How To Do Kids Have Too Much Homework
3:20 PM
Muhammad Yusuf
, Posted in
In the late 90s,
feature stories began appearing in the national media about children and
parents who were so overwhelmed by the amount of homework that it was
destroying their family life and causing psychological damage. The evidence
presented in these stories was often anecdotal, profiling just one or two
families. However, the articles were published in enough respected publications
that they sparked a national debate on whether children have too much homework.
Schools scrambled to create homework policies, parents held protests, and
children began to receive sharply mixed messages on the value of homework.
In all the fuss,
people never realized that the information contained the articles simply wasn't
true. In 2003, the Brown Center on Educational Policy at the prestigious
Brookings Institution released a report that shattered the perception that
American students are staggering under an unreasonable load of homework. In
fact, they found just the opposite: American students probably don't spend
enough time on homework. Gathering data from a number of studies that had been
performed in the late 90s, the Brown Center drew four startling conclusions.
Typical students, from
kindergarten to high school, don't spend more than an hour a day doing
homework. In fact, pointing to a study done by the Higher Education Research
Institute at UCLA, the Brown report found that more than two-thirds of college
freshmen did five hours or less of homework during their final year of high
school.
The report also
analyzed studies and concluded that the homework load for the average student
has not increased appreciably since the 1980s. This is in direct opposition to
the anecdotal evidence cited in the article of homework increasing to as much
as three hours per night.
However, a study
performed in 1997 by Michigan State University showed that children at that
time were spending just over two hours per week on study, which could include
activities other than homework. Interestingly, this study is often used to
prove that students have too much homework, since the weekly hours spent on
study increased over the life of the study by 23 minutes. The Brown Center
postulates that this statistical increase was actually caused by children who
previously had no homework at all and because they had advanced in grade, now
had homework.
Finally, the Brown
report found that, contrary to the articles' portrayal of militant parents
protesting homework, most parents are satisfied with the amount of homework
their children receive. In fact, if parents were dissatisfied with the amount
of homework their children had, it was because they felt it wasn't enough.
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