As many students begin the new school year Tuesday, they’ll also bring home their first homework assignments of the new school year. Although it’s generally assumed that homework helps students learn, a review of the research reveals a surprising verdict: It’s complicated.
Matt Barnum at The 74 looked at what research says about homework’s effectiveness. “Shockingly little, as a matter of fact,” Barnum writes. It’s not that research says homework is ineffective or that there’s plenty of research with inconclusive results on homework’s effectiveness. There just isn’t much research at all and that research should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.
A decade-old overview of past research on homework found a correlation between homework and high-performing students. But the study didn’t find causal effects, so it’s possible that kids who do more homework have high test scores for other reasons. They may be naturally smarter or more driven to succeed academically.
The overview said that all the studies it reviewed had design flaws.
Barnum spoke with Harris Cooper, a professor at Duke University who reviewed the research on homework. “He points out that his research found six studies that could plausibly isolate the impact of homework, with all but one showing consistently positive results,” Barnum writes. But none of those studies were published in academic journals, likely because of design flaws.
Furthermore, those studies range from 31 to 19 years old. With the rise of the Internet and perhaps changing trends in parenting, the way homework is done has changed significantly since those studies were done. It would be wrong to assume they would get the same results if they were conducted today.
Although there are some more recent studies, they use data that’s now 28 years old.
A 2013 study found that being given and doing homework helped students, but the study looked only at college students in economics classes in North Carolina.
So, does homework actually help students? It seems probable, but no one is 100 percent sure.
But, as far as Cooper knows, there aren’t any studies that examine negative consequences of homework, like stress on students and families.
Despite the inconclusive research, parents are generally happy with the amount of homework their student receives or want even more. A Phi Delta Kappa survey found that a majority of parents say their child has about the right amount of homework. Roughly 20 percent of parents each say their child had too much or too little homework.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
