why do professors give so much homework

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Credit: August de Richelieu

Does homework still have value? A Johns Hopkins education expert weighs in

Joyce epstein, co-director of the center on school, family, and community partnerships, discusses why homework is essential, how to maximize its benefit to learners, and what the 'no-homework' approach gets wrong.

By Vicky Hallett

The necessity of homework has been a subject of debate since at least as far back as the 1890s, according to Joyce L. Epstein , co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. "It's always been the case that parents, kids—and sometimes teachers, too—wonder if this is just busy work," Epstein says.

But after decades of researching how to improve schools, the professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education remains certain that homework is essential—as long as the teachers have done their homework, too. The National Network of Partnership Schools , which she founded in 1995 to advise schools and districts on ways to improve comprehensive programs of family engagement, has developed hundreds of improved homework ideas through its Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program. For an English class, a student might interview a parent on popular hairstyles from their youth and write about the differences between then and now. Or for science class, a family could identify forms of matter over the dinner table, labeling foods as liquids or solids. These innovative and interactive assignments not only reinforce concepts from the classroom but also foster creativity, spark discussions, and boost student motivation.

"We're not trying to eliminate homework procedures, but expand and enrich them," says Epstein, who is packing this research into a forthcoming book on the purposes and designs of homework. In the meantime, the Hub couldn't wait to ask her some questions:

What kind of homework training do teachers typically get?

Future teachers and administrators really have little formal training on how to design homework before they assign it. This means that most just repeat what their teachers did, or they follow textbook suggestions at the end of units. For example, future teachers are well prepared to teach reading and literacy skills at each grade level, and they continue to learn to improve their teaching of reading in ongoing in-service education. By contrast, most receive little or no training on the purposes and designs of homework in reading or other subjects. It is really important for future teachers to receive systematic training to understand that they have the power, opportunity, and obligation to design homework with a purpose.

Why do students need more interactive homework?

If homework assignments are always the same—10 math problems, six sentences with spelling words—homework can get boring and some kids just stop doing their assignments, especially in the middle and high school years. When we've asked teachers what's the best homework you've ever had or designed, invariably we hear examples of talking with a parent or grandparent or peer to share ideas. To be clear, parents should never be asked to "teach" seventh grade science or any other subject. Rather, teachers set up the homework assignments so that the student is in charge. It's always the student's homework. But a good activity can engage parents in a fun, collaborative way. Our data show that with "good" assignments, more kids finish their work, more kids interact with a family partner, and more parents say, "I learned what's happening in the curriculum." It all works around what the youngsters are learning.

Is family engagement really that important?

At Hopkins, I am part of the Center for Social Organization of Schools , a research center that studies how to improve many aspects of education to help all students do their best in school. One thing my colleagues and I realized was that we needed to look deeply into family and community engagement. There were so few references to this topic when we started that we had to build the field of study. When children go to school, their families "attend" with them whether a teacher can "see" the parents or not. So, family engagement is ever-present in the life of a school.

My daughter's elementary school doesn't assign homework until third grade. What's your take on "no homework" policies?

There are some parents, writers, and commentators who have argued against homework, especially for very young children. They suggest that children should have time to play after school. This, of course is true, but many kindergarten kids are excited to have homework like their older siblings. If they give homework, most teachers of young children make assignments very short—often following an informal rule of 10 minutes per grade level. "No homework" does not guarantee that all students will spend their free time in productive and imaginative play.

Some researchers and critics have consistently misinterpreted research findings. They have argued that homework should be assigned only at the high school level where data point to a strong connection of doing assignments with higher student achievement . However, as we discussed, some students stop doing homework. This leads, statistically, to results showing that doing homework or spending more minutes on homework is linked to higher student achievement. If slow or struggling students are not doing their assignments, they contribute to—or cause—this "result."

Teachers need to design homework that even struggling students want to do because it is interesting. Just about all students at any age level react positively to good assignments and will tell you so.

Did COVID change how schools and parents view homework?

Within 24 hours of the day school doors closed in March 2020, just about every school and district in the country figured out that teachers had to talk to and work with students' parents. This was not the same as homeschooling—teachers were still working hard to provide daily lessons. But if a child was learning at home in the living room, parents were more aware of what they were doing in school. One of the silver linings of COVID was that teachers reported that they gained a better understanding of their students' families. We collected wonderfully creative examples of activities from members of the National Network of Partnership Schools. I'm thinking of one art activity where every child talked with a parent about something that made their family unique. Then they drew their finding on a snowflake and returned it to share in class. In math, students talked with a parent about something the family liked so much that they could represent it 100 times. Conversations about schoolwork at home was the point.

How did you create so many homework activities via the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program?

We had several projects with educators to help them design interactive assignments, not just "do the next three examples on page 38." Teachers worked in teams to create TIPS activities, and then we turned their work into a standard TIPS format in math, reading/language arts, and science for grades K-8. Any teacher can use or adapt our prototypes to match their curricula.

Overall, we know that if future teachers and practicing educators were prepared to design homework assignments to meet specific purposes—including but not limited to interactive activities—more students would benefit from the important experience of doing their homework. And more parents would, indeed, be partners in education.

Posted in Voices+Opinion

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More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive, research suggests.

A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.   "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .   The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.   Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.   Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.   "The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.   Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.   Their study found that too much homework is associated with:   • Greater stress : 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.   • Reductions in health : In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.   • Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits : Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.   A balancing act   The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.   Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.   "This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," said Pope, who is also a co-founder of Challenge Success , a nonprofit organization affiliated with the GSE that conducts research and works with schools and parents to improve students' educational experiences..   Pope said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.   "Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.   High-performing paradox   In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."   Student perspectives   The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.   The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer at the Stanford News Service .

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Student Opinion

Do Teachers Assign Too Much Homework?

By Michael Gonchar

• Dec. 1, 2016

When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Will it keep you up late at night? Will it cause stress in your family? Or do you have homework under control?

Do your teachers assign too much homework?

In “ As Students Return to School, Debate About the Amount of Homework Rages ,” Christine Hauser writes:

How much homework is enough? My daughter, Maya, who is entering second grade, was asked to complete homework six days a week during the summer. For a while, we tried gamely to keep up. But one day she turned to me and said, “I hate reading.” I put the assignment aside. That was my abrupt introduction to the debate over homework that is bubbling up as students across the United States head back to school. This month, Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Godley, Tex., let parents know on “Meet the Teacher” night that she had no plans to load up her students’ backpacks. “There will be no formally assigned homework this year,” Ms. Young wrote in a note that was widely shared on Facebook. “Rather, I ask that you spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success. Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside, and get your child to bed early.” Other conversations about homework are humming in town halls and online. Some school districts, including one near Phoenix, have taken steps to shorten the summer break, out of concern that too much is forgotten over the summer. But discussions on blogs like GreatSchools.org or StopHomework.com reveal a belief that the workload assigned to students may be too heavy.

When we asked students this same question in 2014, most commenters — but not all — voiced their opinion that homework was stressing them out. Dinah wrote:

In theory, homework seems like a good idea, just a little bit of looking over what was learned in class and answering a few questions to feel more comfortable with the material. In practice, it’s entirely different. Now I’m up till 11:30 p.m. some nights desperately trying to finish three colossal essays.

Eve agreed :

I’m an eighth grade student at an American school and my teachers pile on homework, so much where I am staying up until nearly three in the morning. I LOVE school and I truly do have a passion for learning, it’s just these extra worksheets are not teaching me anything.

And Doug B. wrote :

I’m becoming deranged from the excess of homework given to me. I have no time for any interests I have, companions and sleep.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

— Do your teachers assign too much homework? Or do you have just the right amount?

— Does homework cause stress and tension in your family ? Or does it create opportunities to work together with your parents or siblings?

— Does it get in the way of sleep or extracurricular activities? Or are you able to manage the right balance?

— How do you usually get your homework done? At home or at school? In a quiet room, or with family or friends around? Do you tend to work alone, or do your parents or friends help?

— Is homework, including projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or is it not a good use of time, in your opinion? Explain.

Students 13 and older 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.

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The Workload Dilemma

This is a somewhat odd sentence to write, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about time. When I first transitioned from a traditional faculty position to an administrative position at a teaching center, I had a hard time adjusting to the rhythms of the workload and often wondered where my time went. I started reading about time-use studies and even spent an entire semester painstakingly tracking my time to see what I could learn.

The most important thing I discovered was that I was really  bad at estimating the amount of time I was spending on various tasks. I overestimated the amount of time I was spending on things I didn’t like (committee meetings), underestimated the amount of time I was spending on tasks I enjoyed (reading the latest research on teaching & learning), and thought I was wasting way more time on non-work related tasks (Facebook) than I actually was.

While my attempt to regain control of my time didn’t have a happy ending for me personally (I still work too much!), it did get me thinking about what this might mean for teaching & learning. If I was this bad at estimating how long it would take me to do things, I was certain I wasn’t going to be very good at estimating how long it would take my students  to do things. I also became a lot less confident in the standard answers I would give when faculty would ask me how much reading and writing they should assign. Where did those numbers come from and how did I know they had any relationship to the amount of time we expected students to spend?

So in the summer of 2016 (long ago in a galaxy far, far away), I started to look for empirical research that would help me think more carefully about what we should be asking students to do when they aren’t in class. To make a long story short, that effort led to the creation of an award-winning course workload estimator that has been widely shared and used by more than 115,000 individual users over the last 5 years. I’ve found myself talking a lot about student workload ever since.

Given this history, I’ve been fascinated by what we’ve heard from students about workload this semester. Like Jody Greene , I know of no faculty who set out to assign students more work this semester just because they were online. In fact, faculty at Wake Forest had explicit conversations about workload in our Peer-to-Peer Learning Communities this summer. We even created a new and improved estimator to help faculty estimate the time required to complete online assignments like discussion board posts. Yet students across the country are clearly overwhelmed and feeling as if their academic work has grown exponentially.

So what is happening here? Are faculty underestimating, students overestimating, or something else entirely? In this post, I will share what we’ve heard from Wake Forest students, my various theories about what is going on, and a few specific ways we might respond. You can also hear me discuss these issues and more on the latest episode of Vanderbilt’s Leading Lines podcast with the brilliant Derek Bruff and Karen Costa (embedded below).

What Wake Students Are Telling Us

Like students across the country , those who responded to our all-campus survey felt overwhelmed by academic work this semester. Although we did not ask any specific questions about workload, many students used the open-ended question to make their feelings known. Apart from expressing a preference for in-person learning, concerns about workload were the most common theme.

• “The workload expectations from professors are tearing students apart … I have yet to meet a returning Wake student who feels as though the workload is not unmanageable.”
• “I and almost every other student I’ve talked to have had MORE work this semester than ever and I experienced the routine of … mostly just working and sleeping and that’s not an exaggeration.”
• “[Workload] increased to be double the amount of work from a previous semester not online. I never stopped working every day of the week and assignments would take me hours on end.”

Students hypothesized that instructors were adding more work to make up for lost in-person class time, to keep them busy when they (assumed) they had more time, or to ensure that online courses were rigorous. They also expressed challenges keeping up with numerous, smaller activities due on several days of the week in all of their courses.

• “I feel that professors overcompensated for the fact that we were mostly online and I had significantly more work during the semester … than I have had during other semesters at Wake Forest.”
• “All of my teachers assumed that they could pile on work because all of my classes were online, so I felt completely suffocated the whole semester.”
• “ For one class alone I was expected to watch an hour or more worth of asynchronous lectures … read 2 chapters … read long news or informational articles … sit in class for 75 minutes and have a closed book/ closed note quiz every week … Now imagine this but for 4 more classes.”

What Might Be Going On

I can imagine at least six explanations for what our students were experiencing last semester, and the reality is that all six are probably part of the story.

Hypothesis 1: Whether we intend to or not, we might actually be assigning more work than we have in the past.

There are a number of plausible reasons this, the most straightforward of explanations, could be true. As my experience suggests, it’s really hard to estimate the amount of time students need to complete specific assignments, and that’s particularly true when we’re assigning work for the first time (as many of us are in our newly designed courses). I doubt we are increasing work just to make sure our students take our classes seriously, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we were doing so to assuage our fears that students at a distance would not remain engaged. I also wonder whether increased workload was an unintended consequence of our intensive preparation for the fall. Faculty across the country spent an unprecedented amount of time collecting teaching and learning ideas this summer and we may just be eager to try them all , not thinking about their cumulative impact on student work.

Hypothesis 2:  We aren’t assigning more work, but we haven’t made our expectations clear.

It’s also possible faculty bear some responsibility but in an indirect way.  One of the things I’ve noticed while reading student accounts is that they seem to be spending inordinate amounts of time on the asynchronous activities meant to take the place of in-person activities. If students are asked to post to a discussion board, they often spend hours reading and crafting their responses–far more than the amount of time they would spend responding to a classmate during an in-person class. Likewise, writing assignments that might take 15 minutes in class (because the instructor tells them to stop!) can spiral into hours as high-achieving students worried about their grades work to achieve perfection. Because these new activities are to be completed “at home” and must be turned in for a grade on specific dates, it’s not surprising that students are treating them like the higher-stakes homework they were assigned in the past. In short, students might be doing more than we expect of them because we haven’t actually communicated what we expect.

Hypothesis 3:  Some students are overestimating their work because they are unhappy to be learning online.

If we think faculty have a hard time estimating the amount of work they are assigning, it’s fair to ask whether students might struggle to estimate the time they’ve spent, as well. There is research to suggest that students are not any better than most of us at accurately reporting how they spend their time. And if my experience is any indication, this may be exacerbated by all the other challenges they are facing. We know that many of our students are not enthused about having to spend so much time learning alone in their dorm rooms, so their experience of work is likely to  feel  different. Like my experience of (some!) committee meetings, they may feel like online assignments are dragging on because they are mindful of what else they could be doing if things were different.

Hypothesis 4: Many students could do well with less effort in the past.

The most interesting of all six hypotheses, and the one I’ve thought the most about, is that our experience this semester has revealed an unfortunate truth about how teaching and learning took place prior to the pandemic. This theory, explained by Jody Greene in the widely-shared Twitter thread below, suggests that students are experiencing more work because of a fundamental difference between online courses and the typical in-person course. While there may be no difference in how much work is expected of students in these courses, there is often a difference in how much work is  required .

Most faculty would agree that students should be spending 30 hours a week on homework in a traditional 15-credit semester, but we also know that the average student taking in-person courses is able to get by on about 15 hours a week . This is not surprising to most faculty, as we know that students aren’t always doing the reading or coming to class prepared. Here and there a course might require the full amount of work, but a student can usually count on some of their courses requiring less.

I often get asked about why college students are being assigned "more work" during the pandemic based on anecdotes. Since I have never met an instructor who sat down and decided "I'll give the students more work during this plague," something odd is going on here. A thread. — Jody Greene (aka "Kiddoc") (@Jodyji) November 20, 2020

So what makes online courses so different? In an online course, faculty can see, and students are held accountable for, all expected work. In an in-person class, students can sometimes skip the reading and passively participate in class. But in an online course, they may have to annotate the reading, take a quiz, or contribute to a discussion board after the reading is complete. While this shift would be uncomfortable for students in the case of one course, shifting all of their courses in this direction would, in fact, double their workload and entail a radical reworking of their schedules. Of course, this shift is a good thing for student learning, but it’s not clear we realized it would be asking our students to completely re-orient yet another aspect of their lives.

Hypothesis 5:  The shift to online coursework has increased students’ cognitive load.

Perhaps the challenge is not about faculty or student misperceptions at all, but rather the nature of the work itself. Our students are experts at learning in a traditional face-to-face classroom. But they have had to teach themselves new skills to learn online. They have learned how to use new tools, figured out how to complete new types of assignments, and gotten used to a new rhythm of work. We’ve also encouraged faculty to follow best practices by breaking up a few large assignments into multiple smaller ones. When this happens across five courses, 10 assignments can suddenly convert to 50. While those 50 assignments may take no more time than the original 10, simply keeping track of when they are due is a new job unto itself. In each of these cases, the cognitive load we are placing on students has increased, adding invisible labor to the time they spend completing the work.

Hypothesis 6:  A global pandemic has decreased student capacity to work.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it’s worth remembering that all of this is happening in the midst of a global pandemic. Before they even show up in our classes, our students are likely struggling with isolation, loneliness, and collective or personal trauma. As noted above, this context can make the work feel harder. But it can also make it actually harder. As many of us know all too well, these conditions can decrease our motivation and capacity to work, leading us to spend far more time on tasks than we have in the past. In one of the most thoughtful and heartbreaking comments on our survey, one student explained that “classes were consistently easier in content and material, but emotionally more difficult, and more difficult to try hard for.”

What We Can Do

As I noted at the outset, my best guess is that all six of these phenomena are part of the overall story. In any of these cases, however, it is clear that our students are not doing well. So what might we, as instructors, do to improve their situation this semester?

The first and most basic step is to make sure you have a good,  accurate idea of how much work you are assigning your students. Make use of our workload estimator to estimate the time you expect of  every  assignment (including often overlooked ungraded activities that take considerable time).  Add it all up and make sure that it is less than 3 hours per week per credit hour. But don’t stop there. As our estimator is ultimately an  estimator , it’s not always accurate. So make a regular habit of checking your estimates with students. How much time are they actually spending? Do they need to adjust how they are working or do you need to adjust your estimates?

If you found yourself adding more work to make sure your students remain engaged, this may be a moment to simply trust that most of your students will do what needs to be done to remain engaged. To be sure, not all students have earned our trust, but being overly trusting may be the most humane response for all of us at this moment.

What if you think you might have assigned more work than you realized because you keep getting so many  cool ideas? Adopt the strategy I used for my closet when I lived in a Manhattan studio: figure out what you can fit and only add something after you’ve gotten rid of something else.

To address the challenge of students spending more time than you expect, be explicit. If you’ve done your homework and created time estimates for every reading assignment or activity, go ahead and include them in the syllabus. Tell them if you expect them to spend no more than 15 minutes on a discussion post or 45 minutes on a 1-page journal entry. This will help those who tend to overshoot the estimates, and if they can’t manage to complete the work in that time frame, you can adjust your assignments moving forward.

To decrease your students’ cognitive load, try to limit your use of new tools and technologies. Consider limiting the different kinds of activities you assign, as well. Or, at the very least, build in time for them to learn the new tool or practice the new activity before you expect them to complete the assignment. And to reduce the amount of time they have to spend keeping track of assignments and due dates, ask yourself whether all of your small assignments are actually necessary (or necessary for a grade) and make sure they are assigned and due as part of a predictable weekly schedule.

More controversially, you might also consider decreasing  the amount of work you assign to your students this semester. While it is true that time-on-task is one of the most important predictors of student learning, that relationship may not matter if students are not equipped to actually spend that time, or spend that time productively. As the director of a teaching center, there are few things I consider more important than student learning. But there are things that are more important than student learning.

Finally, if I were only able to give a single piece of advice, it would be this: consider whether  now , in the midst of a global pandemic, is the time to create radically new expectations for what work is  required  of our students. If you think not, then make sure you are holding students accountable for the same amount of work you did in the past. Look at your previous syllabi and ask yourself: how much of the work you expected did students have  to complete in your course? How much did you ask them to complete on the honor system? Then look at your current syllabus and make sure the distribution is roughly the same. If they could get by skipping a few readings in the past, consider giving them that option this semester, as well.

I’ve thought a lot about workload over the past five years, but our collective experience this semester has taught me even more. There will be a time and place for us to discuss what we’ve learned and what it means for how we structure our classes moving forward. But in this moment when our students are so clearly struggling, their well-being is my top priority.

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15 Comments

As suggested, I found a ton of new things to try. I tried to spread them out over several classes. This had two effects. First, I was not grading the same old stuff over and over again. Second, I was able to look at a lot different things to find both what the students liked better and what I liked better. We all know that the effort we have to put in to some assignments is not worth what the students get from it while others seem to have instant success.

Wow Betsy, your post really resonated with me.

RE: Hypotheses 1 & 2: I know I am not assigning more work because I purposefully removed content/chapters from my general education courses and a lab from each upper-division course so that my students could have time to reallocate to their new learning situations. I did so even though I know the market will not require less of our new graduates (which has some implications for your Hypotheses 3 and 6). I still wonder if I made the right decision (short term vs. long term).

RE: Hypothesis 4: I have thought about this one a lot. Reading and preparing for classes has always been expected, yet we all know generations of students who have passed through courses with impunity using only passive techniques that are subsidized by: a) other students’ contributions during class; b) their professor’s tacit acceptance (e.g., building exams from lecture material only); c) the weight of admin’s call for increasing retention rates; d) nefarious means; or e) some combination thereof. The pandemic shift to online learning has effectively reduced total learning in three ways: 1) some professors are now willfully expecting and requiring much less (for a variety of reasons – some having to do with age and technological competency); 2) when professors hold the line, students with only adequate-enough passive learning techniques will react to now “being held accountable for all expected work;” and 3) admin – now adamant about increasing retention rates – is making policy that shields students from the consequences of not learning. Administrators, by their actions, are reluctant to uphold pre-pandemic quality standards because they fear the financial cost. Some students and professors are resistant to learn new teaching/learning techniques because of the opportunity costs (see Kelly Zepp’s comment). I’m certain you overestimated the average amount of time students expect to spend outside of class (2hrs per credit hour). Based on the results of a multi-year student survey at my institution, the average expectation is closer to 9.6 hours per week for all courses (doesn’t matter if it’s one course or a full load; n > 2,300). The difference between our expectation of 9 hours per course versus their expectation of 9.6 hours per week is eye-opening. For a full 3-course/15-credit load, the difference between 9.6 expected hours and 45 now required hours must feel crushing.

Hypothesis 5: The shift to online work has increased the cognitive load for many students and professors alike (parents and spouses, too). Rearranging each efficient exam (assignment) to make several lower-stakes quizzes (assignments) – whether graded or not – generates inefficiencies for both students and professors because each split more than doubles the required number of touch points that usurp time from calendars. Each extra mouse click adds to their cognitive loads.

Five years from now, I think it will be interesting to see: a) which institutions could afford to maintain their pre-pandemic quality standards; and b) how the market will value a college degree if too many post-pandemic graduates are less prepared than pre-pandemic graduates. I’m also interested in whether the surviving college experience will still be an immersive and transformative living-learning experience or if it will become more like how it is being sold – as a convenient module that fits into your busy lifestyle. Perhaps it’s that sales pitch that is shaping our students expectations.

As a student, it would be more helpful to have video or application learning tools. Reading a textbook is difficult at home during this pandemic. Videos and interactive learning best suits our generation. It would be especially helpful in the STEM fields… and discrete mathematics 😉

Very astute observations!

I consciously decreased the amount of work in my classes in the fall. I eliminated either exams, or presentations, or reflection papers in every single class I taught. Yet, the students complained bitterly that there was more work to do.

One of the issues that came to my attention in reading the (anonymous) student evaluations from the fall semester is that students were, essentially, forced to do the homework – the assigned readings and the problems. I have never collected them in the past to grade. We just discussed them in class.

I didn’t collect them to grade in the asynchronous format either, but now, the discussion happened online, and students who would have previously stayed silent in groups or in the whole-class discussion had no “out” – they had to post something. They KNEW they were not graded on the “correctness” of their solutions or their comments on the readings. They KNEW that even posts like, “Hey, I tried Problem #2, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. Help!” would get them full participation score. But they couldn’t bring themselves to be visible as not doing the work at all, not even giving it a shot.

In a sense, the workload did increase for those who could get away with not doing much in the past. They didn’t need to do well either. If you could fly by the seat of your pants and get a C-, it was all fine because nobody knew unless you told them. If you were noticed not participating much, it was a fleeting notice from others. But now, it was up front and center, and it was face-threatening.

The super-achievers suffered from it too. They didn’t feel as ‘on the spot’ in class being occasionally less than perfect, but online, I saw some turn into Hermione Grangers overnight.

Turning into Hermione Grangers! What a great way to describe what we’ve seen here, as well!

For the first time in a very long time (if not for the first time ever) we are paying a lot more attention to the experiences of our students in what were previously face-to-face classes. Online classes have received more scrutiny over time in efforts to ensure they were as good as face to face, and also have a whole layer of support (e.g., instructional designers) that traditional face-to-face classes do not have. With remote learning, administrations rightly paid more attention to the student experience to keep track of and ensure enrollments even with the switch of modalities. This focus revealed and laid bare many of the problems this piece wonderfully unpacks. We are more aware of these issues because of the increased scrutiny. This is not to downplay the realities of student perceptions but to say I hope we continue to pay as close attention to our students in all classes even after the pandemic.

One key point to add. Some of the problems faced by students relates to a mismatch between what they were expecting and what they got, and most importantly for those students who did not believe they could do well in a remote format. Self-efficacy was key. In a study my grad student, Arianna Stone, and I published in the Fall we found that there were significant differences in learning (as measured by exam scores) for those students who believed remote teaching would be a poor way to learn. (see https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/student-expectations-self-confidence-major-predictors-how-they-fare-remote-learning ).

Together with looking at expectations for work, we should also aim to build and scaffold student self-efficacy.

Thanks for this great addition, Regan. I’ve been thinking a lot about how student expectations are shaping their experience online, but I’ve mostly been thinking about it in terms of their feelings of isolation or resistance to forced modality shifts. I hadn’t thought much about self-efficacy, but it makes perfect sense that it would be playing a role here, as it does with all learning! Your study is fascinating and an important contribution to this conversation. It gives us one more thing to discuss with our students as we help them prepare to learn!

About “The Workload Dilemma – Center for the Advancement of Teaching (wfu.edu)” It is also possible that students are finally studying for the amount of time they should. I use an adaptive learning platform for my students for pre-class learning. The platform monitors time on task. They are taking a 3-credit hour course, and the universal expectation is that they put additional 6 hours at home. The students are spending less than 3 hours per week on the adaptive lessons, and I estimate that they will need to spend another 3 hours/week post-class studying for the tests, a few more assigned problems from the textbook, and two programming projects.

The issue possibly with some of my colleagues is that they want everything assigned to be graded. That can exhaust students. I do not grade in-class work or post-class work except for two programming projects. The rest of the graded work includes four tests and a final exam. We need to adopt selective “ungrading,” but not to the extent where we ask students to choose and justify their grades. https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/

Extremists hijack higher education, and those are the only ones getting the press and attention. That is unfortunate.

I too have thought that part of the challenge is related to the fact that more activities are “turned in” and graded. Even if it’s just a nominal participation grade, I get the sense that students will devote more time to a task if they know it will be read/reviewed/graded. If we graded less or made clear that low-stakes assignments needn’t be perfect, that might help!

Thanks for the interesting viewpoint. It might be useful to look at what courses that train us to “teach online” are instruction us to do: extra videos to go into more depth, assignments meant to more thoroughly engage students with the material (to make up for the one-on-one interactions in the classroom), backing away from traditional exams, which are difficult to police online, etc. Each of these things helps the online learning outcomes, but I can easily see that each also increases the student’s workload. So which is it? Be hypervigilent about the estimated workload, or spend our own time designing enrichment activities that fail because the students simply don’t have time to engage with them? Maybe the solution is that the training for “online teaching” is really based on offering a course that is only ever offered online, not toward adapting our current in-person teaching strategies and approaches to an online environment for what we hope is a temporary (until Fall 2021?) fix.

Thanks for the thoughts, Chuck. I think it is an open question whether we should be asking more of students than we have in the past. But whatever we decide is the appropriate amount to expect (the full 3 hours a week per credit hour or the 2 the average student spends), I think it’s possible to adopt evidence-informed strategies that fit within that time-frame. The challenge for those who are new to teaching online–myself included!–is figuring out how many of these new activities and strategies can actually fit within the allotted time. I hope our estimator helps with that!

I have actually decreased modestly what I expect of students. Partly because it was in some instances more difficult for me to keep up with online submissions then a stack of physical papers given to me at the end of class. I’ve also looked at what is easiest for students to do. Typing directly into the box in a discussion post is pretty simple. Completing a document offline with answers to multiple questions about multiple readings and then submitting that is a harder task for them to do and takes longer. And yet I find that the discussion posts actually give me better information from practically the same questions. I also find it helpful to give students an idea of what I actually expect in terms of the length of response for a journal or a discussion post. I remind them that these are low Point assignments and so they don’t require multiple Pages or huge amounts of time. That’s very helpful for students I think to know that in some cases a paragraph is a sufficient response. I also have for all of my classes a deadlines document which outlines class by class exactly what to do including things that are not associated with points like completing the lessons and taking notes for an upcoming quiz. Along with that I have a chart that lays out for each unit exactly what the things are that are do with the due date and the associated points so they can see at a glance what they need to put into there calendar or reminder system. Is very helpful for me to to look at that every class and make sure I know what’s coming up for them as a reminder and to make sure my content matches what they need.

I agree with all the observations in this essay and agree that what is going on is a combination of the factors described. But I would like to add one that I believe is missing. There is a greatly varying range of reactions to online learning but, in general, students who had no problem previously have less of a problem with online learning than others and students who struggled previously are finding it much tougher. Online learning has exaggerated the difference. The students who are most objecting to online learning were middling or struggling students before and they are correct that this new form of learning is making a difficult situation even tougher. At least that’s been my experience.

Great point. I observed a similar phenomenon with the faculty at my institution. Those of us with extensive experience teaching online, like myself, made the shift much more easily. I think my colleagues, esp. those teaching synchronously, forgot that teaching online requires a different skillset. So things took much more time for them b/c they lacked the necessary experience. Or as the author mentioned, it may have seemed like it took more time because they overestimated the time to do the tasks that they don’t like.

Thanks for commenting, David. I think Regan’s research on self-efficacy (see above) can help explain some of what you’re observing!

How Much Homework is Too Much?

When redesigning a course or putting together a new course, faculty often struggle with how much homework and readings to assign. Too little homework and students might not be prepared for the class sessions or be able to adequately practice basic skills or produce sufficient in-depth work to properly master the learning goals of the course. Too much and some students may feel overwhelmed and find it difficult to keep up or have to sacrifice work in other courses.

A common rule of thumb is that students should study three hours for each credit hour of the course, but this isn’t definitive. Universities might recommend that students spend anywhere from two or three hours of study or as much as six to nine hours of study or more for each course credit hour. A 2014 study found that, nationwide, college students self reported spending about 17 hours each week on homework, reading and assignments. Studies of high school students show that too much homework can produce diminishing returns on student learning, so finding the right balance can be difficult.

There are no hard and fast rules about the amount of readings and homework that faculty assign. It will vary according to the university, the department, the level of the classes, and even other external factors that impact students in your course. (Duke’s faculty handbook addresses many facets of courses, such as absences, but not the typical amount of homework specifically.)

To consider the perspective of a typical student that might be similar to the situations faced at Duke, Harvard posted a blog entry by one of their students aimed at giving students new to the university about what they could expect. There are lots of readings, of course, but time has to be spent on completing problem sets, sometimes elaborate multimedia or research projects, responding to discussion posts and writing essays. Your class is one of several, and students have to balance the needs of your class with others and with clubs, special projects, volunteer work or other activities they’re involved with as part of their overall experience.

The Rice Center for Teaching Excellence has some online calculators for estimating class workload that can help you get a general understanding of the time it may take for a student to read a particular number of pages of material at different levels or to complete essays or other types of homework.

To narrow down your decision-making about homework when redesigning or creating your own course, you might consider situational factors that may influence the amount of homework that’s appropriate.

Connection with your learning goals

Is the homework clearly connected with the learning goals of your students for a particular class session or week in the course? Students will find homework beneficial and valuable if they feel that it is meaningful . If you think students might see readings or assignments as busy work, think about ways to modify the homework to make a clearer connection with what is happening in class. Resist the temptation to assign something because the students need to know it. Ask yourself if they will actually use it immediately in the course or if the material or exercises should be relegated to supplementary material.

Levels of performance

The type of readings and homework given to first year students will be very different from those given to more experienced individuals in higher-level courses. If you’re unsure if your readings or other work might be too easy (or too complex) for students in your course, ask a colleague in your department or at another university to give feedback on your assignment. If former students in the course (or a similar course) are available, ask them for feedback on a sample reading or assignment.

Common practices

What are the common practices in your department or discipline? Some departments, with particular classes, may have general guidelines or best practices you can keep in mind when assigning homework.

External factors

What type of typical student will be taking your course? If it’s a course preparing for a major or within an area of study, are there other courses with heavy workloads they might be taking at the same time? Are they completing projects, research, or community work that might make it difficult for them to keep up with a heavy homework load for your course?

Students who speak English as a second language, are first generation students, or who may be having to work to support themselves as they take courses may need support to get the most out of homework. Detailed instructions for the homework, along with outlining your learning goals and how the assignment connects the course, can help students understand how the readings and assignments fit into their studies. A reading guide, with questions prompts or background, can help students gain a better understanding of a reading. Resources to look up unfamiliar cultural references or terms can make readings and assignments less overwhelming.

If you would like more ideas about planning homework and assignments for your course or more information and guidance on course design and assessment, contact Duke Learning Innovation to speak with one of our consultants .

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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.

Watch CBS News

How teachers may be failing students with excessive homework

By Rebecca Lee

August 24, 2016 / 12:41 PM EDT / CBS News

After a long day of school and work, children and parents alike are unlikely to want to come home to a pile of homework. But America’s homework load is higher than ever. 

According to the American Journal of Family Therapy, the amount of homework for some young elementary school students is almost three times the recommended levels. For kids between kindergarten and second grade, the American Institutes for Research says most educators agree no more than 10 to 20 minutes of homework each day is appropriate.

While homework can help establish a daily routine and sense of responsibility, psychologist Lisa Damour said more work does not necessarily mean more achievement. In fact, up until the seventh grade, there is no correlation between homework and academic achievement. For grades seven to 12, it can help with performance, but only to a certain degree – anything more than 90 minutes for middle school students, and between one and a half to two hours for high schoolers, could diminish the positive effects of homework. 

So why do teachers assign so much work? Damour attributes this to the increased pressures on teachers as a result of “high-stake testing.” 

“Teachers are under pressure, which means students will be under pressure,” Damour told “CBS This Morning” Wednesday. 

But one second-grade teacher in Godley, Texas, is not giving in to the pressure. Brandy Young decided to scrap homework altogether. 

“There will be no formally assigned homework this year. Spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success,” Brandy Young wrote in a letter to parents, posted by a mother on Facebook that’s now gone viral.

Young said she made the bold decision after realizing that the extra work “wasn’t right anymore” for her students. 

“If something’s not working as an educator, you need to change it. You’re here to help these kids,” Young said. “Young elementary students don’t need pencil and paperwork after they leave the classroom.”

Instead, Young advised parents to spend the time doing things that are proven to be beneficial to children’s development, including family dinners, playtime and earlier bedtimes. Meanwhile, excessive homework can have detrimental effects, creating tensions at home and conflicts between school and home. 

For families that do have to deal with homework, Damour advised parents to reach out to teachers for help if their children appear overwhelmed by the work load. 

“I think if things are not going well at home, families should reach out to the teacher,” Damour said. “If you and your children every night approach like this terrible battle that is about to unfold, it’s time to call the teacher and it’s time to ask for help.”

More from CBS News

Friday, April 19, 2024

Overloading students with too much homework takes a toll on their mental health

By Angelina Halas October 15, 2019

Not all professors always take into consideration what students have going on outside the classroom and what they might be experiencing personally. This may affect their ability to excel with their assignments, inside and outside of class.

A study from Psychology Today found that 44.2 percent of college students named academics to be something traumatic in their life or something too hard to handle.

The site states “that number is 10 percent higher than any other stressor, including problems with finances or intimate relationships.”

Sophomore biology major Ash Angus finds that academics is a big stressor in her life, as professors don’t take into consideration what students have going on outside the classroom, like familial pressure.

“With parents, especially if your parents are not from America, they have very high expectations of you and they want you to aim higher and higher in life because they weren’t given the same opportunities that you were,” Angus said.

She continued on to explain her belief that professors don’t consider that students have other obligations than just classwork.

According to the American Psychology Association , 41.6 percent of college students have anxiety and 36.4 percent have depression. Angus believes that this could easily be linked to not having a good life balance of school work and outside activities.

“It is dependent on your major, but I feel like most professors pile on a lot of work,” she said. “They don’t even think about the other responsibilities you have like a job, other classes or clubs, a social life and trying to take care of your own mental health.”

Marianne Stenger , a freelance writer and journalist, found in a study that only six percent of college students find their homework to be useful in terms of preparation for tests, quizzes and projects.

Angus feels that she has no time to rest and has been only getting four or five hours of sleep because she’s always up doing homework.

Psychology professor Dr. Maya Gordon admits that she thinks about what students have going on outside the classroom and tries to give reasonable time and due dates, but she tends to think about it more when students come up to her individually.

“Just communicate with me,” Gordon said. “I understand things happen for whatever reason so just let me know. I know students juggle a lot.”

Gordon continued to explain that she presents herself in the classroom in a way that she hopes students feel encouraged to come to her if they are struggling. She also said that if she notices something is incomplete, she will reach out to that student herself to make sure everything is okay.

Gordon admits that because she is a psychologist, she might be more in tune to what students are internalizing and their emotional needs, so she structures her work around that.

“I don’t want students to have an assignment that stresses them and keeps them up at night,” Gordon said. “I don’t want them to not do their best work because they are stressed out.”

Gordon points out that she believes school should be fun and something exciting, not something that stresses students out.

“I don’t want work to take a toll on the health of a student,” she said. “That just takes away the value of an education.”

Gordon explains that within the Cabrini staff, there are a mix of teachers and some are not like her.

“Some professors aren’t as in tune into emotional states or pay as much attention. I think that’s because sometimes they forget, they’re so far removed from when they were a student. They forget what it’s like to be on the other side,” Gordon said.

Despite Gordon acknowledging students responsibilities outside the classroom, she does say that it’s up to the students to let her know if something needs to be changed to help them out.

“I don’t know if you don’t tell me. Just touch base with me. I have no problem adjusting the syllabus or getting rid of the textbook if it’s not helpful. But I only know that if students tell me,” she said.

Italian professor Tiziana Murray is on the same side as Gordon, accepting what students have going on outside of class when it comes to distributing homework.

“I give my students a whole week to do homework. I’m not very strict with the due dates,” Murray said.

Murray is also open to students coming to her if they need help. She said that now she has a more open schedule which allows for students to come see her more, whether that’s for an academic reason or just for support.

She continues to explain that she has a constant connection with her students because she’s always available through email and she will also reach out through there if it’s needed.

In her class, she gives students ways to deal with stress, along with supplying a PowerPoint.

“I want to be there for the mental and the physical support,” Murray said.

She allows for student feedback by asking them in class how they felt about the quizzes and the tests assigned.

“I’m open to change. Students should feel comfortable coming to me because I’m flexible enough. I will support a student if they want to be supported,” she said.

Even though professors are trying to accommodate with student’s mental health and outside activities, not all students know that the option is there to speak up and ask for help.

“They don’t take into consideration what I have going on unless I go to them first and talk to them about it,” Angus said. “I feel like they see you as just a student rather than a whole person. They see you as just a student with your letter grade or your GPA rather than a human being.”

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Do Teachers Assign Too Much Homework?

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

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When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Will it keep you up late at night? Will it cause stress in your family? Or do you have homework under control?

Do teachers assign too much homework?

In the article “The Homework Squabbles,” Bruce Feiler writes:

Homework has a branding problem. Or, to be a little less pointy-headed about it, everybody hates homework. Scan through the parenting shelves, and the frustration is palpable: “The Case Against Homework,” “The Homework Trap,” “The End of Homework.” Glance through glossy magazines, and the enmity is ubiquitous: “The Homework Wars” (The Atlantic), “The Myth About Homework” (Time), “Do Kids Have Too Much Homework?” (Smithsonian). Heck, just drop the word into any conversation with families and watch the temperature rise. Some of this is cyclical, of course. Homework goes back to the onset of formal schooling in America and was popular in an era when the brain was viewed as a muscle to be strengthened. The first backlash began in the early 20th century as repetitive drilling came under attack, and by the ’40s, homework had lost favor. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 generated hysteria that we were losing ground to the Soviet Union, and more homework was one response, but the practice again waned in the 1960s. Homework came roaring back after “A Nation at Risk” in the 1980s as Americans again feared their children were falling behind. Today’s tension echoes this back and forth. “The Chinese do six hours of homework before breakfast — we have to keep up” versus “Play is more important than make-work. Google wants people who are ‘creative’.”

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

— Do your teachers assign too much homework? Or do you have just the right amount?

— Does homework cause stress and tension in your family ? Or does it create opportunities to work together with your parents or siblings?

— Does it get in the way of sleep or extracurricular activities? Or are you able to manage the right balance?

— How do you usually get your homework done? At home or at school? In a quiet room, or with family or friends around? Do you tend to work alone, or do your parents or friends help?

— Is homework, including projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or is it not a good use of time, in your opinion? Explain.

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name . For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

when i get home i do AT LEAST 2 hours of homework and since i got into 7th grade i have no time for hobbies or fun. in a word, it just stinks.

I personally believe that teachers do give a fair amount of homework. Yes some days we do have more homework than others, also some teachers give more homework than others. A page or two of homework for each class is not a big deal but when each teacher assigns two pages of homework a night that’s about ten pages to do when you get home. Children also have after school activity’s, with some children not getting out until late. When you have hours of homework that can be stressful and hard as well. Taking the child out of the after school activity you say could be beneficial to the students education, on the other hand what could is do for them physically. Once they get done with homework would they spend their time on social media and technology? Everything you can do about homework is going to have something you will have to lose. Not saying homework does not help the student but also takes a way sleep and rest for the student as well. Making a child go to school non well rested could damage there learning. Falling asleep in class, not paying attention, and focusing on something else, perhaps unfinished homework for another class. Homework is a good thing and in some ways not so much, just depending on how much is assigned and how much time you have to do it.

I think there are teachers who give just the right amount but i also think there are teachers that dont relise we have homework from other teachers to and theres no way we could finish that all in one night. I think it gets in the way of my sleep all the time and i never have time for extracurriculars any more. I usually do my homework in my room with no one else arond because they get me destracted and i never get finished.

When I have homework, I normally do it wherever I am and I have time to do it. But, it is more difficult for me to do my homework when it’s loud, so I usually prefer to be somewhere quiet. I also prefer working alone because then I stay focused and can do my work without any disruption. On the topic of homework, I also do think that my teachers are assigning too much homework every night. I don’t think some teachers keep the students that do extracurricular activities, like myself, in mind when they are giving homework. They need to consider the student’s life because we wake up very early to go to school for 7 hours, and then after school some students go to a sport practice or a meeting for the club they are in, and then being expected to do at least 3 or more hours of homework is ridiculous. Students are loosing sleep more and more every day, making it harder for students to listen and focus in class. Too much homework is like a domino effect for many students.

I believe teachers do assign too much homework for students. It causes us to become stressed when we have a lot of homework to do. I have stayed up really late just to finish my homework and the lack of sleep effects me a lot the next day. I have a hard time staying awake and the lack of sleep just keeps building. Students have other things to do after school besides homework, like sports practices or games. They get home later then usual and they are expected to do their homework and be ready to go the next day. I believe the amount of homework given to students is too much with all of the other stuff going on in their lives.

In my opinion, I think it’s not entirely the teacher’s fault for giving us much homework because sometimes kids just fall behind in class work and that makes homework for them. One issue though is when each class has homework for you. For me it’s difficult to do all 5 classes homework because most of the time, one assignment is more important than another and sometime they contradict each other. Homework can be quite stressful when it’s mainly sitting down for hours at a time thinking, writing, and clarifying. Most parents look at homework and think, “I don’t know anything about this”. Honestly, the curriculum has changed that much that not even our parents understand it. Mainly math and science, and even physics. It can be quite annoying when you need help and get distressed over homework. I was up until 1am doing homework and I had to stop because my back hurt, I was tired, and I didn’t even get the chance to study for a test because I was just exhausted. I didn’t even get to sleep until near 2 in the morning. Talk about sleep deprivation.

Homework is a very controversial topic. Some kids say it helps with learning on there own. Others believe that its a waste of time. To me, it depends on what class the homework is for and how much homework it is. I’m okay with fifteen to thirty minutes of homework, but that about it. Being a high schooler, you are expected to do lots of homework. But I don’t believe that. We spend 7 hours of our day already in classes and I don’t think doing another hour of homework is helpful. It adds more stress onto an already stressful lifestyle. If you get home at 6 from sports, and start your homework at 7, and you are up until 12, I don’t think that is fair to students. Everyone has there opinion on homework. Some love it, some hate it. Some think its quicker to finish while laying in bed, and some think its better to do at the kitchen table. It all depends on your lifestyle and how you see fit.

I think that each teacher gives out the right amount of homework, but the reason it seems like a lot is because each teacher gives out homework. Say if you only get your average amount math homework, but no other classes, that’s fine, right? but adding in the average amount for every class, and it’s a lot. Homework does get in the way of my sleep because I usually go to sleep at 10 but if I get 3 different homework assignments, which is what I tend to get now, I have to stay up until 11:30. I also do track as an extracurricular acivity, track meets usually go from 3:00 pm and end at around 9:30 pm. on normal days I start my homework at 6:00 and end at 10:30 but if I got home at 9:30 and couldn’t do my homework at the meet then I will end up having to get it done at 1:30 but of course I’ll stop at 11:00 and do the rest in the morning and during lunch break. I think the teachers are giving the right amount eahc, but not all together.

Does it get in the way of sleep or extracurricular activities? Or are you able to manage the right balance?

Coming from a very small school, I see that almost every student is involved in some type of extracurricular activity which take places outside of school hours. Personally when I get back later in the day from practice or a game, the last thing I want to do is spend hours on homework. I think teachers should give students homework if they feel it is important to practice what they are being taught; however, I think some teachers give an excessive amount and it is unnecessary. I think it would be best if each teacher only gave an assignment that at tops would take 15-20 to complete. This way it would be enough to get some practice in without taking a long time and not focusing the whole time.

Teachers do assign to much homework and i think that they shouldn’t assign any, we go to school to learn not to just bring the learning and work home. Homework does get in the way of sleep and extracurricular activities, i just don’t have the time to finish or even start my homework, i could stay up and do my homework but then i would be tired for the next day. I feel that by doing projects and writing assignments at home is not a productive way of learning because why would i want to do something at home where i can’t ask a teacher any questions.

In my thoughts, I believe homework does help the criteria of learning, but too much of it doesn’t. When I have to stay up all night just trying to finish my homework is ridiculous. If I’m not getting enough sleep, then I’m going to be dreading on the next day of school and I’m not going to be focused. Plus, I play year round sports and I have practice every day after school, and games at least twice a week. I do my homework alone in my room, because I tend to work better where it’s quiet and where I’m working alone. Teacher’s and coaches say to do your homework on a bus, but that’s nearly impossible when it’s dark and loud and the bus is not nearly stable. In my opinion, it doesn’t help me when they give a boat load of homework every single night, to where you’re not getting any sleep, or to where you can barely function the next day.

Homework has always been a burden for me and now that I am a 10th grader it has been even more of a hassle getting in the way with my sport(running) and friends. I have a Spanish teacher who gives homework daily that usually is easy as long as I keep up with class and I know what I am doing. The homework that I get from other teachers can vary and comes mostly in chunks. I will have no homework one day and then 3 days worth the next. After coming home from practice that can end as late as 7 pm to 5 pm (the earliest) it is hard and stressful to keep up. I am fine about having homework but it cant be enough to not let me sleep or have some free time.

I think, for the most part, teachers give too much homework. Homework causes a lot of stress and tension in my family. It’s a pain having to listen to my parents and siblings argue with each other about doing homework every single night. Some nights when I have a lot of stuff going on that’s not school related, I have to miss out on sleep to get my homework done, or I’ll blow off my homework and my grade will lower, all because I was tired and wanted to sleep. I do understand that if you want to learn, you need to study and practice, but teachers should give students more time in school to do work so they have time outside of school to do activities that they really enjoy and make them happy. Homework causes so much unnecessary stress that students shouldn’t have to go through.

Over the four years that I have been in high school, I’ve had my fair share of homework. Of course there have been days where I have very little, but then there are other days where each teachers continuously add to my work load. If teachers found a good way to balance out the work with each class, homework and the stress it carries with it would not be as bad. But that often doesn’t happen. For me, the reason it becomes so stressful is simply because of how busy I am. It’s not because I don’t care about my grades, or I see homework as totally pointless, but being involved in sports takes up a lot of my time, and I often have to hurry through homework, not really retaining the true purpose of it. However, when I do have enough time, I find that homework can help me understand new concepts better, because the more repetition I have with something, the better I get at it. Overall, I have mixed feelings about the idea of homework. It’s really only beneficial if there is not a surplus of it, and kids take the time to really focus. I also feel like homework should not be such a pressured thing, and it’s a better practice for teachers not to grade it, but simply go over it in class to reward the kids who did their work, but not punish them if they didn’t understand the concept and got problems wrong.

I’m conflicted about the homework subject, and I have become more conflicted as I have seen my own fourth-grade son struggle to keep up with his assignments this year. I think homework is important to build effective work habits and discipline. However, I don’t think all homework is created equal. I currently think that my fourth grader is being given too much homework. I particularly don’t like the assignment of writing 20 spelling words five times each. I still encourage him to do it, because I want him to have good habits.

I believe that teachers do assign too much homework and it can be hard for some students to keep up. Some students participate in after school activities such as sports, clubs, and music lessons, may have problems keeping up because of the amount of homework they are given. I believe that my teachers do assign too much homework and it is hard for me to get it all done and still be able to participate in the activities I love. For students in advanced classes a large amount of homework is okay and should be expected but having too much homework in their other classes can make it hard to stay caught up. Last year I had the opportunity of taking an advanced class and it was causing stress within my family. I get off the bus later than most students and then I have to watch my brother after school so it can be hard for me to get homework done when he is being loud. It can also be hard to get help from my parents when I don’t understand something because they don’t get home from work until late and homework can get in the way of family time.

i think homework is a good way to keep your mind in “school mode” but too much causes stress. I think schools should give less homework, but only an hour’s worth max.

Wake up at 6, come home at 4. Then after-school activities, then homework for 2 hours, then sleep for 8 hours. Then if you have chores, or jobs to do, then you have no time left at all to do anything else. Of course this causes stress.

For my school i do my H.W. until almost 12:00 at night and i get home around 2:30

My school rarely give us homework that make us stay up too late. But my little brother has tons of homework and hes only in 2nd grade. Some teachers are giving way too muchh homework to kids. they should give them less.

i think that kids do get too much homework. Its not fair to the students.

I think homework is good because it grows your brain even though we all hate it we need it but I think that we get too much. As a 8th grade student it causes a lot of stress and barely gives you time to talk,play.or sometimes even sleep. When I reach home I eat a snack then start my homework. Sometimes I don’t even finish until 8 and later. Our homework tasks are to finish essays do projects worksheets etc I do my homework on my own honestly I think they should keep homework but just not give out too much r at least make us do it in class

i think that when teachers give alot of homework it gives us students no time to have fun . When a teachers give us alot of homewok , we cant get to other activity’s like studying or exerciseing or hanging out with our friends .

I believe that some teachers assign a lot of homework but also some don’t. It just depends on what class the student is in. Homework doesn’t cause stress in my family because I do my homework alone in my room or else in the library during school. Sometimes when I have a lot of textbook homework I find myself with less time in the afternoon. I usually get my homework done at home in my room but I also like working in the library. I think students should do projects at school instead of home because we also have so much other homework to do.

Doing homework with your kids is less helpful than you think. You don’t actually, often, remember the material!! Encourage your kids to work with their friends, they will bounce ideas off each other, correct each others work, and learn better overall.

Does your kid have an iPhone? Try HuddleUp, a free homework collaboration app. It allows kids to work together remotely. They will feel like they are getting one over on you, yet instead they are learning and educating themselves.

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Nobody knows what the point of homework is

The homework wars are back.

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As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework. But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

Luis Torres, the principal of PS 55, a predominantly low-income community elementary school in the south Bronx, told me that his school secured Chromebooks for students early in the pandemic only to learn that some lived in shelters that blocked wifi for security reasons. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.

According to a 2021 Pew survey , 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent.

The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered.

Over the past three years, in response to concerns about equity, schools across the country, including in Sacramento, Los Angeles , San Diego , and Clark County, Nevada , made permanent changes to their homework policies that restricted how much homework could be given and how it could be graded after in-person learning resumed.

Three years into the pandemic, as districts and teachers reckon with Covid-era overhauls of teaching and learning, schools are still reconsidering the purpose and place of homework. Whether relaxing homework expectations helps level the playing field between students or harms them by decreasing rigor is a divisive issue without conclusive evidence on either side, echoing other debates in education like the elimination of standardized test scores from some colleges’ admissions processes.

I first began to wonder if the homework abolition movement made sense after speaking with teachers in some Massachusetts public schools, who argued that rather than help disadvantaged kids, stringent homework restrictions communicated an attitude of low expectations. One, an English teacher, said she felt the school had “just given up” on trying to get the students to do work; another argued that restrictions that prohibit teachers from assigning take-home work that doesn’t begin in class made it difficult to get through the foreign-language curriculum. Teachers in other districts have raised formal concerns about homework abolition’s ability to close gaps among students rather than widening them.

Many education experts share this view. Harris Cooper, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke who has studied homework efficacy, likened homework abolition to “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

But as I learned after talking to a variety of stakeholders — from homework researchers to policymakers to parents of schoolchildren — whether to abolish homework probably isn’t the right question. More important is what kind of work students are sent home with and where they can complete it. Chances are, if schools think more deeply about giving constructive work, time spent on homework will come down regardless.

There’s no consensus on whether homework works

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Researchers disagree even on how much research exists on the value of homework. Kathleen Budge, the co-author of Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools and a professor at Boise State, told me that homework “has been greatly researched.” Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer and leader of the education nonprofit Challenge Success, said, “It’s not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems.”

Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.) Homework proponents argue that while it is difficult to design randomized control studies to test homework’s effectiveness, the vast majority of existing studies show a strong positive correlation between homework and high academic achievement for middle and high school students. Prominent critics of homework argue that these correlational studies are unreliable and point to studies that suggest a neutral or negative effect on student performance. Both agree there is little to no evidence for homework’s effectiveness at an elementary school level, though proponents often argue that it builds constructive habits for the future.

For anyone who remembers homework assignments from both good and bad teachers, this fundamental disagreement might not be surprising. Some homework is pointless and frustrating to complete. Every week during my senior year of high school, I had to analyze a poem for English and decorate it with images found on Google; my most distinct memory from that class is receiving a demoralizing 25-point deduction because I failed to present my analysis on a poster board. Other assignments really do help students learn: After making an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for a ninth grade history project, I was inspired to check out from the library and read a biography of the Chinese ruler.

For homework opponents, the first example is more likely to resonate. “We’re all familiar with the negative effects of homework: stress, exhaustion, family conflict, less time for other activities, diminished interest in learning,” Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, which challenges common justifications for homework, told me in an email. “And these effects may be most pronounced among low-income students.” Kohn believes that schools should make permanent any moratoria implemented during the pandemic, arguing that there are no positives at all to outweigh homework’s downsides. Recent studies , he argues , show the benefits may not even materialize during high school.

In the Marlborough Public Schools, a suburban district 45 minutes west of Boston, school policy committee chair Katherine Hennessy described getting kids to complete their homework during remote education as “a challenge, to say the least.” Teachers found that students who spent all day on their computers didn’t want to spend more time online when the day was over. So, for a few months, the school relaxed the usual practice and teachers slashed the quantity of nightly homework.

Online learning made the preexisting divides between students more apparent, she said. Many students, even during normal circumstances, lacked resources to keep them on track and focused on completing take-home assignments. Though Marlborough Schools is more affluent than PS 55, Hennessy said many students had parents whose work schedules left them unable to provide homework help in the evenings. The experience tracked with a common divide in the country between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

So in October 2021, months after the homework reduction began, the Marlborough committee made a change to the district’s policy. While teachers could still give homework, the assignments had to begin as classwork. And though teachers could acknowledge homework completion in a student’s participation grade, they couldn’t count homework as its own grading category. “Rigorous learning in the classroom does not mean that that classwork must be assigned every night,” the policy stated . “Extensions of class work is not to be used to teach new content or as a form of punishment.”

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

The critiques of homework are valid as far as they go, but at a certain point, arguments against homework can defy the commonsense idea that to retain what they’re learning, students need to practice it.

“Doesn’t a kid become a better reader if he reads more? Doesn’t a kid learn his math facts better if he practices them?” said Cathy Vatterott, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After decades of research, she said it’s still hard to isolate the value of homework, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned.

Blanket vilification of homework can also conflate the unique challenges facing disadvantaged students as compared to affluent ones, which could have different solutions. “The kids in the low-income schools are being hurt because they’re being graded, unfairly, on time they just don’t have to do this stuff,” Pope told me. “And they’re still being held accountable for turning in assignments, whether they’re meaningful or not.” On the other side, “Palo Alto kids” — students in Silicon Valley’s stereotypically pressure-cooker public schools — “are just bombarded and overloaded and trying to stay above water.”

Merely getting rid of homework doesn’t solve either problem. The United States already has the second-highest disparity among OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations between time spent on homework by students of high and low socioeconomic status — a difference of more than three hours, said Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University and author of No More Mindless Homework .

When she interviewed teachers in Boston-area schools that had cut homework before the pandemic, Bempechat told me, “What they saw immediately was parents who could afford it immediately enrolled their children in the Russian School of Mathematics,” a math-enrichment program whose tuition ranges from $140 to about $400 a month. Getting rid of homework “does nothing for equity; it increases the opportunity gap between wealthier and less wealthy families,” she said. “That solution troubles me because it’s no solution at all.”

A group of teachers at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, made the same point after the school district proposed an overhaul of its homework policies, including removing penalties for missing homework deadlines, allowing unlimited retakes, and prohibiting grading of homework.

“Given the emphasis on equity in today’s education systems,” they wrote in a letter to the school board, “we believe that some of the proposed changes will actually have a detrimental impact towards achieving this goal. Families that have means could still provide challenging and engaging academic experiences for their children and will continue to do so, especially if their children are not experiencing expected rigor in the classroom.” At a school where more than a third of students are low-income, the teachers argued, the policies would prompt students “to expect the least of themselves in terms of effort, results, and responsibility.”

Not all homework is created equal

Despite their opposing sides in the homework wars, most of the researchers I spoke to made a lot of the same points. Both Bempechat and Pope were quick to bring up how parents and schools confuse rigor with workload, treating the volume of assignments as a proxy for quality of learning. Bempechat, who is known for defending homework, has written extensively about how plenty of it lacks clear purpose, requires the purchasing of unnecessary supplies, and takes longer than it needs to. Likewise, when Pope instructs graduate-level classes on curriculum, she asks her students to think about the larger purpose they’re trying to achieve with homework: If they can get the job done in the classroom, there’s no point in sending home more work.

At its best, pandemic-era teaching facilitated that last approach. Honolulu-based teacher Christina Torres Cawdery told me that, early in the pandemic, she often had a cohort of kids in her classroom for four hours straight, as her school tried to avoid too much commingling. She couldn’t lecture for four hours, so she gave the students plenty of time to complete independent and project-based work. At the end of most school days, she didn’t feel the need to send them home with more to do.

A similar limited-homework philosophy worked at a public middle school in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A couple of teachers there turned as much class as possible into an opportunity for small-group practice, allowing kids to work on problems that traditionally would be assigned for homework, Jessica Flick, a math coach who leads department meetings at the school, told me. It was inspired by a philosophy pioneered by Simon Fraser University professor Peter Liljedahl, whose influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics reframes homework as “check-your-understanding questions” rather than as compulsory work. Last year, Flick found that the two eighth grade classes whose teachers adopted this strategy performed the best on state tests, and this year, she has encouraged other teachers to implement it.

Teachers know that plenty of homework is tedious and unproductive. Jeannemarie Dawson De Quiroz, who has taught for more than 20 years in low-income Boston and Los Angeles pilot and charter schools, says that in her first years on the job she frequently assigned “drill and kill” tasks and questions that she now feels unfairly stumped students. She said designing good homework wasn’t part of her teaching programs, nor was it meaningfully discussed in professional development. With more experience, she turned as much class time as she could into practice time and limited what she sent home.

“The thing about homework that’s sticky is that not all homework is created equal,” says Jill Harrison Berg, a former teacher and the author of Uprooting Instructional Inequity . “Some homework is a genuine waste of time and requires lots of resources for no good reason. And other homework is really useful.”

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

The takeaways are clear: Schools can make cuts to homework, but those cuts should be part of a strategy to improve the quality of education for all students. If the point of homework was to provide more practice, districts should think about how students can make it up during class — or offer time during or after school for students to seek help from teachers. If it was to move the curriculum along, it’s worth considering whether strategies like Liljedahl’s can get more done in less time.

Some of the best thinking around effective assignments comes from those most critical of the current practice. Denise Pope proposes that, before assigning homework, teachers should consider whether students understand the purpose of the work and whether they can do it without help. If teachers think it’s something that can’t be done in class, they should be mindful of how much time it should take and the feedback they should provide. It’s questions like these that De Quiroz considered before reducing the volume of work she sent home.

More than a year after the new homework policy began in Marlborough, Hennessy still hears from parents who incorrectly “think homework isn’t happening” despite repeated assurances that kids still can receive work. She thinks part of the reason is that education has changed over the years. “I think what we’re trying to do is establish that homework may be an element of educating students,” she told me. “But it may not be what parents think of as what they grew up with. ... It’s going to need to adapt, per the teaching and the curriculum, and how it’s being delivered in each classroom.”

For the policy to work, faculty, parents, and students will all have to buy into a shared vision of what school ought to look like. The district is working on it — in November, it hosted and uploaded to YouTube a round-table discussion on homework between district administrators — but considering the sustained confusion, the path ahead seems difficult.

When I asked Luis Torres about whether he thought homework serves a useful part in PS 55’s curriculum, he said yes, of course it was — despite the effort and money it takes to keep the school open after hours to help them do it. “The children need the opportunity to practice,” he said. “If you don’t give them opportunities to practice what they learn, they’re going to forget.” But Torres doesn’t care if the work is done at home. The school stays open until around 6 pm on weekdays, even during breaks. Tutors through New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development programs help kids with work after school so they don’t need to take it with them.

As schools weigh the purpose of homework in an unequal world, it’s tempting to dispose of a practice that presents real, practical problems to students across the country. But getting rid of homework is unlikely to do much good on its own. Before cutting it, it’s worth thinking about what good assignments are meant to do in the first place. It’s crucial that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds tackle complex quantitative problems and hone their reading and writing skills. It’s less important that the work comes home with them.

Jacob Sweet is a freelance writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, among other publications.

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Too Much Homework in College: Effects and Tips to handle them

College Homework

Homework is part of college life and comes as a booster to students to refine knowledge and skills about certain concepts. However, when colleges give too much homework, it can be counter-productive. We seek to give tips on how to handle assignment burdens in school.

This is because we believe homework is good and can help the learning process. If done in the right way, it will give students a great understanding of the topic.

However, too many assignments affect students’ health and lead to severe cases if left unchecked. It is for this reason that most students hire writers to do their homework and ease the burden.

We can Write your Papers! No Plagiarism

Get that A on your next essay assignment without the hassles. Any topic or subject. 100% Plagiarism-Free Essays.

Why Do Teachers Give So Much Homework?

Teachers use homework to assist the student in improving on that particular topic or subject. A teacher would want to give you a lot of homework to succeed in that particular study area. Giving so much homework comes with various benefits to a student.

a) Better Grades 

First off, homework encourages the discipline of practice. Repetition is another skill that helps students get better at skills. Homework gives students a chance to understand concepts clearly. 

b) Time Management 

Homework is still another method of teaching the students about time management. It forces students to plan their time well and ensure that they do it within the timeframe. Time management is a requirement when you want to develop problem-solving skills. 

c) Better Communication

Besides, teachers give students homework to open a bridge of communication. This homework creates a super connection between a student and a teacher where a teacher will get to know students, especially in an area of struggle. Students will also understand the area of excellence. 

d) Extra Learning Moment 

Again, homework is helpful to a student to allow additional time for learning. 

That is so because the school hours are not enough to make students understand all the concepts they read. It will be a solution to time shortages. 

The teacher creates a homework plan for the students to induce better study habits. This homework will reduce the period you spend on TV or social media platforms that are always unfruitful to your study course. 

Is Too Much Homework in College Good or Bad?

A research study performed by Stanford University in 2013 revealed too many students come with several negative consequences.

It suggested that it would be counter-productive to spend more than two hours on your homework. 

The best approach when issuing homework is to do it in moderation.

Students should also have extra time to handle other life matters, such as sports and watching a favorite movie.

The homework is only suitable for you if a student finds time to handle other life issues well. 

How to Handle Too Much Homework in College

1. avoid being a perfectionist.

You can apply the Pirate principle, which upholds the 80-20 rule. It states that only your 20% input could lead to 80% of your successes.

Avoid making everything perfect as you tackle your college assignments. You are only in school to get better as long as you are working.

When you are handling college homework, you do not always aim to get 100%. When it comes to grading, sometimes 80% could mean an A!

2. Hire an Expert

Indeed handling too much homework at college could also overwhelm you. You may be handling too many assignments on the table whose deadline is near, causing you to strain your schedule. In the process, you may not handle all the homework and meet deadlines. 

As such, it could be reasonable to look for a helping hand. You can hire someone who has a track record of handling similar tasks effectively.

It could be someone you know, and you can get a referral from a friend who understands the industry. If you cannot write your homework , getting an expert writer is one of the best options to score the grade and manage the workload.

3. Eliminate Distractions

Students encounter challenges in doing their homework when they respond to texts from social media platforms and other forms of online engagements. You can overcome such a challenge by creating a workplace. 

Students can opt to visit the library to reduce such distractions. However, you can still find a conducive environment where you can have some peace to focus on your work. 

It is easier to complete your homework if your attention is 100%. When you stop working on your homework midway to respond to other demands, the chances are high that you may not complete it at the right time.

4. Track Your Time

Students should be in a position to account for their time well. You can seek help by using sites or free apps that will assist you in tracking your time.

Such a method is great in helping you to cut down hours that you might be spending fruitful time on something different. 

One should reserve time to read and research for the homework assignment.

Among the benefits of tracking is time to quantify the problem and use it to manage it effectively.

For example, if the classwork can take one hour, you can schedule it to fit in the projection. 

5. Start Early

Once you are out of class, take a break and organize yourself to get your homework ready. Make a list of what you want to complete for each night.

The secret is getting up to start early to reduce the pending quantity of work. If you wait for too long, until late evening, the fatigue will overwhelm you to complete the same assignment. 

6. Set Time to Relax

It is vital to secure some time to do something that you usually enjoy. It could be a home activity or an extracurricular one.

Such gives you a break from letting out any extra energy or frustrations. But do not relax too much. You may end up having to copy other students’ assignments , which is not good.

Negative Effects of Too Much Homework in College

A) sedentary lifestyle.

When students get too much homework, they will lack time to play, affecting their social development. A study revealed that a student who gets better grades spends quality time in play. 

One spends more time while sitting to get lessons from the tutors.

When one gets the homework, it also adds more time to sit while working on the assignments.

A sedentary lifestyle can lead to other health problems, such as obesity and hypertension. 

b) Healthy Problems

If you spend too much time doing homework as a routine, it may lead to several physical health challenges.

First off, it may lead to sleeping problems and digestive issues. It becomes stressful for anyone who is doing homework with headaches. 

Too much homework could lead to stress and other physical health problems. For instance, the student may experience fatigue and body burnout. 

In addition, other physical symptoms include headache, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and weight loss. 

c) Isolation

Too much homework limits how much a student finds free time to intermingle with other people. It becomes harder for one to balance between social life and doing other activities that are outside studies. Such a mismatch may lead to anxiety. 

Furthermore, too much homework makes the students lack balance in their social lives. They tend to face alienation from society. 

d) Sleep Well

The student should take enough time at night to have quality rest. The standard time for any adult should range between 6 to 8 hours. It is a refreshing experience to have quality time to sleep and organize yourself when your mind is cool the following day. 

e) Create a Home Workgroup

It could be in-person or virtual. Creating a homework group it makes it to be less overwhelming. The student will have a fruitful time researching for the correct materials to use for the given assignment. 

Where the student is struggling, the study group becomes a better platform to help students ask enough questions and get instant feedback from friends. It is also a place where you get inspiration from a fellow student on positively approaching the issue. 

Josh Jasen or JJ as we fondly call him, is a senior academic editor at Grade Bees in charge of the writing department. When not managing complex essays and academic writing tasks, Josh is busy advising students on how to pass assignments. In his spare time, he loves playing football or walking with his dog around the park.

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What’s the Purpose of Homework?

• Homework teaches students responsibility.
• Homework gives students an opportunity to practice and refine their skills.
• We give homework because our parents demand it.
• Our community equates homework with rigor.
• Homework is a rite of passage.
• design quality homework tasks;
• differentiate homework tasks;
• move from grading to checking;
• decriminalize the grading of homework;
• use completion strategies; and
• establish homework support programs.
• Always ask, “What learning will result from this homework assignment?” The goal of your instruction should be to design homework that results in meaningful learning.
• Assign homework to help students deepen their understanding of content, practice skills in order to become faster or more proficient, or learn new content on a surface level.
• Check that students are able to perform required skills and tasks independently before asking them to complete homework assignments.
• When students return home, is there a safe and quite place for them to do their homework? I have talked to teachers who tell me they know for certain the home environments of their students are chaotic at best. Is it likely a student will be able to complete homework in such an environment? Is it possible for students to go to an after school program, possibly at the YMCA or a Boys and Girls Club. Assigning homework to students when you know the likelihood of them being able to complete the assignment through little fault of their own doesn’t seem fair to the learner.
• Consider parents and guardians to be your allies when it comes to homework. Understand their constraints, and, when home circumstances present challenges, consider alternative approaches to support students as they complete homework assignments (e.g., before-or after-school programs, additional parent outreach).

Howard Pitler is a dynamic facilitator, speaker, and instructional coach with a proven record of success spanning four decades. With an extensive background in professional development, he works with schools and districts internationally and is a regular speaker at national, state, and district conferences and workshops.

Pitler is currently Associate Professor at Emporia State University in Kansas. Prior to that, he served for 19 years as an elementary and middle school principal in an urban setting. During his tenure, his elementary school was selected as an Apple Distinguished Program and named "One of the Top 100 Schools in America" by Redbook Magazine. His middle school was selected as "One of the Top 100 Wired Schools in America" by PC Magazine. He also served for 12 years as a senior director and chief program officer for McREL International, and he is currently serving on the Board of Colorado ASCD. He is an Apple Distinguished Educator, Apple Teacher, National Distinguished Principal, and Smithsonian Laureate.

He is a published book author and has written numerous magazine articles for  Educational Leadership ® magazine,  EdCircuit , and  Connected Educator , among others.

ASCD is dedicated to professional growth and well-being.

Let's put your vision into action., related blogs.

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Do our kids have too much homework?

by: Marian Wilde | Updated: January 31, 2024

Print article

Many students and their parents are frazzled by the amount of homework being piled on in the schools. Yet many researchers say that American students have just the right amount of homework.

“Kids today are overwhelmed!” a parent recently wrote in an email to GreatSchools.org “My first-grade son was required to research a significant person from history and write a paper of at least two pages about the person, with a bibliography. How can he be expected to do that by himself? He just started to learn to read and write a couple of months ago. Schools are pushing too hard and expecting too much from kids.”

Diane Garfield, a fifth grade teacher in San Francisco, concurs. “I believe that we’re stressing children out,” she says.

But hold on, it’s not just the kids who are stressed out . “Teachers nowadays assign these almost college-level projects with requirements that make my mouth fall open with disbelief,” says another frustrated parent. “It’s not just the kids who suffer!”

“How many people take home an average of two hours or more of work that must be completed for the next day?” asks Tonya Noonan Herring, a New Mexico mother of three, an attorney and a former high school English teacher. “Most of us, even attorneys, do not do this. Bottom line: students have too much homework and most of it is not productive or necessary.”

Research about homework

How do educational researchers weigh in on the issue? According to Brian Gill, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, there is no evidence that kids are doing more homework than they did before.

“If you look at high school kids in the late ’90s, they’re not doing substantially more homework than kids did in the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s or the ’40s,” he says. “In fact, the trends through most of this time period are pretty flat. And most high school students in this country don’t do a lot of homework. The median appears to be about four hours a week.”

Education researchers like Gill base their conclusions, in part, on data gathered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

“It doesn’t suggest that most kids are doing a tremendous amount,” says Gill. “That’s not to say there aren’t any kids with too much homework. There surely are some. There’s enormous variation across communities. But it’s not a crisis in that it’s a very small proportion of kids who are spending an enormous amount of time on homework.”

Etta Kralovec, author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning , disagrees, saying NAEP data is not a reliable source of information. “Students take the NAEP test and one of the questions they have to fill out is, ‘How much homework did you do last night’ Anybody who knows schools knows that teachers by and large do not give homework the night before a national assessment. It just doesn’t happen. Teachers are very clear with kids that they need to get a good night’s sleep and they need to eat well to prepare for a test.

“So asking a kid how much homework they did the night before a national test and claiming that that data tells us anything about the general run of the mill experience of kids and homework over the school year is, I think, really dishonest.”

Further muddying the waters is an AP/AOL poll that suggests that most Americans feel that their children are getting the right amount of homework. It found that 57% of parents felt that their child was assigned about the right amount of homework, 23% thought there was too little and 19% thought there was too much.

One indisputable fact

One homework fact that educators do agree upon is that the young child today is doing more homework than ever before.

“Parents are correct in saying that they didn’t get homework in the early grades and that their kids do,” says Harris Cooper, professor of psychology and director of the education program at Duke University.

Gill quantifies the change this way: “There has been some increase in homework for the kids in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. But it’s been an increase from zero to 20 minutes a day. So that is something that’s fairly new in the last quarter century.”

The history of homework

In his research, Gill found that homework has always been controversial. “Around the turn of the 20th century, the Ladies’ Home Journal carried on a crusade against homework. They thought that kids were better off spending their time outside playing and looking at clouds. The most spectacular success this movement had was in the state of California, where in 1901 the legislature passed a law abolishing homework in grades K-8. That lasted about 15 years and then was quietly repealed. Then there was a lot of activism against homework again in the 1930s.”

The proponents of homework have remained consistent in their reasons for why homework is a beneficial practice, says Gill. “One, it extends the work in the classroom with additional time on task. Second, it develops habits of independent study. Third, it’s a form of communication between the school and the parents. It gives parents an idea of what their kids are doing in school.”

The anti-homework crowd has also been consistent in their reasons for wanting to abolish or reduce homework.

“The first one is children’s health,” says Gill. “A hundred years ago, you had medical doctors testifying that heavy loads of books were causing children’s spines to be bent.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. There were also concerns about excessive amounts of stress .

“Although they didn’t use the term ‘stress,'” says Gill. “They worried about ‘nervous breakdowns.'”

“In the 1930s, there were lots of graduate students in education schools around the country who were doing experiments that claimed to show that homework had no academic value — that kids who got homework didn’t learn any more than kids who didn’t,” Gill continues. Also, a lot of the opposition to homework, in the first half of the 20th century, was motivated by a notion that it was a leftover from a 19th-century model of schooling, which was based on recitation, memorization and drill. Progressive educators were trying to replace that with something more creative, something more interesting to kids.”

The more-is-better movement

Garfield, the San Francisco fifth-grade teacher, says that when she started teaching 30 years ago, she didn’t give any homework. “Then parents started asking for it,” she says. “I got In junior high and high school there’s so much homework, they need to get prepared.” So I bought that one. I said, ‘OK, they need to be prepared.’ But they don’t need two hours.”

Cooper sees the trend toward more homework as symptomatic of high-achieving parents who want the best for their children. “Part of it, I think, is pressure from the parents with regard to their desire to have their kids be competitive for the best universities in the country. The communities in which homework is being piled on are generally affluent communities.”

The less-is-better campaign

Alfie Kohn, a widely-admired progressive writer on education and parenting, published a sharp rebuttal to the more-homework-is-better argument in his 2006 book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing . Kohn criticized the pro-homework studies that Cooper referenced as “inconclusive… they only show an association, not a causal relationship” and he titled his first chapter “Missing Out on Their Childhoods.”

Vera Goodman’s 2020 book, Simply Too Much Homework: What Can We Do? , repeats Kohn’s scrutiny and urges parents to appeal to school and government leaders to revise homework policies. Goodman believes today’s homework load stresses out teachers, parents, and students, deprives children of unstructured time for play, hobbies, and individual pursuits, and inhibits the joy of learning.

Homework guidelines

What’s a parent to do, you ask? Fortunately, there are some sanity-saving homework guidelines.

Cooper points to “The 10-Minute Rule” formulated by the National PTA and the National Education Association, which suggests that kids should be doing about 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level. In other words, 10 minutes for first-graders, 20 for second-graders and so on.

Too much homework vs. the optimal amount

Cooper has found that the correlation between homework and achievement is generally supportive of these guidelines. “We found that for kids in elementary school there was hardly any relationship between how much homework young children did and how well they were doing in school, but in middle school the relationship is positive and increases until the kids were doing between an hour to two hours a night, which is right where the 10-minute rule says it’s going to be optimal.

“After that it didn’t go up anymore. Kids that reported doing more than two hours of homework a night in middle school weren’t doing any better in school than kids who were doing between an hour to two hours.”

Garfield has a very clear homework policy that she distributes to her parents at the beginning of each school year. “I give one subject a night. It’s what we were studying in class or preparation for the next day. It should be done within half an hour at most. I believe that children have many outside activities now and they also need to live fully as children. To have them work for six hours a day at school and then go home and work for hours at night does not seem right. It doesn’t allow them to have a childhood.”

International comparisons

How do American kids fare when compared to students in other countries? Professors Gerald LeTendre and David Baker of Pennsylvania State University conclude in their 2005 book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, that American middle schoolers do more homework than their peers in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, but less than their peers in Singapore and Hong Kong.

One of the surprising findings of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. LeTendre notes: “That really flummoxes people because they say, ‘Doesn’t doing more homework mean getting better scores?’ The answer quite simply is no.”

Homework is a complicated thing

To be effective, homework must be used in a certain way, he says. “Let me give you an example. Most homework in the fourth grade in the U.S. is worksheets. Fill them out, turn them in, maybe the teacher will check them, maybe not. That is a very ineffective use of homework. An effective use of homework would be the teacher sitting down and thinking ‘Elizabeth has trouble with number placement, so I’m going to give her seven problems on number placement.’ Then the next day the teacher sits down with Elizabeth and she says, ‘Was this hard for you? Where did you have difficulty?’ Then she gives Elizabeth either more or less material. As you can imagine, that kind of homework rarely happens.”

Shotgun homework

“What typically happens is people give what we call ‘shotgun homework’: blanket drills, questions and problems from the book. On a national level that’s associated with less well-functioning school systems,” he says. “In a sense, you could sort of think of it as a sign of weaker teachers or less well-prepared teachers. Over time, we see that in elementary and middle schools more and more homework is being given, and that countries around the world are doing this in an attempt to increase their test scores, and that is basically a failing strategy.”

Quality not quantity?

“ The Case for (Quality) Homework: Why It Improves Learning, and How Parents Can Help ,” a 2019 paper written by Boston University psychologist Janine Bempechat, asks for homework that specifically helps children “confront ever-more-complex tasks” that enable them to gain resilience and embrace challenges.

Similar research from University of Ovideo in Spain titled “ Homework: Facts and Fiction 2021 ” says evidence shows that how homework is applied is more important than how much is required, and it asserts that a moderate amount of homework yields the most academic achievement. The most important aspect of quality homework assignment? The effort required and the emotions prompted by the task.

Robyn Jackson, author of How to Plan Rigorous Instruction and other media about rigor says the key to quality homework is not the time spent, but the rigor — or mental challenge — involved. ( Read more about how to evaluate your child’s homework for rigor here .)

Nightly reading as a homework replacement

Across the country, many elementary schools have replaced homework with a nightly reading requirement. There are many benefits to children reading every night , either out loud with a parent or independently: it increases their vocabulary, imagination, concentration, memory, empathy, academic ability, knowledge of different cultures and perspectives. Plus, it reduces stress, helps kids sleep, and bonds children to their cuddling parents or guardians. Twenty to 30 minutes of reading each day is generally recommended.

But, is this always possible, or even ideal?

No, it’s not.

Alfie Kohn criticizes this added assignment in his blog post, “ How To Create Nonreaders .” He cites an example from a parent (Julie King) who reports, “Our children are now expected to read 20 minutes a night, and record such on their homework sheet. What parents are discovering (surprise) is that those kids who used to sit down and read for pleasure — the kids who would get lost in a book and have to be told to put it down to eat/play/whatever — are now setting the timer… and stopping when the timer dings. … Reading has become a chore, like brushing your teeth.”

The take-away from Kohn? Don’t undermine reading for pleasure by turning it into another task burdening your child’s tired brain.

Additional resources

Books Simply Too Much Homework: What Can We do? by Vera Goodman, Trafford Publishing, 2020

The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Children and What Parents Can Do About It by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, Crown Publishers, 2007

The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing by Alfie Kohn, Hatchett Books, 2006 The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Etta Kralovec and John Buell, Beacon Press, 2001.

The Battle Over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents by Harris M. Cooper, Corwin Press, 2001.

Seven Steps to Homework Success: A Family Guide to Solving Common Homework Problems by Sydney Zentall and Sam Goldstein, Specialty Press, 1998.

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Teachers should give out less homework

Faisa Mohamed

Teachers should give out less homework because many students have other responsibilities outside of school and by reducing homework, students have proven to get more sleep which leads to better physical and mental health. So instead of benefiting students’ learning, it can actually be detrimental to it.

Faisa Mohamed , Staff Writer January 9, 2023

First and foremost, excessive amounts of homework can be detrimental to students’ mental and physical health. It can lead to increased stress and anxiety, as well as sleep deprivation and other health problems. When students are overwhelmed by too much homework, they may become burnt out and lose motivation to learn. I believe that teachers should give out less homework because many kids have work or responsibilities outside of school and don’t deserve to be overworked. By reducing homework, students have proven to get more sleep which leads to better physical and mental health. So instead of benefiting students’ learning, it can actually be detrimental to it. Homework doesn’t necessarily always equate to higher achievement.  

Muntaha Ibrahim, a student at South, thinks there’s too much going on in most students’ lives to stress about homework. “Teens are stressed and overwhelmed.” They are more likely to have problems focusing on topics for extended periods of time. Many students have family problems at home and some are babysitting their younger siblings when they don’t have time for homework. It can be difficult to make homework a priority when you have other responsibilities. Some students have jobs to financially help their parents. Students of color especially often have expectations from their families that they contribute to the household. When you consider inequities in students’ home lives, giving out the same homework to students becomes much more complicated. 

In addition, homework doesn’t motivate people, it just causes extra work and stress. In fact, it might make a student less interested in the subject because they feel overwhelmed. When students do end up doing homework, it is often only to get a good grade, not to actually learn the content. Aisha Ahmed said, “Too much homework can cause students to lose interest in the class because students doing a lot of homework, they’re not able to do their other work properly and wind up losing focus in class.” Despite this, there are also disadvantages to not giving students homework. In some cases, homework gives students the time that they don’t get in class to work and be independent on their own time. Giving homework is teaching in its own way, so students can learn on their time. As a teacher though, it’s effectively their job to do most of the teaching so students’ lives aren’t centered around school and homework.

A potential solution to this situation is that teachers give out homework only if students don’t finish all of their work in class. This way students can complete their unfinished classwork, but it is not so much that it is overwhelming or  too much stress. This may improve students’ mental health. This also benefits teachers because students are more likely to finish their work without feeling overwhelmed.

• Aisha Ahmed
• Muntaha Ibrahim

Faisa Mohamed is a sophomore and it is her first year on newspaper. She joined because she heard good things about it and she thought it would help her...

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Christian • Dec 6, 2023 at 10:21 am

Very interesting: I really appreciate your ideology and I completely agree with you.?

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good research

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This is a good article it really helped me with my assignment!

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Why Do High School Teachers Give So Much Homework?

High school can feel overwhelming at times. There are multiple teachers, subjects, and learning objectives to be completed at the same time. All this coordination results in high school teachers giving students homework that can quickly pile up. This leaves students to ask: “why do high school teachers give so much homework?”

The main reason why high school teachers give students homework is so they can revise or complete the learning covered in class. Moreover, homework is beneficial as it highlights the value of responsibility and time-management skills. Sometimes homework becomes too much when different teachers assign tasks simultaneously, or multiple tests are approaching. 

Teachers are under pressure from administrators and school districts to cover the curriculum content and show academic progress. So, if students struggle with or do not meet learning objectives for whatever reason, a teacher will often assign the work to be completed at home. Either this or the teacher will hold students after the bell for extra studying.

Another reason why high school teachers assign homework is to help students become independent learners and prepare them for higher education.

Important skills are practiced when students stay on top of homework tasks and deadlines. For instance, students train and develop being responsible and how to manage their time effectively.

Nevertheless, when assigned too much homework, studies have pointed to consequences such as mental health problems and physical ailments. The news report below highlights this point.

The rest of this article will discuss how much homework teachers should assign and how to manage the workload.

Table of Contents

How Much Homework Should High School Teachers Give?

A high school teacher should give around 10-20 minutes of clear, purposeful homework per night. This number is ideal considering that multiple other teachers are potentially giving homework as well, so a student is likely to spend between 60-90 minutes per night on homework in total.

Homework serves an important function. But it can also be counterproductive when too much homework is assigned. Several studies suggest that the optimal amount of time high school students should spend on homework is between 60-90 minutes per night .

High school teachers should also be aware of what the other teachers in the grade are assigning to ensure the work is manageable.

Some schools develop a homework policy that dictates how much or little homework is assigned per grade. For instance, some schools don’t assign homework other than catch-up work or projects , while others may set a homework sheet every night.

Regardless of the policy, teachers must consider their students’ needs and homework goals before setting assignments. It is also essential that teachers coordinate with their colleagues to ensure that, cumulatively, the homework assignments are still manageable for students.

It should be emphasized that a higher number of hours spent doing homework does not necessarily result in better academic outcomes.

The chart below shows how 15-year-olds in South Korea and Finland spend less time on homework than their counterparts in Italy and the United States. Yet, South Korea and Finland regularly rank highly on global educational standards.

Types of Homework That School Teachers Should Assign

On top of a homework policy, high school teachers must ensure their homework is purposeful , easy to understand , and does not require special instruction .

The reason for such qualifications is that students have different learning styles and abilities.

A homework assignment that takes one student ten minutes to complete might take another student longer than that based on individual differences. Some may need more in-person instruction and support with work, which can’t necessarily be given when a student completes their work at home.

So, the students should have a clear understanding of what to do. That way, they can complete their assignments independently to the best of their ability at home without any intervention from others.

Additionally, educators should be aware that not all students have access to the same devices or resources. So, any assigned homework should be accessible to all students through the delivery means of the teacher. In other words, the teacher should try to give physical copies of work to students versus relying on them to print any work at home.

How To Manage Homework Assignments

Helping students prepare to manage their homework assignments is vital to ensure their success when completing them.

It can be easy for some to get distracted or forgetful with schoolwork, so homework management should be facilitated by the teacher and maintained by the student.

Many elementary schools offer agendas and homework booklets to their students, and this practice sometimes continues into high school. Each institution has its own way of helping students manage work, with many turning to virtual school communication apps that can be downloaded onto smartphones.

Virtual School Organization Apps

Seesaw and myHomework Student Planner are examples of the virtual school planner apps that some teachers, parents, and students use to maintain communication and organization.

These apps are now commonly used, especially since online learning has become more prominent recently. The apps are helpful as they do what they set out to do – organize work.

Digital platforms are also more engaging for students, which will help motivate them to complete and submit tasks on time.

However, they can’t always be relied upon because not all students have access to smartphones , internet access, or computers at home, so virtual homework apps may not be the best option for all students.

Other Organization Tools

As an educator, my experience is that virtual apps offer efficiency but lack full accessibility for students. So, I prefer to stick to hard copy tools used to help high school students organize their schoolwork.

While agendas and journals may be more geared toward elementary school students, they’re much more practical for high school students with a legitimate workload.

High school students have multiple subjects to learn in a semester, requiring significantly more effort. So, agendas are hard copy tools that can play a critical role in helping students organize and maintain their schoolwork.

Schools design and print agendas for their students. You can purchase these agendas through the school administration for the most part (some schools may offer them for free).

Otherwise, you can also use simple day planners like the Global Printed Products Hardcover 2023 Planner or the Productivity Store Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Day Planner (both available on Amazon.com). These day planners have well-designed layouts for students to help them stay organized.

Final Thoughts

High school teachers give homework to reconsolidate or complete the learning covered in class. If every high school teacher assigned a homework task, then the accumulation of homework can become overwhelming for students.

Teachers should be mindful of this and limit the homework they set to around 10-20 minutes. They should also collaborate with other faculty members to ensure consistency across the school and that students’ well-being is prioritized.

High school educators should also work closely with students to help them manage and organize tasks more effectively. Digital platforms like Google Classroom or conventional methods like an agenda are recommended.

Finally, homework should always be purposeful and clear otherwise students will not see the benefits and become disengaged with the learning.

For further information on the main points mentioned in this article, check out this video:

• Edutopia: What’s the right amount of homework?
• Edutopia: Homework vs. No Homework
• NEA: How much homework is too much?
• Statista: The Countries Where Kids Do The Most Homework
• YouTube: Above the Noise – Is Homework Necessary?
• EurekAlert: How much math, science homework is too much?
• YouTube: CBS New York – Can Too Much Homework Harm Your Child’s Health?

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• Can Elementary Teachers Wear Jeans?
• Teachers and Drinking: 5 Important Questions Answered
• Can A Teacher Ask Personal Questions?

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