Do our kids have too much homework?

Parents and their children have been overwhelmed by the amount of homework that is assigned by schools and teachers. Experiences range from sacrificing weekends to staying up late to complete homework. It can be stressful if the homework is challenging and hard, though teachers intend to make students practice and understand the concepts taught in class.

Studies have indicated that there no evidence that homework is more these days. The trend has been flat for the last two decades or so. However, educators across the world do agree that a young child today does a lot more homework than before.

However, educators agree that a young child is doing more homework today than ever before.

A Short History About Homework Movements

There are published pieces of evidence that at the break of the Twentieth Century, many mothers have led a movement against homework stating that their kids are better off playing outside than sitting at home and doing homework after coming from school. This movement tasted great success in California when a legislature was passed in 1901 that abolished homework for K-8 grades. However, this was revoked in 1916.

The supporters for homework have always maintained that it is beneficial to students as it makes them recollect what was taught and practice it, which eventually made them better at it. In the long run, students also pick up life skills like planning, time management, and owning responsibility for the tasks they have to complete.

On the other hand, the opposers have also consistently maintained that this has a bad effect on the child’s health and eventually they go through a lot of stress (back they used the term nervous breakdown) and anxiety leading to depression when they fail to complete their homework on time.

What is the Current Trend?

Progressive educators over the years have ensured that homework was no longer a boring activity by coming out with creative and interesting assignments and homework.

In today’s scenario, high achieving parents have started to demand more homework that is also challenging the student’s ability. The idea behind this was parents felt the pressure to make their children get good grades and enroll them in affluent universities.

Though the high achieving parents wanted more homework, studies have not established a link between what a student achieves based on the amount of homework. It has been found that there is barely any relationship between homework and grades in elementary school children. This increased during middle school until it became a 60 to 120 minutes activity each day. This seems to be the optimal level, as kids who did more than these two hours in middle school did not seem to perform any better than those doing less than two hours of homework.

When the averages were compared globally, American middle school children were found to be spending more time on homework than their counterparts in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. However, they were behind compared to their peers in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Conclusion

The studies have established that there is no correlation between the amount of homework and test scores being higher. The answer then to the question, “Does more homework lead to higher scores”? is a simple “No”.