, homework can provide the structure needed to practice academic knowledge and vocabulary — skills that low-income students are less likely to acquire without school support. 

This equity argument, problematic in elementary school, completely falls apart in high school.  

High school students, particularly those taking AP and college prep classes, must do homework. A lot of it. There is simply too much to cover in a high school course if students are given copious class time to complete readings and practice math problems. That work must be done outside of school. 

Equity issues don’t merely persist in high school — in many cases, they are exacerbated. Low-income elementary kids grow up to be high school students with more than their fair share of responsibilities. Many provide round-the-clock child care for younger siblings, work part-time jobs, or experience homelessness, bouncing from one friend’s couch to another. This is not an optimal time to learn how to do homework. Teachers in low-income areas, unable to cajole their hundreds of students to complete reading notes and algebraic proofs at home, typically give up and assign less homework , contributing to the diminished rigor of schools in high-poverty areas.  

On the other side of the equity bar, parents of more privileged students also take a step back during high school years. Elementary school events and conferences are madhouses, while high school open house nights often resemble ghost towns . With less parental involvement and no habit to fall back on, it is unclear how these high school freshmen will suddenly learn how to do homework.  

Developing the habit 

Parents who gleefully avoided homework meltdowns during their children’s formative years will suddenly find themselves wondering how to strap a 16-year-old to a desk for the two hours necessary to complete an essay. 

Though Cooper’s research questions the effectiveness of homework in elementary school, he acknowledges that “The average correlation between time spent on homework and achievement was substantial for secondary school students….For high school students, the positive line continues to climb until between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours of homework a night.”

Even with the recognition that homework lacks academic value for young kids, he still recommends adhering to The National Education Association Parents’ Guide of 10–20 minutes of homework a day for K–2 students and increasing that amount 10 minutes a year.

The primary purpose of elementary school homework should be building the homework habit.

The primary purpose of elementary school homework should be building the homework habit. The real benefit is simply learning how to do it: How to set aside time, complete a task outside of school, and struggle through problems even when a teacher or helpful classmate is not nearby. If students don’t learn those skills while they are young, they will find it harder to succeed in high school and college.     

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Jenna Vandenberg is a Seattle-based teacher, writer, runner and mom of two girls.

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Not Including Classwork and Homework (Formative Assessment) in the Grade

Danny, middle school humanities teacher.

“I stopped including students’ classwork performance in the grade. I let them know that we do classwork, and I expect them to do it, because it will help us practice and prepare for the test. They do it, I give them feedback, and that’s it. No one’s copying off each other, and I save myself lots of time that I used to spend entering every classwork assignment every day.

“I used to think classwork should be part of the grade. Now I don’t because when I think about classwork, it should be like a safe zone for students.  Put yourself in that situation. Let’s say the classwork was learning how to cook lasagna, and I don’t know how to cook. The teacher’s giving me all these ingredients, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not going to show mastery that day on an exit ticket.  It’s going to take me time, it’s going to take me practice, practice, and more practice, but I’ll be able to cook it when the “test” comes. Classwork is a safezone for students to practice the material, so when it comes to actually testing them, they can do it.

Nick, high school science teacher

“I don’t include classwork or homework in the grade. I had a conversation with my students about it when I introduced it—about how classwork and homework are means to learning the materials which they will then demonstrate on the quiz and tests. Student reactions were very mixed at the beginning, but they admitted that they treat a lot of classes as a game, where you figure out what things you need to do to get a certain grade and you accumulate points by doing the right things. It’s much more straightforward in my class. We can get away from all those games and we can focus on learning. We can focus on improving your understanding of the material. When I said that exact thing in my sixth period class, one student blurted out, “I like this way of grading,” and I said, “Me too.” What surprised me is that it’s the students who always get A’s who were the most skeptical and resistant to the change, because they do all their homework and behave well in class, and do whatever the teacher says, and they rely on the behavior-type points to maintain their grades, and now I’m holding them accountable for what they know, not how much they do what I say.

Jillian, middle school math & science teacher

“I’ve significantly lowered the percentage of what homework is worth. Before homework was worth 25% and tests were worth 60%. Now homework is worth 5% and assessments are worth 80%. Students were just doing homework for the points and to help their grade, rather than doing it because it helps them in their learning. Now they start to realize there is a purpose to homework. They see problems show up on the exams and they think, ‘Ok, maybe I should do more of the homework problems. It’s not just so I can get points.’ I’ve seen them do more homework this year than in the last few years.

Kelly, middle school Humanities teacher

“I used to be kind of afraid that if I didn’t count things for grades, specifically things like group work, homework, or classwork that students would lose motivation and not want to do it. And then not do it. But now I’ve come to realize that students will be motivated to do the work if it’s structured properly. If they see the value in doing it. And that’s kind of the biggest shift that I’ve really made. What changed my thinking was that I have better participation now and homework completion than I did when I was counting those things for grades. I mean that’s pretty compelling evidence.

Sarah, high school special education teacher

“If you’re grading all the small stuff, it just becomes so massive and overwhelming for the teacher as well as the student, making sure that every little thing is in. The question is really: ‘Can you master this skill, or have you mastered this skill?’ rather than ‘Did you fill out a worksheet?’ The worksheets are important because they help build toward the test, but it takes the stress off of the student and off of the teacher. The stress is not on are they a good student because they’ve finished all this work. Instead I’m really looking at how well do they understand the concept, and I can really focus more on what they need.

Temy, high school science teacher

“I made the announcement at the beginning of the quarter: From now on we’re only grading you on your assessments. That’s it. And students were very happy with that. But some of them said, ‘Oh, what do you mean? I don’t get credit for my work?’ I had been counting homework for 10%, but for those students, that’s a really important 10%. That normally saves them when they don’t do well on the assessments. That 10% normally allows them to copy homework, or get help from someone else, or just follow all the directions, but still not learn anything.

Theresa, middle school English teacher

“There’s a lot of stuff I don’t put into the grade book now, but it was kind of a slow progression where at the beginning of the year I still had a homework category, but this quarter I’m not including any homework in their grades at all. Instead I’m having a lot more conversations with kids about the purpose of the homework. I’m as still assigning homework, and they still need to go home and study and they still need to be reading independently. But I remind them how I’m assessing: I know that you studied for the spelling test if you do well on the spelling test. I know you did your spelling homework if you do well on a spelling test. I know you’ve been doing your independent reading if you manage to put together a book report at the end of the month. I’m really kind of pushing the homework piece to being: Here’s the reason why you’re doing it and I’m not going to actually grade that. It’s not going to become part of your grade. I’m instead going to grade what you learned from doing the homework.

Grading for Equity  by Joe Feldman is a publication of the  Crescendo Education Group .

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The Pros and Cons of Homework

The-Pros-and-Cons-Should-Students-Have-Homework

Homework is a word that most students dread hearing. After hours upon hours of sitting in class , the last thing we want is more schoolwork over our precious weekends. While it’s known to be a staple of traditional schooling, homework has also become a rather divise topic. Some feel as though homework is a necessary part of school, while others believe that the time could be better invested. Should students have homework? Have a closer look into the arguments on both sides to decide for yourself.

A college student completely swamped with homework.

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Why should students have homework, 1. homework encourages practice.

Many people believe that one of the positive effects of homework is that it encourages the discipline of practice. While it may be time consuming and boring compared to other activities, repetition is needed to get better at skills. Homework helps make concepts more clear, and gives students more opportunities when starting their career .

2. Homework Gets Parents Involved

Homework can be something that gets parents involved in their children’s lives if the environment is a healthy one. A parent helping their child with homework makes them take part in their academic success, and allows for the parent to keep up with what the child is doing in school. It can also be a chance to connect together.

3. Homework Teaches Time Management

Homework is much more than just completing the assigned tasks. Homework can develop time management skills , forcing students to plan their time and make sure that all of their homework assignments are done on time. By learning to manage their time, students also practice their problem-solving skills and independent thinking. One of the positive effects of homework is that it forces decision making and compromises to be made.

4. Homework Opens A Bridge Of Communication

Homework creates a connection between the student, the teacher, the school, and the parents. It allows everyone to get to know each other better, and parents can see where their children are struggling. In the same sense, parents can also see where their children are excelling. Homework in turn can allow for a better, more targeted educational plan for the student.

5. Homework Allows For More Learning Time

Homework allows for more time to complete the learning process. School hours are not always enough time for students to really understand core concepts, and homework can counter the effects of time shortages, benefiting students in the long run, even if they can’t see it in the moment.

6. Homework Reduces Screen Time

Many students in North America spend far too many hours watching TV. If they weren’t in school, these numbers would likely increase even more. Although homework is usually undesired, it encourages better study habits and discourages spending time in front of the TV. Homework can be seen as another extracurricular activity, and many families already invest a lot of time and money in different clubs and lessons to fill up their children’s extra time. Just like extracurricular activities, homework can be fit into one’s schedule.

A female student who doesn’t want to do homework.

The Other Side: Why Homework Is Bad

1. homework encourages a sedentary lifestyle.

Should students have homework? Well, that depends on where you stand. There are arguments both for the advantages and the disadvantages of homework.

While classroom time is important, playground time is just as important. If children are given too much homework, they won’t have enough playtime, which can impact their social development and learning. Studies have found that those who get more play get better grades in school , as it can help them pay closer attention in the classroom.

Children are already sitting long hours in the classroom, and homework assignments only add to these hours. Sedentary lifestyles can be dangerous and can cause health problems such as obesity. Homework takes away from time that could be spent investing in physical activity.

2. Homework Isn’t Healthy In Every Home

While many people that think homes are a beneficial environment for children to learn, not all homes provide a healthy environment, and there may be very little investment from parents. Some parents do not provide any kind of support or homework help, and even if they would like to, due to personal barriers, they sometimes cannot. Homework can create friction between children and their parents, which is one of the reasons why homework is bad .

3. Homework Adds To An Already Full-Time Job

School is already a full-time job for students, as they generally spend over 6 hours each day in class. Students also often have extracurricular activities such as sports, music, or art that are just as important as their traditional courses. Adding on extra hours to all of these demands is a lot for children to manage, and prevents students from having extra time to themselves for a variety of creative endeavors. Homework prevents self discovery and having the time to learn new skills outside of the school system. This is one of the main disadvantages of homework.

4. Homework Has Not Been Proven To Provide Results

Endless surveys have found that homework creates a negative attitude towards school, and homework has not been found to be linked to a higher level of academic success.

The positive effects of homework have not been backed up enough. While homework may help some students improve in specific subjects, if they have outside help there is no real proof that homework makes for improvements.

It can be a challenge to really enforce the completion of homework, and students can still get decent grades without doing their homework. Extra school time does not necessarily mean better grades — quality must always come before quantity.

Accurate practice when it comes to homework simply isn’t reliable. Homework could even cause opposite effects if misunderstood, especially since the reliance is placed on the student and their parents — one of the major reasons as to why homework is bad. Many students would rather cheat in class to avoid doing their homework at home, and children often just copy off of each other or from what they read on the internet.

5. Homework Assignments Are Overdone

The general agreement is that students should not be given more than 10 minutes a day per grade level. What this means is that a first grader should be given a maximum of 10 minutes of homework, while a second grader receives 20 minutes, etc. Many students are given a lot more homework than the recommended amount, however.

On average, college students spend as much as 3 hours per night on homework . By giving too much homework, it can increase stress levels and lead to burn out. This in turn provides an opposite effect when it comes to academic success.

The pros and cons of homework are both valid, and it seems as though the question of ‘‘should students have homework?’ is not a simple, straightforward one. Parents and teachers often are found to be clashing heads, while the student is left in the middle without much say.

It’s important to understand all the advantages and disadvantages of homework, taking both perspectives into conversation to find a common ground. At the end of the day, everyone’s goal is the success of the student.

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Two Opinions: Should Homework be Graded for Accuracy?

Margot Schneider and Peter Ryan | October 7, 2020

Why Graded Homework is Beneficial During iSelectLearning and Hybrid Learning by Margot Schneider ’22

Teachers use homework as a resource to push students’ understanding of the material that is covered in class. It is a space for students to practice and demonstrate their mastery of a skill, presumably for some sort of assessment. During iSelectLearning , many teachers have turned to grading homework for accuracy rather than completion. This is a beneficial way for teachers to check in on the progress of their class, for students to boost their grades, and to motivate students to stay on track during virtual learning. 

Grading homework for accuracy can be a very helpful tool for teachers: homework answers reveal the units or concepts that are especially difficult for students. This feedback informs teachers about the state of their class and helps them adjust accordingly — they can cater their lessons to target the areas in which students struggled. Ultimately, this will help students on their assessments as well: if some class time is spent reviewing difficult concepts that students generally struggled with, they will be more prepared and confident going into assessments. 

In many classes, assessments dictate a significant portion of a student’s final grade. Graded homework assignments help to soften the intense pressure around highly valued tests or assignments, helping students to focus on actually learning the material and demonstrating their understanding over the course of a unit. Consequently, students’ grades will be a more balanced average, instead of being primarily determined by a few stressful and perhaps difficult assessments. Graded homework offers students more gradual control over their grades and the opportunity to better delegate their time, which can be very difficult to do in iSelectLearning.  

It is undeniably more difficult to stay motivated and manage time during virtual school. Learning safely from home certainly has some advantages, but it is absolutely a different environment. It is much easier to get distracted and veer off task in a space where you may have family members working or household responsibilities to accomplish. Graded homework will motivate students to stay on track with their learning and communicate with their teachers and peers if they are struggling. Grades drive students to seek correct answers and necessary assistance to understand the material on pace with the class. If assignments are graded for accuracy, students will be more likely to attend office hours, communicate with teachers and advisors, and make the most of their virtual learning experience.  

The Case Against Graded Homework Assignments by Peter Ryan ’21

What is the purpose of homework? Students should complete additional schoolwork outside of class for three reasons: practicing skills, building an understanding of content, and identifying areas of concern. In order to best achieve these goals, students should feel encouraged to work through assignments without feeling added pressure on their grades. Ideally, students could develop questions for the next class period without feeling stress to answer every question correctly. Of course, assignments should still be graded for completion so that students must still turn work in. However, assignments graded for accuracy, which have become more popular during iSelectLearning , defeat the purpose of homework: they motivate students to prioritize immediate perfection over deeper understanding.

Homework assignments should be spaces to think creatively about problems and experiment with approaches. Graded assignments do the opposite: they force the student to produce perfect answers without giving them the proper time to fully comprehend the bigger picture. An incorrect answer could even lead to an in-class question that addresses other students’ confusions as well. The pressure of homework graded for accuracy may compel students to turn to outside resources to find the correct answer, rather than improving their own handle on class concepts. When homework is graded for accuracy, students suffer twice: their grades may slip and they do not learn as effectively.

Teachers may prefer graded homeworks during iSelectLearning because they can consistently examine students’ understanding of class material. When teachers can’t effectively check in with students every day, homework graded for accuracy may seem like a solid way to give feedback. Students who are fully virtual should be encouraged to utilize office hours to solidify their grasp of subject matter, not punished for struggling with concepts right after they are introduced. These assignments hurt students more than they help, both by adding unnecessary stress and by placing immediate comprehension above concept retainment. In a time when students are adjusting to a more rigorous online curriculum than last spring’s, only assessments should be graded for accuracy.

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Peter Ryan is a senior at Friends Select School. He currently serves as President of Student Government, Co-Clerk of QUAKE, and founding leader of Cricket...

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Pulse Nigeria

Here's why homework is bad according to research

It is probably best that schools ban homework totally.

For as long as we can all remember, homework has long been a part of the education system.

It is said that homework is a great way to reinforce learning, promote independent study habits, and prepare students for academic success.

However, recent research has revealed that homework might just have some negative effects. These include;

Negative impact on mental health

One reason why homework is bad is that it can have a negative impact on students' mental health. Excessive homework has been linked to increased stress, anxiety, and even depression, particularly among high school students who are already grappling with academic pressure and social obligations.

It reduces family time

Kids and students these days spend a lot of hours in school, and homework can encroach upon valuable family time when they are at home, depriving students of opportunities to bond with their loved ones, pursue hobbies, and engage in extracurricular activities. This lack of balance can lead to feelings of isolation and resentment, ultimately undermining the quality of family relationships.

It's not that effective in reinforcing learning

Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that homework may have limited effectiveness in reinforcing learning, especially when it involves rote memorisation or busywork. Instead of deepening understanding and mastery of concepts, excessive homework can lead to surface-level learning and a focus on grades rather than genuine comprehension.

Loss of interest in learning

Homework leads to stress in some students and this can in turn affect students' intrinsic motivation to learn and explore new ideas. Instead of making them love learning, excessive homework can instil a sense of apathy and disengagement, leading students to view education as a chore rather than a source of inspiration.

Impact on physical health

Spending long hours hunched over textbooks and screens trying to complete homework can take a toll on students' physical health, contributing to issues such as eyestrain, headaches, and poor posture. Lack of sufficient sleep, often a result of late-night homework sessions, can further compound these problems and impair cognitive function.

With these few reasons explaining why homework is bad, it is probably best that schools should ban homework totally. Or maybe I'm being biased because I actually hate doing homework, what do you think?

                  Homework might just have some negative effects [Education Hub]                 ©(c) provided by Pulse Nigeria

One-third of Australian children can't read properly as teaching methods cause 'preventable tragedy', Grattan Institute says

A young boy looking at a sheet of paper with words on it

One-third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new report.

The Grattan Institute's Reading Guarantee report calls this a "preventable tragedy" caused by persisting with teaching styles popular at universities, but "contrary to science" and discredited by inquiries in all major English-speaking countries.

"In a typical Australian school classroom of 24 students, eight can't read well," said report lead author and Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter. 

"Australia is failing these children."

The estimated cost of this "failure" was profound both personally and economy-wide, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even jailed later in life, the report concluded. 

Dr Hunter said the "conservative" financial estimate amounted to a "really significant cost" that did not include productivity benefits from increased reading. 

Students left to 'guess' meaning of words

The Grattan Institute attributed the major cause of its findings to the rise of a teaching style called "whole language", which became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s. 

It is underpinned by a philosophy that learning to read is a natural, unconscious process that students can master by being exposed to good literature. 

Proponents say it empowers young people by giving them autonomy. 

However, Grattan said it left students to "guess" the meaning of words and was saddling parents with expensive tuition costs to help their children catch up.

After decades of the so-called reading wars , "whole language" has incorporated elements of other approaches such as phonics, but Grattan said it remained "light touch" and "contrary to scientific recommendations". 

"What we need to do is set our expectations higher. We need to stop accepting failure," Dr Hunter said.

"It's not good enough that one in three students are not where they need to be in reading."

The Grattan Institute said evidence showed a much greater number of students learned to read successfully using the alternative "structured literacy" approach, and at least 90 per cent of students would be proficient using this model. 

Small laminated bits of paper with phonics on them are seen in a classroom

"Structured literacy" includes phonics, but also teacher-led "explicit instruction" backed by the latest science on how children's brains learn new concepts. 

"The quality of teaching is the thing that will shift the dial for our young people," Dr Hunter said. 

"We need to make the most of every single minute we have with our young people." 

Why are some schools still not using phonics?

Despite major inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States settling the argument that structured literacy teaching is superior, that hasn't flowed to all classrooms, the Grattan Institute says. 

It said where school systems had embraced it, students had  reaped the rewards . 

Australia's 10,000 schools have a high degree of autonomy, and even in states where education departments advocate for the structured literacy approach, the report says there needs to be more support for teachers to re-train and be provided with ready-made lessons. 

"The real issue here is, are governments doing enough to set teachers up for success?'" Dr Hunter said. 

"The challenge is making sure best practice is common practice in every single classroom." 

Western Sydney University's Katina Zammit, president of the Australian Literary Educators Association, said the whole language method should not end up in history's trash can. 

She said that in school systems that moved to the teaching methods championed by the Grattan Institute, some teachers found it too prescriptive. 

"The teachers that I have had contact with, some of the children who are being taught this way, have either lost interest in reading because it's a whole class approach or they are not retaining the instruction," Dr Zammit said. 

Dr Zammit agreed whole learning did not work for all students but said it could still be useful in the classroom. 

"One size doesn't fit all students," she said. 

"Yes, the majority it might, but we do have to look at engagement and motivation as well." 

However in a statement to the ABC, Education Minister Jason Clare said the science on teaching reading had been settled.

He also foreshadowed mandating teaching styles in the upcoming school funding agreement.

"The reading wars are over. We know what works. The current National School Reform Agreement doesn't include the sort of targets or reforms to move the needle here," he said.

"The new Agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work. The sort of things that will help children keep up, catch up and finish school."

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  1. The Problem with Grading

    In fact, Feldman says, grades have become "the main criteria in nearly every decision that schools make about students," from whether they get promoted to the next class or held back, to which course level a student should be taking, such as college prep, honors, or AP.

  2. Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

    Boston University The Brink Other Publications Boston University's Alumni Magazine 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.

  3. Should we really be grading homework?

    Advertisement This article was published more than 1 year ago Answer Sheet A deep dive into whether -- and how -- homework should be graded Perspective by Valerie Strauss Staff writer February...

  4. Key Lessons: What Research Says About the Value of Homework

    Homework has been in the headlines again recently and continues to be a topic of controversy, with claims that students and families are suffering under the burden of huge amounts of homework. School board members, educators, and parents may wish to turn to the research for answers to their questions about the benefits and drawbacks of homework.

  5. Why You Should Grade Homework (But Not How You Think)

    Why You Should Grade Homework (But Not How You Think) Subscribe to the Teach 4 the Heart Podcast. There are quite a few different views about whether or not homework should be graded. Some say absolutely not; others definitely yes. And still others choose to just give a completion grade but not grade the work itself.

  6. Does homework really work?

    After two hours, however, achievement doesn't improve. For high schoolers, Cooper's research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in ...

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  8. Homework Pros and Cons

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  9. Why homework matters

    Homework must be challenging and purposeful for kids to recognize its value. For this reason, at Success, we take great care with the design of our homework assignments, ensuring they are engaging and relevant to what takes place in class the next day. When done well, homework can be a form of the "flipped classroom"—a model developed by ...

  10. Study: Homework Doesn't Mean Better Grades, But Maybe Better

    November 20, 2012 Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at UVA's Curry School of Education The time students spend on math and science homework doesn't necessarily mean better grades, but it could lead to better performance on standardized tests, a new study finds.

  11. What's the Right Amount of Homework?

    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.

  12. Should We Get Rid of Homework?

    Oct. 26, 2022 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...

  13. Should Kids Get Homework?

    And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary. "Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're...

  14. Grading homework problems on completion vs. correctness, and overall

    To answer your main question, homework was still 15-20% of the grade. Each graded answer was a larger portion, but I didn't hear any of my fellow students complain about that. (Although, perhaps the ones who didn't do well on the homework didn't have the math skills to figure that out. evil grin)

  15. Why Homework Matters: It's Not Just About Grades

    The primary purpose of elementary school homework should be building the homework habit. The real benefit is simply learning how to do it: How to set aside time, complete a task outside of school, and struggle through problems even when a teacher or helpful classmate is not nearby. If students don't learn those skills while they are young ...

  16. Not Including Classwork and Homework (Formative Assessment) in the Grade

    Before homework was worth 25% and tests were worth 60%. Now homework is worth 5% and assessments are worth 80%. Students were just doing homework for the points and to help their grade, rather than doing it because it helps them in their learning. Now they start to realize there is a purpose to homework. They see problems show up on the exams ...

  17. The Pros and Cons: Should Students Have Homework?

    Why Should Students Have Homework? 1. Homework Encourages Practice Many people believe that one of the positive effects of homework is that it encourages the discipline of practice. While it may be time consuming and boring compared to other activities, repetition is needed to get better at skills.

  18. Why Homework is Bad: Stress and Consequences

    Health News Is Too Much Homework Bad for Kids' Health? Research shows that some students regularly receive higher amounts of homework than experts recommend, which may cause stress and negative...

  19. Two Opinions: Should Homework be Graded for Accuracy?

    Graded homework will motivate students to stay on track with their learning and communicate with their teachers and peers if they are struggling. Grades drive students to seek correct answers and necessary assistance to understand the material on pace with the class.

  20. Why Homework Doesn't Seem To Boost Learning--And How It Could

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  21. Should homework be graded in an undergraduate math course?

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  22. Why is Homework Important?

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  23. Like, honestly, why is homework graded in US or on a more ...

    I think the point with homework being graded harshly is that adds stress and takes the joy out of learning if every homework is a mini-test. Why not just evaluate students on correctness for tests and projects? MasterSystem86 3 hr. ago

  24. Here's why homework is bad according to research

    One reason why homework is bad is that it can have a negative impact on students' mental health. Excessive homework has been linked to increased stress, anxiety, and even depression, particularly ...

  25. One-third of Australian children can't read properly as teaching

    The estimated cost of this "failure" was profound both personally and economy-wide, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even ...