Does Homework Improve Learning?

Most proponents, of course, aren’t saying that all homework is always good in all respects for all kids – just as critics couldn’t defend the proposition that no homework is ever good in any way for any child. But is there some other benefit, something other than academic learning, that might be cited in homework’s defense? For full citations, please see the reference section of The Homework Myth. 1. Cooper et al., p. 2. This early study by Joseph Mayer Rice is cited in Gill and Schlossman 2004, p. 5. Paschal et al.; Walberg et al. 6. Barber, p. 56. Two of the four studies reviewed by Paschal et al. The third found benefits at two of three grade levels, but all of the students in this study who were assigned homework also received parental help. The last study found that students who were given math puzzles (unrelated to what was being taught in class) did as well as those who got traditional math homework.

8. There is reason to question whether this technique is really appropriate for a topic like homework, and thus whether the conclusions drawn from it would be valid. Meta-analyses may be useful for combining multiple studies of, say, the efficacy of a blood pressure medication, but not necessarily studies dealing with different aspects of complex human behavior. 10. Cooper et al. 12. Hofferth and Sandberg, p. 13. Cooper 1999a, p. 100. It’s also theoretically possible that the relationship is reciprocal: Homework contributes to higher achievement, which then, in turn, predisposes those students to spend more time on it. But correlations between the two leave us unable to disentangle the two effects and determine which is stronger. 14. Cool and Keith. 15. For example, see Chen and Stevenson; Epstein; Georgiou; Gorges and Elliott. 16. Epstein and Van Voorhis, pp. 183-84. Also see Walberg et al., pp. 17. Muhlenbruck et al. In Cooper et al.

18. Cooper et al. 19. Cooper et al. 20. Chen and Stevenson, p. 21. “Several surveys have found that students consistently report their homework time to be higher than teachers’ estimates” (Ziegler 1986, p. 22. Ziegler 1992, p. 602. Cooper (1989a, p. “far from ideal” for a number of reasons, including the relative rarity of random-assignment studies. 25. Cooper 1999a, p. 72. That difference shrank in the latest batch of studies (Cooper et al. 26. Cooper et al. 1998. The correlation was .17. 27. See Kohn 1999b, 2000, which includes analysis and research to support the claims made in the following paragraphs. 28. Nevertheless, Cooper criticizes studies that use only one of these measures and argues in favor of those, like his own, that make use of both (see Cooper et al. The problems with tests and grades may be different, but they don’t cancel each other out when the two variables are used at the same time. 29. Cooper 1989a, p.

30. Cooper 1999a, p. 72; 2001, p. 16. The studies he reviewed lasted anywhere from two to thirty weeks. 31. Natriello and McDill. ] of 0.130” (p. 32. Tymms and Fitz-Gibbon. Quotation appears on p. 8. If anything, this summary understates the actual findings. 34. Cooper 1989a, p. 109. Why this might be true is open to interpretation. 35. The unpublished study by C. Bents-Hill et al. 36. The four, in order, are Finstad; Townsend; Foyle; and Meloy. 38. Cooper 1989a, p. 100. The correlations were .02, .07, and .25, respectively. 39. Baker and Letendre, p. 40. For example, see any number of writings by Herbert Walberg. Another possible reason that “elementary achievement is high” in Japan: teachers there “are free from the pressure to teach to standardized tests” (Lewis, p. Until they get to high school, there are no such tests in Japan. As far as I can tell, no data on how 2004 NAEP math scores varied by homework completion have been published for nine- and thirteen-year-olds.

Seventeen-year-olds were not asked to quantify the number of hours devoted to homework in 2004, but were asked whether they did homework “often,” “sometimes,” or “never” – and here more homework was correlated with higher scores (U.S. Department of Education 2005, p. 42. In 2000, fourth graders who reported doing more than an hour of homework a night got exactly same score as those whose teachers assigned no homework at all. Those in the middle, who said they did 30-60 minutes a night, got slightly higher scores. 43. Ziegler 1992, p. 44. Mullis et al. 45. Chen and Stevenson, pp. 47. Even at a first pass, TIMSS results suggest that the U.S. But TIMSS results really don’t support the proposition that our seniors are inferior. That’s true, first, because, at least on the science test, the scores among most of the countries are actually pretty similar in absolute terms (Gibbs and Fox, p.