debate on does homework promote learning

Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

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

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Senior Contributing Editor

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

She can be reached at [email protected] .

Comments & Discussion

Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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Student Opinion

Should We Get Rid of Homework?

Some educators are pushing to get rid of homework. Would that be a good thing?

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

Do you like doing homework? Do you think it has benefited you educationally?

Has homework ever helped you practice a difficult skill — in math, for example — until you mastered it? Has it helped you learn new concepts in history or science? Has it helped to teach you life skills, such as independence and responsibility? Or, have you had a more negative experience with homework? Does it stress you out, numb your brain from busywork or actually make you fall behind in your classes?

Should we get rid of homework?

In “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong, ” published in July, the Times Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that homework may be imperfect, but it still serves an important purpose in school. The essay begins:

Do students really need to do their homework? As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?” I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.” The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Mr. Kang argues:

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility. A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Should we get rid of homework? Why, or why not?

Is homework an outdated, ineffective or counterproductive tool for learning? Do you agree with the authors of the paper that homework is harmful and worsens inequalities that exist between students’ home circumstances?

Or do you agree with Mr. Kang that homework still has real educational value?

When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Do you think the amount is appropriate, too much or too little? Is homework, including the projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or, in your opinion, is it not a good use of time? Explain.

In these letters to the editor , one reader makes a distinction between elementary school and high school:

Homework’s value is unclear for younger students. But by high school and college, homework is absolutely essential for any student who wishes to excel. There simply isn’t time to digest Dostoyevsky if you only ever read him in class.

What do you think? How much does grade level matter when discussing the value of homework?

Is there a way to make homework more effective?

If you were a teacher, would you assign homework? What kind of assignments would you give and why?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

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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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The Cult of Homework

America’s devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it’s what today’s parents and teachers grew up with themselves.

America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed , which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.

The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s . Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study , for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.

But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work—and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject.

Read: My daughter’s homework is killing me

Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.

“The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.”

Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.

Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.

Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.”

Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. “They don’t need it,” Schneider says, “so they’re not advocating for it.”

That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they’re working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.

As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it’s worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there’s some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.

In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s , and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.

This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it’s compatible with “the 10-minute rule,” a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level—that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.

In Cooper’s eyes, homework isn’t overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found “little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student”; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with “concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities.”

According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing , considers homework to be a “reliable extinguisher of curiosity,” and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper’s 2006 meta-analysis doesn’t establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children’s (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn’s prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)

In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn’t help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork , while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students’ success.)

Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. “If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores,” he says. “But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive.”

His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. “The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough,” Kohn says. What about homework’s effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.

Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.

Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs—things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.

Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it’s important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. “The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system,” he says. “Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing.” In other words, many parents’ own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn’t rigorous enough. (This dovetails with—and complicates—the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)

Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. “They could do it, but they’re afraid to do it, because they’re getting pressure every day about test scores,” Stengel says.

Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. “Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching,” she says.

“In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework,” Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. “If we had kids reading—anything, the sports page, anything that they’re able to read—that’s the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they’re not. They’re going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about.”

“Exploratory” is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he’d like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. “We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago,” Simpson says, “so it’s been easy to say we aren’t going to assign worksheets, we aren’t going assign regurgitative problem sets.” For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus.

Simpson says he thinks it’s a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: “When our students can’t make the connection between the work they’re doing at 11 o’clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot.”

When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she’s pleased with the results, but she’s noticed something funny. “Some kids,” she says, “really do like homework.” She’s started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily—whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home.

Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It’s usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they’ve managed their time.

In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they’re particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. “They’re making meaningful decisions about their time that I don’t think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing,” Bronke said.

The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it—to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it’s actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class—to start with nothing, and add as necessary.

Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

A s kids return to school, debate is heating up once again over how they should spend their time after they leave the classroom for the day.

The no-homework policy of a second-grade teacher in Texas went viral last week , earning praise from parents across the country who lament the heavy workload often assigned to young students. Brandy Young told parents she would not formally assign any homework this year, asking students instead to eat dinner with their families, play outside and go to bed early.

But the question of how much work children should be doing outside of school remains controversial, and plenty of parents take issue with no-homework policies, worried their kids are losing a potential academic advantage. Here’s what you need to know:

For decades, the homework standard has been a “10-minute rule,” which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. Second graders, for example, should do about 20 minutes of homework each night. High school seniors should complete about two hours of homework each night. The National PTA and the National Education Association both support that guideline.

But some schools have begun to give their youngest students a break. A Massachusetts elementary school has announced a no-homework pilot program for the coming school year, lengthening the school day by two hours to provide more in-class instruction. “We really want kids to go home at 4 o’clock, tired. We want their brain to be tired,” Kelly Elementary School Principal Jackie Glasheen said in an interview with a local TV station . “We want them to enjoy their families. We want them to go to soccer practice or football practice, and we want them to go to bed. And that’s it.”

A New York City public elementary school implemented a similar policy last year, eliminating traditional homework assignments in favor of family time. The change was quickly met with outrage from some parents, though it earned support from other education leaders.

New solutions and approaches to homework differ by community, and these local debates are complicated by the fact that even education experts disagree about what’s best for kids.

The research

The most comprehensive research on homework to date comes from a 2006 meta-analysis by Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper, who found evidence of a positive correlation between homework and student achievement, meaning students who did homework performed better in school. The correlation was stronger for older students—in seventh through 12th grade—than for those in younger grades, for whom there was a weak relationship between homework and performance.

Cooper’s analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement—test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills. On the other hand, some studies he examined showed that homework can cause physical and emotional fatigue, fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children. At the end of his analysis, Cooper recommended further study of such potential effects of homework.

Despite the weak correlation between homework and performance for young children, Cooper argues that a small amount of homework is useful for all students. Second-graders should not be doing two hours of homework each night, he said, but they also shouldn’t be doing no homework.

Not all education experts agree entirely with Cooper’s assessment.

Cathy Vatterott, an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school.

“Correlation is not causation,” she said. “Does homework cause achievement, or do high achievers do more homework?”

Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs , thinks there should be more emphasis on improving the quality of homework tasks, and she supports efforts to eliminate homework for younger kids.

“I have no concerns about students not starting homework until fourth grade or fifth grade,” she said, noting that while the debate over homework will undoubtedly continue, she has noticed a trend toward limiting, if not eliminating, homework in elementary school.

The issue has been debated for decades. A TIME cover in 1999 read: “Too much homework! How it’s hurting our kids, and what parents should do about it.” The accompanying story noted that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to a push for better math and science education in the U.S. The ensuing pressure to be competitive on a global scale, plus the increasingly demanding college admissions process, fueled the practice of assigning homework.

“The complaints are cyclical, and we’re in the part of the cycle now where the concern is for too much,” Cooper said. “You can go back to the 1970s, when you’ll find there were concerns that there was too little, when we were concerned about our global competitiveness.”

Cooper acknowledged that some students really are bringing home too much homework, and their parents are right to be concerned.

“A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” he said. “If you take too little, they’ll have no effect. If you take too much, they can kill you. If you take the right amount, you’ll get better.”

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January 18, 2024

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Q&A: Does homework still have value? An education expert weighs in

by Vicky Hallett, Johns Hopkins University

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.

Provided by Johns Hopkins University

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Gray Matters: What role should homework play in learning?

Historical Background In the U.S., debates about the value of homework have been steady over the past century. In the beginning half of the 1900’s, homework was not nearly as common. Many school districts banned homework at the elementary and middle school levels in the belief that it only facilitated rote learning. That changed in the 1950’s when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, creating the perception that the U.S. needed to increase the amount of students’ homework to be competitive in the space race. Over the next 50 years until the present, the popular view of homework switched every 15 years or so between support and condemnation. Today research has enhanced our understanding, but the debate continues.

Homework: What’s the Point? Numerous benefits are attributed to homework: better retention of factual knowledge, development of study habits, increased ability to manage time effectively, and heightened parental involvement. Evaluating exactly what of these benefits can be attributed to homework versus inherent differences in students or the quality of assignments presents obvious challenges. Further confounding research, homework often exacts costs in the form of increased stress and reduced sleep, which can negate potential benefits. Nonetheless, research to date provides guidance on homework’s role in achieving some of these goals.

Research Examples How much homework should be assigned? Although not unanimous, multiple studies on the relationship between homework time and academic achievement have shown that it is not a linear relationship: more homework does not equal more learning. One study of 7,451 13- year-old students administered a test of science and mathematics in addition to a survey of effort spent on homework, homework time, homework frequency, and the general circumstances around how homework was done. Results: student academic gains were associated with homework time up to 1 hour a day, after which increased homework time was associated with worse performance. This result varies with students’ ages.

How does the influence of homework change in different grades? While empirical studies have not yet explicitly compared the role of homework in different ages, a review of the literature reveals clear trends. A meta-analysis of 4,400 studies up until 2003 found that homework time had different effects depending on the grade of students. Results: up to two hours of homework showed the most benefit for high school students, up to an hour of homework showed some benefit for middle school students, and almost no benefit was found among elementary school students.

What homework factors contribute to academic performance? Studies that focus on the circumstances in which students complete homework have found that autonomy and effort are more important predictors of performance than homework time alone. One study of 483 eighth-graders from 20 classes analyzed students’ grades and standardized test scores in mathematics in relation to survey responses on homework effort. Students responded once in November and once in May of the academic year. Results: academic gains in grades and test scores were positively correlated to homework effort. However, other studies suggest that since effort and autonomy are highly correlated with students’ prior achievement, it’s difficult to say if this is a trait of the homework or of a certain kind of student.

How can homework best facilitate learning? Practices from the “ How can I improve longterm learning ” edition of Gray Matters 01 should be implemented in homework design to facilitate learning. For instance, using homework to continue practice on material and skills learned in previous weeks uses distributed practice to improve recall. Homework that offers adequate practice of important skills also helps reinforce skills in a variety of contexts. A survey of school leaders around homework best practices found similar results: homework can facilitate engagement when it is an authentic, engaging extension of the class. Results: homework should be designed intentionally, with reference to most effective forms of practice.

Does the effect of homework change when instruction occurs at home and exercises are done in class? In this case, the question is essentially if homework facilitates learning when it is done as a part class rather than at home. One model that represents this circumstance is the flipped classroom. Case studies done with ninth to twelfth-graders across a variety of subjects showed that achievement increased after implementing a model where students watched videos at home and practiced learning in class. In these schools the percentage of students passing standardized exams increased by up to 12%. Empirical studies comparing in-class work and at home work have repeated research design flaws, however, they generally indicate that in-class exercises have a positive effect for older students. Results: the research is inconclusive, but generally indicates that flipped classroom approaches have positive net benefits for high school students.

How frequently should homework be assigned? The research on frequency is not conclusive, however most studies suggest that classes that receive homework frequently tend to do better on tests of achievement. One such study administered standardized mathematics examinations to 2,939 grade 7 and 8 students across 20 classes. In addition to the exam, students answered questions on frequency of homework and the average amount of time spent on homework each evening. Results: Classes that had more frequent homework assignments had overall higher averages on the achievement tests.

Does homework change students’ attitudes towards school? Studies comparing the attitudes of students who received homework with those who did not receive homework generally found no significant results across a variety of grade levels. One study compared three different models for assigning arithmetic homework to 342 third-graders across twelve classrooms: teachers assigned no homework, assigned homework as usual, and were required to assign a constant amount of homework every night. Students answered questions measuring their attitudes towards school, teacher, arithmetic, spelling, reading, and homework. Results: no significant differences were found between the attitudes of the different groups.

Conclusion The quality of homework and the students who complete it vary significantly, however the general research trends suggest that assigning homework does have benefits at the middle and upper school levels. Frequency of assignment and students’ autonomy in finishing homework were also correlated with student achievement. These results provide guidelines on the appropriate quantity of homework, but how best to incorporate homework content into an overall progression of students’ learning remains for teachers to judge.

“Adolescents’ Homework Performance in Mathematics and Science: Personal Factors and Teaching Practices” by Rubén FernándezAlonso, Javier Suárez-Álvarez, and José Muñiz, Journal of Educational Psychology , 2015, 107(4), 1075.

“Ask the Cognitive Scientist Allocating Student Study Time” by Daniel T. Willingham, American Educator , 2002, 26(2), 37-39.

“Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987–2003” by Harris Cooper, Jorgianne Civey Robinson, and Erika A. Patall, Review of Educational Research , 2006, 76(1), 1-62.

“Does Homework Improve Learning?” by Alfie Kohn, AlfieKohn.org, 2006. “Effects of Arithmetic Homework upon the Attitudes of Third Grade Pupils Toward Certain School-related Structure” by Norbert Maertens, School Science and Mathematics , 1968, 68(7), 657-662.

“Flipped Learning Model Dramatically Improves Course Pass Rate for At-Risk Students, Clintondale high School, MI: A Case Study” by Pearson Education, May, 2013.

“Flipped Learning Model Increases Student Engagement and Performance, Byron High School, MN: A Case Study” by Pearson Education, June, 2013.

“Homework. Research on Teaching Monograph Series, Homework Versus In-class Supervised Study” by Harris Cooper, 1989, 77- 89.

“If They’d Only Do Their Work!” by Linda Darling-Hammond and Olivia Ifill-Lynch, Educational Leadership, 2008, 63(5), 8-13.

“Research Trends: Why Homework Should Be Balanced” by Youki Terada, Edutopia, 2015, July 31.

“Synthesis of Research on Homework” by Harris Cooper, Educational leadership, 1989, 47(3), 85-91.

“The Homework–Achievement Relation Reconsidered: Differentiating Homework Time, Homework Frequency, and Homework Effort” by Ulrich Trautwein, Learning and Instruction, 2007, 17(3), 372-388.

Gray Matters is dedicated to providing research-based answers to questions commonly raised by faculty and within the education community. Gray Matters is published by the Tiger Works Research & Development group at Avenues.

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This post has been updated as of December 2017.

It’s not uncommon to hear students, parents, and even some teachers always complaining about homework. Why, then, is homework an inescapable part of the student experience? Worksheets, busy work, and reading assignments continue to be a mainstay of students’ evenings.

Whether from habit or comparison with out-of-class work time in other nations, our students are getting homework and, according to some of them, a LOT of it. Educators and policy makers must ask themselves—does assigning homework pay off?

Is there evidence that homework benefits students younger than high school?

The Scholastic article Is Homework Bad? references Alfie Kohn’s book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing , in which he says, “There is no evidence to demonstrate that homework benefits students below high school age.”

The article goes on to note that those who oppose homework focus on the drawbacks of significant time spent on homework, identifying one major negative as homework’s intrusion into family time. They also point out that opponents believe schools have decided homework is necessary and thus assign it simply to assign some kind of homework, not because doing the work meets specifically-identified student needs.

“Busy work” does not help students learn

Students and parents appear to carry similar critiques of homework, specifically regarding assignments identified as busy work—long sheets of repetitive math problems, word searches, or reading logs seemingly designed to make children dislike books.

When asked how homework can negatively affect children, Nancy Kalish, author of The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It , says that many homework assignments are “simply busy work” that makes learning “a chore rather than a positive, constructive experience.”

Commenters on the piece, both parents and students, tended to agree. One student shared that on occasion they spent more time on homework than at school, while another commenter pointed out that, “We don’t give slow-working children a longer school day, but we consistently give them a longer homework day.”

Without feedback, homework is ineffective

The efficacy of the homework identified by Kalish has been studied by policy researchers as well. Gerald LeTendre, of Penn State’s Education Policy Studies department points out that the shotgun approach to homework, when students all receive the same photocopied assignment which is then checked as complete rather than discussed individually with the student, is “not very effective.”  He goes on to say that, “If there’s no feedback and no monitoring, the homework is probably not effective.”

Researchers from the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia had similar findings in their study, “ When Is Homework Worth The Time ?” According to UVAToday, these researchers reported no “substantive difference” in the grades of students related to homework completion.

As researcher Adam Maltese noted, “Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be.” The report further suggested that while not all homework is bad, the type and quality of assignments and their differentiation to specific learners appears to be an important point of future research.

If homework is assigned, it should heighten understanding of the subject

The Curry School of Education report did find a positive association between standardized test performance and time spent on homework, but standardized test performance shouldn’t be the end goal of assignments—a heightened understanding and capability with the content material should.

As such, it is important that if/when teachers assign homework assignments, it is done thoughtfully and carefully—and respectful of the maximum times suggested by the National Education Association, about 10 minutes per night starting in the first grade, with an additional 10 minutes per year after.

Continue reading — The Homework Debate: How Homework Benefits Students

Monica Fuglei is a graduate of the University of Nebraska in Omaha and a current adjunct faculty member of Arapahoe Community College in Colorado, where she teaches composition and creative writing.

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Effects of homework creativity on academic achievement and creativity disposition: Evidence from comparisons with homework time and completion based on two independent Chinese samples

Huiyong fan.

1 College of Educational Science, Bohai University, Jinzhou, China

2 Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China

Jianzhong Xu

3 Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Foundations, College of Education, Mississippi State University, MS, United States

Shengli Guo

Associated data.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

During the past several decades, the previous studies have been focusing on the related theoretical issues and measuring tool of homework behaviors (mainly including homework time, completion, and homework creativity). However, the effects of these homework behaviors on general creativity remain unknown. Employing a number of questionnaires, this study investigated two samples from middle schools of Mainland China. The results showed that (1) the eight-item version of Homework Creativity Behaviors Scale had acceptable validity and reliability; (2) compared with homework completion and homework time, homework creativity explained less variety of academic achievement (3.7% for homework creativity; 5.4% for completion and time); (3) homework creativity explained more variance of general creativity than that of homework completion and homework time accounted (7.0% for homework creativity; 1.3% for completion and time); and (4) homework creativity was negatively associated with grade level. Contrary to the popular beliefs, homework completion and homework creativity have positive effects on the students’ general creativity. Several issues that need further studies were also discussed.

Introduction

Homework is an important part of the learning and instruction process. Each week, students around the world spend 3–14 hours on homework, with an average of 5 hours a week ( Dettmers et al., 2009 ; OECD, 2014 ). The results of the previous studies and meta-analysis showed that the homework time is correlated significantly with students’ gains on the academic tests ( Cooper et al., 2012 ; Fan et al., 2017 ; Fernández-Alonso et al., 2019 ).

Homework is a multi-faceted process which has many attributes – each attribute can be identified, defined, and measured independently ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). Some attributes, such as homework time ( Núñez et al., 2013 ; Kalenkoski and Pabilonia, 2017 ), homework frequency ( Fernández-Alonso et al., 2015 ), homework completion ( Rosário et al., 2015 ), homework effort ( Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007 ; Fernández-Alonso et al., 2015 ), homework purpose ( Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2009 ; Xu, 2010 , 2021 ), homework performance and problems ( Power et al., 2007 ), homework management behavior ( Xu, 2008 ), homework expectation ( Xu, 2017 ), and self-regulation of homework behavior ( Yang and Tu, 2020 ), have been well recorded in the literature, and operationally defined and measured.

Recently, a research community has noticed the “creativity” in homework (in short form, “homework creativity”) who have raised some speculations about its effects on students’ academic achievement and general creativity disposition ( Kaiipob, 1951 ; Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ; Guo, 2018 ; Guo and Fan, 2018 ; Chang, 2019 ). However, the scientific measurement of homework creativity has not been examined systematically. The relationship between homework creativity, academic achievement, and general creativity disposition, as well as the grade difference in homework creativity, are still in the state of conjectures consequently.

As a scientific probe to homework creativity, this study included three main sections. In the “Literature Review” section, the conceptualization and relevant measurement of homework creativity were summarized; the relationship between homework behaviors and academic achievements, general creativity, and the grade difference in homework behaviors and general creativity were also evaluated. These four main results related to the four research questions were also presented in the body of this article. They are reliability and validity of homework creativity behavior scale (HCBS), the relationships between the scores of HCBS and those of general creativity and academic achievement, and the grade effects of scores of HCBS. In the “Discussion” section, the scientific contributions and interpretations of the findings of this study were elaborated.

Homework creativity

Conceptual background of homework creativity.

As an attribute of homework process, homework creativity refers to the novelty and uniqueness of homework ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). Specifically, the ways relating to homework creativity with extant theoretical literature are presented below.

First, creativity is a natural part of homework process which serves as a sub-process of learning. Guilford (1950) is the first psychologist who linked creativity with learning, pointing out that the acquisition of creativity is a typical quality of human learning, and that a complete learning theory must take creativity into account.

Second, according to the Four-C Model of Creativity (e.g., Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ), the homework creativity can be divided mainly into the category of “Transformative Learning” (Mini-C creativity), which is different from the “Everyday Innovation” (Little-C creativity), “Professional Expertise” (Pro-C creativity), or “Eminent Accomplishments” (Big-C creativity, Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ; Kozbelt et al., 2011 ).

The Mini-C is defined as a type of intrapersonal creativity which has personal meaning, not solid contribution or breakthrough in a field ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 , p. 76, Table 1 ). The most important point which distinguishes Mini-C from other types of creativity is the level of novelty of product. The Mini-C creativity involves the personal insight or interpretation which is new to a particular individual, but may be ordinary to others. The Little-C creativity refers to any small, but solid innovation in daily life. The Pro-C creativity is represented in the form of professional contribution which is still not a breakthrough. The Big-C creativity generates a real breakthrough appears in some field which is considered as something new to all human beings. The other difference is related with the subjects of sub-types of creativity. The Mini-C creativity mainly happens in all kinds of students. The Little-C creativity can be widely found in normal people. The Pro-C creativity’s masters are those who are proficient in some field. The Big-C creativity is related frequently with those giants who has made eminent contribution to human being.

Basic information of samples 1 and 2 included.

The Mini-C creativity frequently happens in learning process. When the contribution of the Mini-C creativity grows big enough, it can move into the category of the Little-C creativity, or the Big-C creativity. Most homework creativity is of Mini-C creativity, and of which a small part may grow as the Little-C and Big-C creativities. For example, when students independently find a unique solution to a problem in homework which has scientific meaning, a Little-C or Big-C occurs.

Third, the education researchers have observed homework creativity for many years and been manipulating them in educational practice. Kaiipob (1951) described that homework is a semi-guide learning process in which homework such as composition, report, public speech, difficult and complex exercises, experiments, and making tools and models consumes a lot of time and accelerate the development of students’ creativity disposition (p. 153).

In the recent years, creativity has become a curriculum or instruction goal in many countries (the case of United Kingdom, see Smith and Smith, 2010 ; Chinese case, see Pang and Plucker, 2012 ). Homework is the most important way that accomplish this goal. Considering Chinese in primary and secondary schools in China as an example, the curriculum standards have clearly required homework to cultivate students’ creative spirit, creative thinking, and ability to imagination since the year 2000. The results of Qian’s (2006) investigation revealed that the percent of these creative homework items in each unit fluctuates between 29 and 45%.

Previous instruments of homework behaviors

Those existent instruments measuring homework behavior can be divided into the following two categories: The single-indicator instruments and the multi-dimension instruments ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). The single-indicator instruments employ only one item to measure homework attributes, such as homework time (e.g., Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007 ), homework frequency (e.g., De Jong et al., 2000 ), homework completion (e.g., Xu et al., 2019 ), and effort (e.g., Liu et al., 2013 ).

The typical multi-dimension instruments include Homework Process Inventory ( Cooper et al., 1998 ), Homework Purpose Scale ( Xu, 2010 ), Homework Performance Questionnaire ( Pendergast et al., 2014 ), Homework Management Scale (HMS; Xu and Corno, 2003 ), Homework Evaluating Scale ( Fernández-Alonso et al., 2015 ), Homework Problem Checklist ( Anesko et al., 1987 ), Science Homework Scale ( Tas et al., 2016 ), Homework Expectancy Value Scale ( Yang and Xu, 2017 ), and Online Homework Distraction Scale ( Xu et al., 2020 ).

Although the previous tools measured some dimensions of homework ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ), there is hardly any tool that can be employed to gauge the homework creativity. Guo and Fan (2018) extracted several attributes (i.e., time, completion, quality, purpose, effort, creativity, sociality, liking) represented in the existent instruments of homework behaviors, and put forth a multi-faceted model of homework behaviors which intuitionally predicts the existence of homework creativity.

Under the guideline of the multi-faceted model ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ), Guo (2018) developed a multi-dimensional homework behavior instrument, which detected the homework creativity as a dimension in the homework behavior of middle school students. A typical item of homework creativity in Guo (2018) is “The way I do my homework is different from others.” The subscale homework creativity reported by Guo (2018) needs to be improved because it has a small number of items with lower reliability.

Following Guo’s (2018) work, Chang (2019) conducted a new investigation focusing on homework creativity behavior. Using an open-ended questionnaire, a total of 30 students from primary, middle, and high schools were invited to answer this question, that is, “What characteristics can be considered as creative in the process of completing the homework?” Here, “creativity” refers to novelty, uniqueness, and high quality. A group of 23 specific behaviors were reported, among which the top 10 are as follows: Learning by analogy, open minded, one question with multiple solutions, unique solution, summarizing the cause of errors, constructing a personal understanding, analyzing knowledge points clearly, classifying homework contents, making more applications, having rich imagination, and a neat handwriting (see Chang, 2019 , Table 4 , p. 14). Based on these results of open-ended questionnaire, Chang (2019) invented a nine-item scale (see Table 1 and Supplementary Table S3 for details) called as the HCBS which has a good reliability coefficient (α = 0.87).

Regression analyses of homework creative behavior on academic achievement and general creativity.

AA, academic achievement; WCAPt, total score of WCAP; TWk, time spent on homework in week days; TWw, time spent on homework in weekend; HCp, homework completion; HCb, homework creativity behavior.

Previous studies on the relationship between homework behaviors and academic achievement

In the literature, homework behaviors is one cluster of variables typically including homework time, homework completion, effort, purpose, frequency, etc. Academic achievement is an outcome of homework which is operationally measured using the scores on the standardized tests, or non-standardized tests (including final examinations, or teachers’ grades, or estimations by participants themselves, those forms were used widely in the literature, see Fan et al., 2017 ). Academic achievement may be affected by a lot of factors inherited in the process of learning (see Hattie, 2009 for an overview of its correlates). The relationship between homework behaviors and academic achievement is one of the most important questions in homework field, because it is related to the effectiveness of homework ( Cooper et al., 2006 , 2012 ; Fan et al., 2017 ).

Most of the previous studies focused on the relationship between homework time and academic achievement. Cooper et al. (2006) synthesized the primary studies published from 1989 to 2003, and found that the correlation between homework time of America students and their academic achievement was about 0.15. Fan et al. (2017) reviewed those individual studies published before June 2015, and reported that the averaged correlation between homework time of international students and their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academic achievement was about 0.20. Fernández-Alonso et al. (2017) investigated a representative sample of Spanish students (more than 26,000), and the results of multi-level analysis indicated that the correlation between homework time and academic achievement was negative at student level, but positive at school level ( r = 0.16). Fernández-Alonso et al. (2019) took a survey on a big sample from 16 countries from Latin America, and reported that the relationship between homework time and academic achievement was very weak. Valle et al. (2019) analyzed the homework time, time management, and achievement of 968 Spain students finding that homework time management was positively related to academic achievement. Taken all these together, we will find that the homework has some small significant correlations with academic achievement, the average r = 0.15.

The correlation between homework completion and academic achievement has also been investigated for decades. Based on a review of 11 primary studies, Fan et al. (2017) reported a high correlation of 0.59 between them. Rosário et al. (2015) investigated 638 students, and demonstrated a correlation of 0.22 between amount of homework completed and math test scores. Xu et al. (2019) took a survey using a sample of 1,450 Chinese eighth graders, and found that the correlations between homework completion and the gains in math test scores ranged from 0.25 to 0.28. Dolean and Lervag (2022) employed the Randomized Controlled Trial design, and demonstrated that amount of homework completed has immediate effect on writing competency in which the effect of moderate amount of homework can last for 4 months. Integrating the aforementioned results, we can find that the averaged correlation between homework completion and academic achievement was higher than that between homework time with academic achievement.

Homework effort was also found to be correlated with academic achievement. Fan et al. (2017) reviewed four primary studies and returned that a medium correlation ( r = 0.31) between homework effort and academic achievement. Two recent investigations showed that this relationship is positively and reciprocally related ( r = 0.41–0.42) ( Xu, 2020 ; Xu et al., 2021 ).

The effect of homework purpose was also correlated with the academic achievement. Fan et al. (2017) summarized four existent primary studies and reported an averaged correlation of 0.11 between them. Later, Rosário et al. (2015) found a similar correlation coefficient of these two variables on a sample of 638 students. Xu’s (2018) investigation revealed that the correlation between purpose and academic achievement was about 0.40. Sun et al. (2021) investigated a larger sample ( N = 1,365), and found that the subscales of homework purpose had different correlation patterns with academic achievement (academic purpose is 0.40, self-regulatory purpose is 0.20, and approval-seeking purpose is 0.10).

Considering the case of homework creativity, there is only one study preliminarily investigated its relationship with academic achievement. Guo (2018) investigated a sample of 1,808 middle school students, and reported a significant correlation between homework creativity and academic achievement ( r = 0.34, p < 0.05).

Previous studies on the relationship between homework behaviors and general creativity

General creativity refers to the psychological attributes which can generate novel and valuable products ( Kaufman and Glăveanu, 2019 ; Sternberg and Karami, 2022 ). These psychological attributes typically included attitude (e.g., willing to take appropriate risk), motivations (e.g., intrinsic motivation, curiosity), abilities (e.g., divergent thinking), and personality (e.g., independence) ( Kaufman and Glăveanu, 2019 ; Long et al., 2022 ). These attributes can be assessed independently, or in the form of grouping ( Plucker et al., 2019 ; Sternberg, 2019 ). For instance, the divergent thinking was measured independently ( Kaufman et al., 2008 ). Also, the willing to take appropriate risk was measured in tools contain other variables ( Williams, 1979 ). There are many studies examined the relationship between learning and general creativity in the past several decades indicating that the correlation between them was around 0.22 (e.g., Gajda et al., 2017 ; Karwowski et al., 2020 ).

Regarding the relationship between homework behaviors and general creativity, there are few studies which presented some contradictory viewpoints. Kaiipob (1951) posited that homework could accelerate development of students’ general creativity disposition, because the tasks in homework provide opportunities to exercise creativity. Cooper et al. (2012) argued that homework can diminish creativity. Furthermore, Zheng (2013) insisted that homework will reduce curiosity and the ability to challenging – the two core components of creativity. The preliminary results of Chang (2019) indicated that the score of HCBS is significantly correlated with scores of a test of general creativity, Williams’ creativity packet ( r = 0.25–0.33, p < 0.05).

Previous studies on the relationship between homework behaviors and homework creativity

In Guo and Fan’s (2018) theoretical work, homework creativity was combined from two independent words, homework and creativity, which was defined as a new attribute of homework process and was considered as a new member of homework behaviors. Up till now, there are two works providing preliminary probe to the relationship between homework behaviors and homework creativity. Guo (2018) investigated a sample of 1808 middle school students, and found that homework creativity was correlated significantly with liking ( r = 0.33), correctness ( r = 0.47), completion ( r = 0.57), and purpose ( r = 0.53). Based on another sample of Chinese students (elementary school students, N = 300; middle school students, N = 518; high school students, N = 386), Chang (2019) showed that the score of homework creativity was correlated significantly with homework time ( r = 0.11), completion ( r = 0.39), correctness ( r = 0.63), effort ( r = 0.73), social interaction ( r = 0.35), quality ( r = 0.69), interpersonal relation purpose ( r = 0.17), and purpose of personal development ( r = 0.41).

Previous studies on grade differences of homework behaviors and general creativity

Grade differences of homework behaviors.

As a useful indicator, homework time was recorded frequently (e.g., Cooper et al., 2006 ; Fan et al., 2017 ). A recent meta-analysis included 172 primary studies (total N = 144,416) published from 2003 to 2019, and demonstrated that time Chinese K-12 students spent on homework increased significantly along with increasing of grades ( Zhai and Fan, 2021 , October).

Regarding homework managing time, some studies reported the grade difference was insignificant. Xu (2006) surveyed 426 middle school students and found that there was no difference between middle school students and high school students. Xu and Corno (2003) reported that urban junior school students ( N = 86) had no grade difference in homework Managing time. Yang and Tu (2020) surveyed 305 Chinese students in grades 7–9, and found that in managing time behavior, the grade differences were insignificant. The rest studies showed that the grade effect is significant. A survey by Xu et al. (2014) based on 1799 Chinese students in grades 10 and 11 showed that the higher level the grade, the lower level of time management.

Grade differences of general creativity

The findings from the previous studies suggested that the scores of general creativity deceases as the grade increases except for some dimensions. Kim (2011) reviewed the Torrance Tests of Creative thinking (TTCT) scores change using five datasets from 1974 to 2008, and reported that three dimensions of creative thinking (i.e., “Fluency,” “Originality,” and “Elaboration”) significantly decreased along with grades increase, while the rest dimension (i.e., “Abstractness of titles”) significantly increased when grades increase. Nie and Zheng (2005) investigated a sample of 3,729 participants from grades 3–12 using the Williams’ Creativity Assessment Packet (WCAP), and reported that the creativity scores decreased from grades 9–12. Said-Metwaly et al. (2021) synthesized 41 primary studies published in the past 60 years, and concluded that the ability of divergent thinking had a whole increase tendency from grades 1 to 12 with a decrease tendency from grades 8 to 11 at the same time.

The purpose and questions of this study

What we have known about homework creativity hitherto is nothing except for its notation and a preliminary version of measurement. To get deeper understanding of homework creativity, this study made an endeavor to examine its relationships with relevant variables based on a confirmation of the reliability and validity of HCBS. Specifically, there are four interrelated research questions, as the following paragraphs (and their corresponding hypotheses) described.

(i) What is the reliability and validity of the HCBS?

Because the earlier version of the HCBS showed a good Cronbach α coefficient of 0.87, and a set of well-fitting indices ( Chang, 2019 ), this study expected that the reliability and validity will also behave well in the current conditions as before. Then, we present the first set of hypotheses as follows:

H1a: The reliability coefficient will equal or greater than 0.80.

H1b: The one-factor model will also fit the current data well; and all indices will reach or over the criteria as the expertise suggested.

(ii) What degree is the score of the HCBS related with academic achievement?

As suggested by the review section, the correlations between homework behaviors and academic achievement ranged from 0.15 and 0.59 (e.g., Fan et al., 2017 ), then we expected that the relationship between homework creativity and academic achievement will fall into this range, because homework creativity is a member of homework behaviors.

The results of the previous studies also demonstrated that the correlation between general creativity and academic achievement changed in a range of 0.19–0.24 with a mean of 0.19 ( Gajda et al., 2017 ). Because it can be treated as a sub-category of general creativity, we predicted that homework creativity will have a similar behavior under the current condition.

Taken aforementioned information together, Hypothesis H2 is presented as follows:

H2: There will be a significant correlation between homework creativity and academic achievement which might fall into the interval of 0.15–0.59.

(iii) What degree is the relationship between HCBS and general creativity?

As discussed in the previous section, there are no inconsistent findings about the relationship between the score of HCBS and general creativity. Some studies postulated that these two variables be positive correlated (e.g., Kaiipob, 1951 ; Chang, 2019 ); other studies argued that this relationship be negative (e.g., Cooper et al., 2012 ; Zheng, 2013 ). Because homework creativity is a sub-category of general creativity, we expected that this relationship would be positive and its value might be equal or less than 0.33. Based on those reasoning, we presented our third hypothesis as follows:

H3: The correlation between homework creativity and general creativity would be equal or less than 0.33.

(iv) What effect does grade have on the HCBS score?

Concerning the grade effect of homework behaviors, the previous findings were contradictory ( Xu et al., 2014 ; Zhai and Fan, 2021 , October). However, the general creativity decreased as the level of grade increases from grade 8 to grade 11 ( Kim, 2011 ; Said-Metwaly et al., 2021 ). Taken these previous findings and the fact that repetitive exercises increase when grades go up ( Zheng, 2013 ), we were inclined to expect that the level of homework creativity is negative correlated with the level of grade. Thus, we presented our fourth hypothesis as follows:

H4: The score of HCBS might decrease as the level of grades goes up.

Materials and methods

Participants.

To get more robust result, this study investigated two convenient samples from six public schools in a medium-sized city in China. Among them, two schools were of high schools (including a key school and a non-key school), and the rest four schools were middle schools (one is key school, and the rest is non-key school). All these schools included here did not have free lunch system and written homework policy. Considering the students were mainly prepared for entrance examination of higher stage, the grades 9 and 12 were excluded in this survey. Consequently, students of grades 7, 8, 10, and 11 were included in our survey. After getting permission of the education bureau of the city investigated, the headmasters administrated the questions in October 2018 (sample 1) and November 2019 (sample 2).

A total of 850 questionnaires were released and the valid number of questionnaires returned is 639 with a valid return rate of 75.18%. Therefore, there were 639 valid participants in sample 1. Among them, there were 273 boys and 366 girls (57.2%); 149 participants from grade 7 (23.31%), 118 from grade 8 (18.47%), 183 from grade 10 (28.64%), and 189 from grade 11 (29.58%); the average age was 15.25 years, with a standard deviation (SD) of 1.73 years. See Table 1 for the information about each grade.

Those participants included received homework assignments every day (see Table 1 for the distribution of homework frequency). During the working days, the averaged homework time was 128.29 minutes with SD = 6.65 minutes. In the weekend, the average homework time was 3.75 hours, with SD = 0.22 hours. The percentage distribution here is similar with that of a national representative sample ( Sun et al., 2020 ), because the values of Chi-squared (χ 2 ) were 7.46 (father) and 8.46 (mother), all p -values were above 0.12 (see Supplementary Table S1 for details).

Another package of 850 questionnaires were released. The valid number of questionnaires returned is 710 with a valid return rate of 83.53%. Among them, there were 366 girls (51.50%); 171 participants from grade 7 (24.23%), 211 from grade 8 (26.06%), 190 from the grade 10 (22.96%), and 216 from grade 11 (26.76%); the average age was 15.06 years, with SD = 1.47 years.

Those participants included received homework assignments almost each day (see Table 1 for details for the distribution of homework frequency). During the working days, the averaged homework time was 123.02 minutes with SD = 6.13 minutes. In weekend, the average homework time was 3.47 hours, with SD = 0.21 hours.

The percentage distribution here is insignificantly different from that of a national representative sample ( Sun et al., 2020 ), because the values of χ 2 were 5.20 (father) and 6.05 (mother), p -values were above 0.30 (see Supplementary Table S1 for details).

Instruments

The homework creativity behavior scale.

The HCBS contains nine items representing students’ creativity behaviors in the process of completing homework (for example, “I do my homework in an innovative way”) ( Chang, 2019 , see Supplementary Table S3 for details). The HCBS employs a 5-point rating scale, where 1 means “completely disagree” and 5 means “completely agree.” The higher the score, the stronger the homework creative behavior students have. The reliability and validity of the HCBS can be found in Section “Reliability and validity of the homework creativity behavior scale” (see Table 2 and Figures 1 , ​ ,2 2 for details).

Results of item discrimination analysis and exploratory factor analysis.

**p < 0.01, two side-tailed. The same for below.

a Correlations for sample 1; b Correlations for sample 2. c Seventh item should be removed away according to the results of CFA (see section “Reliability and validity of the HCBS” for details).

Parallel analysis scree plots of the HCBS data.

The standardized solution for HCBS eight-item model. hcb, homework creativity behavior; it 1∼9, item1 ∼6, 8∼9.

Homework management scale

The HMS contains 22 items describing specific behaviors related to self-management in homework (for example, “I will choose a quiet place to do my homework” or “Tell myself to calm down when encountering difficulties”) ( Xu and Corno, 2003 ; Xu, 2008 ). The HMS employs a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree). All items can be divided into five dimensions, i.e., arranging environment, managing time, focusing attention, monitoring motivation, and monitoring and controlling emotion. Among them, the monitoring and controlling emotion dimension adopts a method of reverse scoring.

Except for the internal consistency of arranging environment in sample 1, which is 0.63, the internal consistency coefficients of the five dimensions based two samples in this study are all greater than 0.7, ranging from 0.70 to 0.79. The Cronbach’s coefficients of the overall HMS-based two samples are 0.88 and 0.87, respectively. The ω coefficients of the dimensions of HMS ranged from 0.64 to 0.80. The ω coefficients of the HMS total scores were 0.88 and 0.87 for samples 1 and 2, respectively. Those reliability coefficients were acceptable for research purpose ( Clark and Watson, 1995 ; Peterson and Kim, 2013 ).

Williams’ creativity assessment packet

The WCAP including a total of 40 items is a revised version to measure general disposition of creativity (for example, “I like to ask some questions out of other’s expectation” or “I like to imagine something novel, even if it looks useless”) ( Williams, 1979 ; Wang and Lin, 1986 ; Liu et al., 2016 ). The WCAP uses a 3-point Likert scales, in which 1 = disagree, 2 = uncertain, and 3 = agree. The higher WCAP score, the higher is the general creativity level. All items of WCAP can be scattered into four dimensions: adventure, curiosity, imagination, and challenge ( Williams, 1979 ; Wang and Lin, 1986 ; Liu et al., 2016 ). In this study, the Cronbach’s α coefficients of adventure, curiosity, imagination, challenge, and total scale are 0.62, 0.71, 0.78, 0.64, and 0.90, respectively. The ω coefficients were in sequence 0.61, 0.70, 0.77, 0.63, and 0.90 for adventure, curiosity, imagination, challenge, and the total score of WCAP. The correlations between the four dimensions of WCAP are between 0.47 and 0.65. The patterns of reliability coefficients and correlations between dimensions are similar to those results reported by the previous studies ( Williams, 1979 ; Wang and Lin, 1986 ; Liu et al., 2016 ) which stand acceptable reliability and validity ( Clark and Watson, 1995 ; Peterson and Kim, 2013 ).

Homework indicators

Homework time.

The participants were asked to report the time spent on homework in the past week. This technique has been employed widely in many international survey programs, such as PISA from OECD (e.g., Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007 ). The items are as follows: (1) “Every day, from Monday to Friday, in last week, how many minutes you spent on homework?” The options are as follows: (A) 0–30 min; (B) 31–60 min (C) 61–90 min (D) 91–120 min; (E) 121–180 min; (F) 181 min or more. (2) “In last weekend, how many hours you spent on homework?” The options are as follows: (A) 0–1 h; (B) 1.1–3 h; (C) 3.1–5 h; (D) 5.1–7 h; (E) 7.1 h or more.

Homework completion

The homework completion is a useful indicator demonstrated in the previous studies ( Welch et al., 1986 ; Austin, 1988 ; Swank, 1999 ; Pelletier, 2005 ; Wilson, 2010 ), and had large correlation with achievement, as a meta-analytic results suggested ( Fan et al., 2017 ). In the survey of this study, the participants were also asked to estimate a percent of the completion of homework in the past week and fill in the given blank space. It includes three items which are as follows: “What is the percentage of Chinese/Maths/English homework assignment you completed in the last week?” “Please estimate and write a number from 0 to 100 in the blank space.”

Academic achievement

To record the academic achievement, an item required participants to make a choice based on their real scores of tests, not estimate their tests scores. The item is, “In the last examination, what is the rank of your score in your grade?” (A) The first 2%; (B) The first 3–13%; (C) The first 14–50%; (D) The first 51–84%; (E) The last 16%. The options here correspond to the percentage in the normal distribution, it is convenient to compute a Z -score for each student.

The method employed here is effective to retrieve participants’ test scores. First, the self-report method is more effective than other method under the condition of anonymous investigation. To our knowledge, participants do not have the will to provide their real information in the real name format. Second, this method transforms test scores from different sources into the same space of norm distribution which benefits the comparisons. Third, the validity of this method has been supported by empirical data. Using another sample ( N = 234), we got the academic achievement they reported and real test scores their teacher recorded. The correlation between ranks self-reported and the real scores from Chinese test were r = 0.81, p < 0.001; and the correlation coefficient for mathematics was also large, i.e., r = 0.79, p < 0.001.

Data collection procedure

There are three phases in data collection. The first one is the design stage. At this stage, the corresponding author of this study designed the study content, prepared the survey tools, and got the ethical approve of this project authorized from research ethic committee of school the corresponding author belongs to.

The second stage is to releasing questionnaire prepared. The questionnaire was distributed and retrieved by the head master of those classes involved. Neither the teachers nor the students knew the purpose of this research. During this stage, students can stop answering at any time, or simply withdraw from the survey. None of the teachers and students in this study received payment.

The third stage is the data entry stage. At this stage, the corresponding author of this study recruited five volunteers majored in psychology and education, and explained to them the coding rules, missing value processing methods, identification of invalid questionnaires, and illustrated how to deal with these issues. The volunteers used the same data template for data entry. The corresponding author of this study controlled the data entry quality by selective check randomly.

Data analysis strategies

R packages employed.

The “psych” package in R environment ( R Core Team, 2019 ) was employed to do descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, mean difference comparisons, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), reliability Analysis ( Revelle, 2022 ); and the “lavaan” package was used in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and measurement invariance test ( Rosseel, 2012 ); and the “semPlot” package was employed to draw the picture of CFA’s outputs ( Epskamp et al., 2022 ).

Analysis strategies of exploratory factor analysis and reliability

Sample 1 was used for item analysis, EFA, reliability analysis. In EFA, factors were extracted using maximum likelihood, and the promax method served as the rotation method. The number of factors were determined according to the combination of the results from screen plot, and the rule of Eigenvalues exceeding 1.0, and parallel analysis ( Luo et al., 2019 ).

The Cronbach’s α and MacDonald’s ω test were employed to test the reliability of the scale. The rigorous criteria that α ≥ 0.70 ( Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994 ) and ω ≥ 0.7 ( Green and Yang, 2015 ) were taken as acceptable level of the reliability of HCBS.

Analysis strategies of confirmatory factor analysis

As suggested by Hu and Bentler (1999) , two absolute goodness-of-fit indices, namely, the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) and the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR), and two relative goodness-of-fit indices, namely, comparative fit index (CFI) and Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI) were recruited as fitting indicators. The absolute goodness-of-fit indices are less than 0.08, and the relative goodness-of-fit indices greater than 0.90 are considered as a good fit. The CFA was conducted using the second sample.

Strategies for measurement invariance

Measurement invariance testing included four models, they are Configural invariance (Model 1), which is to test whether the composition of latent variables between different groups is the same; Weak invariance (Factor loading invariance, Model 2), which is to test whether the factor loading is equal among the groups; Intercept invariance (Model 3), that is, whether the intercepts of the observed variables are equal; Strict equivalent (Residual Variance invariance, Model 4), that is, to test whether the error variances between different groups are equal ( Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ).

Since the χ 2 test will be affected easily by the sample size, even small differences will result in significant differences as the sample size will increase. Therefore, this study used the changes of model fitting index CFI, RMSEA, and SRMR (ΔCFI, ΔRMSEA, and ΔSRMR) to evaluate the invariance of the measurement. When ΔCFI ≤ 0.010, ΔRMSEA ≤ 0.015, and ΔSRMR ≤ 0.030 (for metric invariance) or 0.015 (for scalar or residual invariance), the invariance model is considered acceptable ( Cheung and Rensvold, 2002 ; Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ).

Strategies of controlling common methods biases

The strategy of controlling common methods biases is mainly hided in the directions. Each part of the printed questionnaire had a sub-direction which invites participants answer the printed questions honestly. The answer formats between any two neighboring parts were different from each other which requested participants change their mind in time. For example, on some part, the answering continuum varied from “1 = totally disagreed” to “5 = total agreed,” while the answering continuum on the neighboring part is the from “5 = totally disagreed” to “1 = total agreed.” Additionally, according to the suggestion of the previous studies, the one factor CFA model and the bi-factor model can be used to detect the common methods biases (e.g., Podsakoff et al., 2012 ).

Detection of common method biases

The fitting results of the one-common-factor model using CFA technique were as follows: χ 2 = 15,073, df = 3320, p < 0.001; χ 2 / df = 4.54, CFI = 0.323, TLI = 0.306, RMSEA = 0.071, 90% CI: 0.070–0.072, and SRMR = 0.101. The results of the bi-factor model under CFA framework were presented as follows: χ 2 = 2,225.826, df = 117, p < 0.001; χ 2 / df = 19.024, CFI = 0.650, TLI = 0.543, RMSEA = 0.159, 90% CI: 0.154–0.164, and SRMR = 0.127. These poor indices of the two models suggested that the one-common-factor model failed to fit the data well and that the biases of common method be ignored ( Podsakoff et al., 2012 ).

Reliability and validity of the homework creativity behavior scale

Item analysis.

Based on the sample 1, the correlation coefficients between the items of the HCBS were between 0.34 and 0.64, p -values were below 0.01. The correlations between the items and the total score of HCBS vary from 0.54 to 0.75 ( p -values are below 0.01). On the condition of sample 2, the correlations between the items fluctuate between 0.31 and 0.58, the correlation coefficients between the items and the total score of the HCBS change from 0.63 to 0.75 ( p -values were below 0.01). All correlation coefficients between items and total score are larger than those between items and reached the criterion suggested ( Ferketich, 1991 ; see Table 2 for details).

Results of exploratory factor analysis

The EFA results (based on sample 1) showed that the KMO was 0.89, and the χ 2 of Bartlett’s test = 1,666.07, p < 0.01. The rules combining eigenvalue larger than 1 and the results of parallel analysis (see Figure 1 for details) suggested that one factor should be extracted. The eigenvalue of the factor extracted was 3.63. The average variance extracted was 0.40. This factor accounts 40% variance with factor loadings fluctuating from 0.40 to 0.76 (see Table 2 ).

Results of confirmatory factor analysis

In the CFA situation (based on sample 2) the fitting indices of the nine-item model of the HCBS are acceptable marginally, they are χ 2 = 266.141; df = 27; χ 2 / df = 9.857; CFI = 0.904; TLI = 0.872; RMSEA = 0.112; 90% CI: 0.100–0.124; SRMR = 0.053.

The modification indices of item 7 were too big (MI value = 74.339, p < 0.01), so it is necessary to consider to delete item 7. Considering its content of “I designed a neat, clean and clear homework format by myself,” item 7 is an indicator of strictness which is weakly linked with creativity. Therefore, the item 7 should be deleted.

After removing item 7, the fitting results were, χ 2 = 106.111; df = 20; χ 2 / df = 5.306; CFI = 0.957; TLI = 0.939; RMSEA = 0.078; 90% CI: 0.064–0.093; SRMR = 0.038). The changes of the fitting indices of the two nested models (eight-item vs. nine-item models) are presented as follows: Δχ 2 = 160.03, Δ df = 7, χ 2 (α = 0.01, df = 7) = 18.48, p < 0.05. After deleting item 7, both CFI and TLI indices increased to above 0.93, and RMSEAs decreased below 0.08 which suggested that the factor model on which eight items loaded fitted the data well. The average variance extracted was 0.50 which is adequate according to the criteria suggested by Fornell and Larcker (1981) . The standardized solution for the eight-item model of the HCBS was shown in Figure 2 .

Correlations between the homework creativity behavior scale and similar concepts

The results showed that the score of the HCBS was significantly correlated with the total score and four dimensions of WCAP and their correlation coefficients ranged from 0.20 to 0.29, p -values were below 0.01. Similarly, the correlations between the score of the HCBS and the scores of arranging environment, managing time, motivation management, and controlling emotion, and total score of the HMS ranged from 0.08 to 0.22, p -values were 0.01; at the meanwhile, the correlation between the score of HCBS and the distraction dimension of the HMS was r = –0.14, p -values were 0.01. The HCBS score was also significantly related to homework completion ( r = 0.18, p < 0.01), but insignificantly related to homework time (see Table 3 for details).

Correlation matrix between variables included and the corresponding descriptive statistics.

About correlation between variables, the results of sample 1 and sample 2 were presented in the lower, upper triangle, respectively.

a In analyses, grades 7, 8, 10, and 11 were valued 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively.

b TWk, the time spent on homework in the weekend; TWw, the time spent on homework from Monday to Friday; HCp, homework completion; HMSt, total score of homework management scale; AE, arrange environment; MT, manage time; MM, monitor motivation; CE, control emotion; FA, focus attention; WCAPt, WCAP total score; AD, adventure; CU, curiosity; IM, imagination; CH, challenging; HCb, homework creativity behavior; AA, academic achievement.

c Since sample 1 did not answer the WCAP, so the corresponding cells in the lower triangle are blank. *p < 0.05, two side-tailed, the same for below.

d Since there is only one item from variable 1 to 4, the α and ω coefficients cannot be computed.

Correlations between the homework creativity behavior scale and distinct concepts

The correlation analysis results demonstrated that both the correlation coefficients between the score of HCBS and the time spent on homework in week days, and time spent on in weekend days were insignificant ( r -values = 0.02, p -values were above 0.05), which indicated a non-overlap between two distinct constructs of homework creativity and time spent on homework.

Reliability analyses

The results revealed that both the Cronbach’s α coefficients of sample 1 and sample 2 were 0.86, which were greater than a 0.70 criteria the previous studies suggest ( Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994 ; Green and Yang, 2015 ).

Effect of homework creativity on academic achievement

The results (see Table 4 ) of hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that (1) gender and grade explained 0.8% variation of the score of academic achievement. This number means closing to zero because the regression equation failed to pass the significance test; (2) homework time and completion explained 5.4% variation of academic achievement; considering the β coefficients of the time spent on homework is insignificant, this contribution should be attributed to homework completion totally, and (3) the score of the HCBS explained 3.7% variation of the academic achievement independently.

Effect of homework creativity on general creativity

The results showed the following (see Table 4 for details):

(1) Gender and grade explained 1.3% variation of the total score of general creativity (i.e., the total score of WACP); homework time and completion explained 1.3% variation of the total score of general creativity disposition; and the score of the HCBS independently explained 7.0% variation of the total score of general creativity.

(2) Gender and grade explained 1.7% variation of the adventure score, and homework time and completion explained 1.6% variation of the adventure score, and the score of the HCBS independently explained 6.4% variation of the adventure score.

(3) Gender and grade explained 2.4% variation of the curiosity score, and homework time and completion explained 1.1% variation of the curiosity score, and the score of the HCBS independently explained 5.1% variation of the curiosity score.

(4) Gender and grade explained 0.3% variation of the imagination score, homework time completion explained 0.3% variation of the imagination score. The real values of the two “0.3%” are zeros because both the regression equations and coefficients failed to pass the significance tests. Then the score of the HCBS independently explained 4.4% variation of the imagination score.

(5) Gender and grade explained 0.3% variation of the score of the challenge dimension, homework time and completion explained 2.3% variation of the challenge score, and the score of the HCBS independently explained 4.9% variation of the challenge score.

Grade differences of the homework creativity behavior scale

Test of measurement invariance.

The results of measurement invariance test across four grades indicated the following:

(1) The fitting states of the four models (Configural invariance, Factor loading invariance, Intercept invariance, and Residual variance invariance) were marginally acceptable, because values of CFIs (ranged from 0.89 to 0.93), TLIs (varied from 0.91 to 0.93), RMSEAs (fluctuated from 0.084 to 0.095), and SRMRs (changed from 0.043 to 0.074) located the cutoff intervals suggested by methodologists ( Cheung and Rensvold, 2002 ; Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ; see Table 5 for fitting indices, and refer to Supplementary Table S2 for the estimation of parameters).

Fitting results of invariance tests across grades.

(2) When setting factor loadings equal across four grades (i.e., grades 7, 8, 10, and 11), the ΔCFA was –0.006, ΔRMSEA was –0.007, and ΔSRMR was 0.016 which indicated that it passed the test of factor loading invariance. After adding the limit of intercepts equal across four groups, the ΔCFA was –0.008, ΔRMSEA was –0.004, and the ΔSRMR was 0.005 which supported that it passed the test of intercept invariance. At the last step, the error variances were also added as equal, the ΔCFA was –0.027, ΔRMSEA was 0.005, and the ΔSRMR was 0.019 which failed to pass the test of residual variance invariance (see Table 5 for changes of fitting indices). Taking into these fitting indices into account, the subsequent comparisons between the means of factors can be conducted because the residuals are not part of the latent factor ( Cheung and Rensvold, 2002 ; Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ).

Grade differences in homework creativity and general creativity

The results of ANOVA showed that there were significant differences in the HCBS among the four grades [ F (3,1345) = 27.49, p < 0.001, η 2 = 0.058, see Table 6 for details]. Further post-test tests returned that the scores of middle school students were significantly higher than those of high school students (Cohen’s d values ranged from 0.46 to 0.54; the averaged Cohen’s d = 0.494), and no significant difference occurs between grades 7 and 8, or between grades 10 and 11. See Figure 3 for details.

Grade differences in HCBS.

***p < 0.001.

The mean differences of the HCBS between the groups of grades.

To address the gap in the previous research on homework creativity, this study examined the psychometric proprieties of the HCBS and its relationship with academic achievement and general creativity. The main findings were (1) Hypotheses H1a and H1b were supported that the reliability and validity of the HCBS were acceptable; (2) Hypothesis H2 was supported that the correlation between the score of the HCBS and academic achievement was significant ( r -values = 0.23–0.26 for two samples); (3) Hypothesis H3 received support that the correlation between the scores of HCBS and WCAP was significant ( r -values = 0.20–0.29 for two samples); and (4) the H4 was supported from the current data that the score of high school students’ was lower than that of the middle school students’ (Cohen’s d = 0.49).

The positive correlations among homework creativity, homework completion, and general creativity

The first key finding should be noted is that the positive correlations with between pairs of homework creativity, homework completion, and general creativity. This result is inconsistent with prediction of an argument that homework diminishes creativity ( Cooper et al., 2012 ; Zheng, 2013 ). Specifically, the correlation between homework completion and curiosity was insignificant ( r = 0.08, p > 0.05) which did not support the argument that homework hurts curiosity of creativity ( Zheng, 2013 ). The possible reason may be homework can provide opportunities to foster some components of creativity by independently finding and developing new ways of understanding what students have learned in class, as Kaiipob (1951) argued. It may be the homework creativity that served as the way to practice the components of general creativity. In fact, the content of items of the HCBS are highly related with creative thinking (refer to Table 2 for details).

Possible reasons of the grade effect of the score of the homework creativity behavior scale

The second key finding should be noted is that the score of the HCBS decreased as the level of grades increased from 7 to 11. This is consistent with the basic trend recorded in the previous meta-analyses ( Kim, 2011 ; Said-Metwaly et al., 2021 ). There are three possible explanations leading to this grade effect. The first one is the repetitive exercises in homework. As Zheng (2013) observed, to get higher scores in the highly competitive entrance examination of high school and college, those Chinese students chose to practice a lot of repetitive exercises. The results of some behavior experiments suggested that repetitive activity could reduce the diverse thinking of subjects’ (e.g., Main et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, the repetitive exercises would lead to fast habituation (can be observed by skin conductance records) which hurts the creative thinking of participants ( Martindale et al., 1996 ). The second explanation is that the stress level in Chinese high schools is higher than in middle school because of the college entrance examination. The previous studies (e.g., Beversdorf, 2018 ) indicated that the high level of stress will trigger the increase activity of the noradrenergic system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis which could debase the individual’s performance of creativity. Another likely explanation is the degree of the certainty of the college entrance examination. The level of certainty highly increases (success or failure) when time comes closer to the deadline of the entrance examination. The increase of degree of certainty will lead to the decrease of activity of the brain areas related to curiosity (e.g., Jepma et al., 2012 ).

The theoretical implications

From the theoretical perspective, there are two points deserving to be emphasized. First, the findings of this study extended the previous work ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ). This study revealed that homework creativity had two typical characteristics, including the personal meaning of students (as represented by the content of items of the HCBS) and the small size of “creativity” and limited in the scope of exercises (small correlations with general creativity). These characteristics are in line with what Mini-C described by the previous studies ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ). Second, this study deepened our understanding of the relationship between learning (homework is a part of learning) and creativity which has been discussed more than half a century. One of the main viewpoints is learning and creativity share some fundamental similarities, but no one explained what is the content of these “fundamental similarities” (e.g., Gajda et al., 2017 ). This study identified one similarity between learning and creativity in the context of homework, that is homework creativity. Homework creativity has the characteristics of homework and creativity at the same time which served as an inner factor in which homework promote creativity.

The practical implications

The findings in this study also have several potential practical implications. First, homework creativity should be a valuable goal of learning, because homework creativity may make contributions to academic achievement and general creativity simultaneously. They accounted for a total of 10.7% variance of academic achievement and general creativity which are the main goals of learning. Therefore, it is valuable to imbed homework creativity as a goal of learning, especially in the Chinese society ( Zheng, 2013 ).

Second, the items of the HCBS can be used as a vehicle to help students how to develop about homework creativity. Some studies indicated that the creative performance of students will improve just only under the simple requirement of “to be creative please” ( Niu and Sternberg, 2003 ). Similarly, some simple requirements, like “to do your homework in an innovative way,” “don’t stick to what you learned in class,” “to use a simpler method to do your homework,” “to use your imagination when you do homework,” “to design new problems on the basis what learnt,” “to find your own unique insights into your homework,” and “to find multiple solutions to the problem,” which rewritten from the items of the HCBS, can be used in the process of directing homework of students. In fact, these directions are typical behaviors of creative teaching (e.g., Soh, 2000 ); therefore, they are highly possible to be effective.

Third, the HCBS can be used to measure the degree of homework creativity in ordinary teaching or experimental situations. As demonstrated in the previous sections, the reliability and validity of the HCBS were good enough to play such a role. Based on this tool, the educators can collect the data of homework creativity, and make scientific decisions to improve the performance of people’s teaching or learning.

Strengths, limitations, and issues for further investigation

The main contribution is that this study accumulated some empirical knowledge about the relationship among homework creativity, homework completion, academic achievement, and general creativity, as well as the psychometric quality of the HCBS. However, the findings of this study should be treated with cautions because of the following limitations. First, our study did not collect the test–retest reliability of the HCBS. This makes it difficult for us to judge the HCBS’s stability over time. Second, the academic achievement data in our study were recorded by self-reported methods, and the objectivity may be more accurate. Third, the lower reliability coefficients existed in two dimensions employed, i.e., the arrange environment of the HMS (the α coefficient was 0.63), and the adventure of the WCAP (the α coefficient was 0.61). Fourth, the samples included here was not representative enough if we plan to generalize the finding to the population of middle and high school students in main land of China.

In addition to those questions listed as laminations, there are a number of issues deserve further examinations. (1) Can these findings from this study be generalized into other samples, especially into those from other cultures? For instances, can the reliability and validity of the HCBS be supported by the data from other samples? Or can the grade effect of the score of the HCBS be observed in other societies? Or can the correlation pattern among homework creativity, homework completion, and academic achievement be reproduced in other samples? (2) What is the role of homework creativity in the development of general creativity? Through longitudinal study, we can systematically observe the effect of homework creativity on individual’s general creativity, including creative skills, knowledge, and motivation. The micro-generating method ( Kupers et al., 2018 ) may be used to reveal how the homework creativity occurs in the learning process. (3) What factors affect homework creativity? Specifically, what effects do the individual factors (e.g., gender) and environmental factors (such as teaching styles of teachers) play in the development of homework creativity? (4) What training programs can be designed to improve homework creativity? What should these programs content? How about their effect on the development of homework creativity? What should the teachers do, if they want to promote creativity in their work situation? All those questions call for further explorations.

Homework is a complex thing which might have many aspects. Among them, homework creativity was the latest one being named ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). Based on the testing of its reliability and validity, this study explored the relationships between homework creativity and academic achievement and general creativity, and its variation among different grade levels. The main findings of this study were (1) the eight-item version of the HCBS has good validity and reliability which can be employed in the further studies; (2) homework creativity had positive correlations with academic achievement and general creativity; (3) compared with homework completion, homework creativity made greater contribution to general creativity, but less to academic achievement; and (4) the score of homework creativity of high school students was lower than that of middle school students. Given that this is the first investigation, to our knowledge, that has systematically tapped into homework creativity, there is a critical need to pursue this line of investigation further.

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the research ethic committee, School of Educational Science, Bohai University. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author contributions

HF designed the research, collected the data, and interpreted the results. YM and SG analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. HF, JX, and YM revised the manuscript. YC and HF prepared the HCBS. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Liwei Zhang for his supports in collecting data, and Lu Qiao, Dounan Lu, Xiao Zhang for their helps in the process of inputting data.

This work was supported by the LiaoNing Revitalization Talents Program (grant no. XLYC2007134) and the Funding for Teaching Leader of Bohai University.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.923882/full#supplementary-material

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School Life Balance , Tips for Online Students

The Pros and Cons of Homework

Updated: December 7, 2023

Published: January 23, 2020

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

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

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

2. Homework Gets Parents Involved

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

3. Homework Teaches Time Management

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

4. Homework Opens A Bridge Of Communication

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

5. Homework Allows For More Learning Time

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

6. Homework Reduces Screen Time

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

The Other Side: Why Homework Is Bad

1. homework encourages a sedentary lifestyle.

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

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

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

2. Homework Isn’t Healthy In Every Home

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

3. Homework Adds To An Already Full-Time Job

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

4. Homework Has Not Been Proven To Provide Results

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

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

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

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

5. Homework Assignments Are Overdone

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

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

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

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

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Homework: Useful Teaching Tool or Waste of Time?

• May 18, 2021

• Helpful or harmful?

How is homework helpful?

• Does homework promote learning?

Downsides of homework

• Should students have homework?
• Stress free homework tips

Homework. How can one little word cause so much trouble? Almost all schools require homework , but should they? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of homework, plus what the research says you should really be doing after school. 

As a pupil in the UK, you will without a doubt encounter homework during your school years. Some kids love it, others… not so much! Many parents struggle to make their child complete their homework and to fit it into their family’s busy schedule, and many kids and teens find homework quite boring. But let’s put our feelings about homework to the side, and focus on a more important question – is homework really necessary?

Is homework helpful or harmful?

Well, it depends. There’s loads of debate about homework and whether or not it helps you learn. Researchers have been trying to find the answer to this question since your parents were in school!

It all comes down to the purpose of the homework and the age of the student, as well as their interest in the topic at hand. 

For secondary students, homework is useful as a "short and focused intervention .” That means something like a research project that you complete at home. 💻

For primary students, homework can help reinforce skills students are learning in school. It makes sense to practice spelling words at home or working on reading skills , for example. 

How does homework promote learning?

One way homework can promote learning is by giving older students a chance to read more content than can be covered in class. For example, a Literature student might read a couple of chapters of a novel at home and then spend the class time discussing its themes with peers. This saves classroom time for the part of learning that’s done with other students.

Research shows that the best homework is closely linked to what you’re learning in the classroom. It should expand your learning and always be something you can complete independently. ✔️

It goes without saying that homework takes time. The more homework you have, the less time you can spend outside or relax. 

Homework leaves less time for creative activities that are also very important for brain growth. 🧠

Studies show very little difference in test scores between students who spend lots of time on homework and students who do less homework. For primary school students especially, not many benefits have been found. 

So, should students have homework?

In an ideal world, primary students would not have homework. And secondary students would only have short-term homework assignments with a very specific goal, like a book report or a science project. 

Since students often do have homework, it shouldn’t take much time - the benefits are the same for a few minutes and a few hours of homework!

Stress-free homework tips 

At the end of the day, there may be very little you can do right away about your homework situation. If your teacher assigns it, it must get done – but here are a few tips to make it less stressful:

• It’s a great idea for you to be independent with planning and managing your work time rather than being hounded into starting your homework by your parents. As you get older, it’s up to you to manage yourself – maybe you’d prefer to divide the work up into manageable chunks, for example tackling one subject before dinner and another one after.
• You should have a distraction-free space to work at home. Turn off the television, and keep electronics out of sight to make it easier to stay focused.
• If you’ve had a long school day, it’s a great idea to take some free time after school before starting your homework. You may need a chance to relax and regroup before jumping right into homework. 
• If you find yourself struggling with your workload, you should have a chat with your teacher or speak to your parents about it. Homework should closely follow the in-class learning and shouldn’t take more than an hour.

Homework help with GoStudent

If you’re struggling to manage your homework, a GoStudent tutor can help. Our experienced, friendly tutors have a deep understanding of the content they teach, and your tutor can give you the one-on-one support you need to get back on track and be able to finish that homework in no time! 🚀

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Does Homework Help or Hinder Learning?

• does homework help or hinder learning?

*Updated 2021

The debate on whether or not homework is beneficial is a fair deal older than one might expect. inaugurated in 1900 by a ladies’ home journal article which called homework a “ national crime ,” the nation’s favor for homework has ebbed and waned more than a century. below, we’ll look at three arguments why homework is essential component of education and three arguments students would be better off without it., homework helps.

Homework benefits teachers

The average American high-school classroom has an estimated 24 students . While teachers are trained to assess student learning on the spot, large class sizes can prevent teachers from checking each student’s progress in every session. When homework is treated as a  formative assessment , an assignment given only as a starting point from which to deliver feedback, homework provides a crucial opportunity for teachers to fill in any gaps in their in-class assessments of student performance and identify where improvement is needed.

Homework helps students gain skills outside the scope of academic learning

Beyond reinforcing lessons gleaned in the classroom, homework is often the first task that encourages young people to develop self-discipline, an indispensable skill for further learning and for life. Homework helps students learn to meet deadlines, to work independently and create their own study methods, and yes, how to approach assignments they might not be particularly interested in.

Homework boosts learning

A Duke University review of 25 years’ worth of studies on homework found a positive statistical correlation between homework and higher achievement, especially at the secondary-school level. An Oxford University study similarly demonstrated the connection between time spent on homework and results achieved. Just as one excels at an instrument or a sport through practice, so too is academic excellence achieved through practice. Veteran teachers defend homework as a vital part of skill improvement and student buy-in. Even students acknowledge the necessary role homework plays in their education, and many students report feeling more engaged in class after completing homework assignments.

Homework hinders

Learning can be accomplished without homework

Finland routinely ranks at the top of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment, yet Finland’s students do the least  homework of all OECD countries. Finland’s system encourages students to play as much as they work; they are not subject to rankings, grades, or standardized tests as is common practice in other countries. With its  holistic  approach to learning, Finland proves that insisting students focus solely on academics during school and after is not necessarily a recipe for academic success.

Homework does not benefit all students equally

Not all home environments are conducive to at-home learning. Level of education, time, and energy vary among parents, and parents at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum tend to have the least amount of each resource. Wealthier kids are more likely to benefit from homework simply because they have the necessary resources to complete it: adult assistance, home computers and internet access. However, students whose home situations may preclude them from completing homework (for example, older siblings who care for younger siblings or children who need to hold an after-school job) inevitably fall further behind . As such, homework can exacerbate achievement gaps between rich and poor students, rendering homework not only counterproductive, but a barrier to equality.

Homework is an unfair burden to parents

A Brown University study supported what most parents have probably already observed in their homes – that homework is a flashpoint for family  stress , affecting children and parents equally. Parents have a number of valid reasons to dread homework as much as their kids do – it forces their children to keep sitting after a long, mostly sedentary school-day; it cuts into family bonding time and diminishes opportunities for kids to take on other household duties. This is to say nothing of the pressure of guiding a child on homework that a parent may or may not understand. If homework is not welcome  by parents or students, it can potentially damage the overall academic experience as well as a student’s  home life  as well.

The Bottom Line:  With  teacher-led  zero-homework movements making their way across America, it’s clear that the homework versus no-homework pendulum is in full swing. What’s your stance? Is homework necessary for reinforcing and building academic skills, or does it put needless strain on parents and students alike?

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