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Health Hazards of Homework
March 18, 2014 | Julie Greicius Pediatrics .
A new study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education and colleagues found that students in high-performing schools who did excessive hours of homework “experienced greater behavioral engagement in school but also more academic stress, physical health problems, and lack of balance in their lives.”
Those health problems ranged from stress, headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems, to psycho-social effects like dropping activities, not seeing friends or family, and not pursuing hobbies they enjoy.
In the Stanford Report story about the research, Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of the study published in the Journal of Experimental Education , says, “Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good.”
The study was based on survey data from a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in California communities in which median household income exceeded $90,000. Of the students surveyed, homework volume averaged about 3.1 hours each night.
“It is time to re-evaluate how the school environment is preparing our high school student for today’s workplace,” says Neville Golden, MD , chief of adolescent medicine at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health and a professor at the School of Medicine. “This landmark study shows that excessive homework is counterproductive, leading to sleep deprivation, school stress and other health problems. Parents can best support their children in these demanding academic environments by advocating for them through direct communication with teachers and school administrators about homework load.”
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This past spring, Stanford University computer scientists unveiled their pandemic brainchild, Code In Place , a project where 1,000 volunteer teachers taught 10,000 students across the globe the content of an introductory Stanford computer science course.
Students in Code In Place evaluated the feedback they received using this carefully designed user interface. (Image credit: Code In Place 2021)
While the instructors could share their knowledge with hundreds, even thousands, of students at a time during lectures, when it came to homework, large-scale and high-quality feedback on student assignments seemed like an insurmountable task.
“It was a free class anyone in the world could take, and we got a whole bunch of humans to help us teach it,” said Chris Piech , assistant professor of computer science and co-creator of Code In Place. “But the one thing we couldn’t really do is scale the feedback. We can scale instruction. We can scale content. But we couldn’t really scale feedback.”
To solve this problem, Piech worked with Chelsea Finn , assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, and PhD students Mike Wu and Alan Cheng to develop and test a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence teaching tool capable of assisting educators in grading and providing meaningful, constructive feedback for a high volume of student assignments.
Their innovative tool, which is detailed in a Stanford AI Lab blogpost , exceeded their expectations.
Teaching the AI tool
In education, it can be difficult to get lots of data for a single problem, like hundreds of instructor comments on one homework question. Companies that market online coding courses are often similarly limited, and therefore rely on multiple-choice questions or generic error messages when reviewing students’ work.
“This task is really hard for machine learning because you don’t have a ton of data. Assignments are changing all the time, and they’re open-ended, so we can’t just apply standard machine learning techniques,” said Finn.
The answer to scaling up feedback was a unique method called meta-learning, by which a machine learning system can learn about many different problems with relatively small amounts of data.
“With a traditional machine learning tool for feedback, if an exam changed, you’d have to retrain it, but for meta-learning, the goal is to be able to do it for unseen problems, so you can generalize it to new exams and assignments as well,” said Wu, who has studied computer science education for over three years.
The group found it much easier to get a little bit of data, like 20 pieces of feedback, on a large variety of problems. Using data from previous iterations of Stanford computer science courses, they were able to achieve accuracy at or above human level on 15,000 student submissions; a task not possible just one year earlier, the researchers remarked.
Real-world testing
The language used by the tool was very carefully crafted by the researchers. They wanted to focus on helping students grow, rather than just grading their work as right or wrong. The group credited “the human in the loop” and their focus on human involvement during development as essential to the positive reception to the AI tool.
Students in Code In Place were able to rate their satisfaction with the feedback they received, but without knowing whether the AI or their instructor had provided it. The AI tool learned from human feedback on just 10% of the total assignments and reviewed the remaining ones with 98% student satisfaction.
“The students rated the AI feedback a little bit more positively than human feedback, despite the fact that they’re both as constructive and that they’re both identifying the same number of errors. It’s just when the AI gave constructive feedback, it tended to be more accurate,” noted Piech.
Thinking of the future of online education and machine learning for education, the researchers are excited about the possibilities of their work.
“This is bigger than just this one online course and introductory computer science courses,” said Finn. “I think that the impact here lies substantially in making this sort of education more scalable and more accessible as a whole.”
Mike Wu is advised by Noah Goodman , associate professor of psychology and of computer science, who was also a member of this research team. Finn, Goodman and Piech are affiliates of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) . Goodman is also a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute .
This project was funded by the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Hoffman Yee Grant .
To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly Stanford Science Digest .
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Taylor Kubota, Stanford News Service: (650) 724-7707; [email protected]
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Stanford University issued the following news release:
A Stanford researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.
"Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope (https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/dpope), a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220973.2012.745469)published in the Journal of Experimental Education.
The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.
Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.
Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.
"The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning,...
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Excessive homework is counterproductive, study finds
"young people are spending more time alone," the study's authors wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities.".
Kids everywhere rejoice! A researcher at Stanford University has determined homework to be counterproductive and unhealthy -- too much of it, anyway.
In a study led by Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, researchers found that excessive homework proved detrimental to student well-being and engagement. The study cited previous research suggesting that after two hours, the benefits of homework diminish. Advertisement
In surveying students' perceptions about homework, researchers found that too much of it was associated with greater stress, reductions in health (increase in headaches, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems), as well as less time for important social interactions and extracurricular activities.
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"Young people are spending more time alone," the study's authors wrote , "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."
Many students, the study said, reported having to choose between doing homework and developing other skills.
The study focused on high-performing schools in well-to-do communities -- places where average household incomes are north of $90,000 annually, and where the vast majority of students go on to college. Students at these hyper-competitive high schools did an average of 3.1 hours of homework per night. Advertisement
"The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.
Pope was helped by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University in compiling the research paper. It was published this week in the Journal of Experimental Education .
[Stanford University]
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March 11, 2014
Study suggests more than two hours of homework a night may be counterproductive
by Clifton B. Parker, Stanford University
Education scholar Denise Pope has found that too much homework has negative effects on student well-being and behavioral engagement.
A Stanford researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.
"Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .
The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.
Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.
Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.
"The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.
Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.
Their study found that too much homework is associated with:
- Greater stress: 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.
- Reductions in health: In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.
- Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits: Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.
A balancing act
The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.
Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.
"This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," Pope said.
She said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.
"Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.
High-performing paradox
In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."
Student perspectives
The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.
Journal information: Journal of Experimental Education
Provided by Stanford University
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Why (Most) Homework Should Be Banned
The 30-minute rule is there to justify giving a lot of homework
Anthony Malcolm ‘23 , Staff Writer December 8, 2022
There are plenty of reasons why (most) homework should be banned. I’ll start out with some general facts and look at homework in general, then go into some detail about our school.
Stanford conducted a study surveying over 4,300 students in 10 high performing high schools in California. More than 70% of the students said they were “often or always stressed over schoolwork,” with 56% claiming that homework was the main stressor. But here’s the kicker: Less than 1% said homework was not a stressor.
The researchers then asked the students if they had exhibited symptoms of stress like headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems. More than 80% of the students reported at least one stress related symptom recently and 44% claimed they experienced 3 or more symptoms. The study also found that students who spend a lot of time working on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, and a lack of balance in their lives. The study claimed that any more than 2 hours of homework per night was counterproductive, and that the students who spent too much time on homework were more likely to not participate in activities and hobbies, and stop seeing friends and family.
A smaller NYU study claimed that students at elite high schools are susceptible to chronic stress, emotional exhaustion, and alcohol and drug abuse. About half of the students said they received at least 3 hours of homework a night on top of being pressured to take college level classes and participate in extracurricular activities (sound familiar?). The study claims that many of the students felt they were being worked as hard as adults, and they said that their workload seemed inappropriate for their development level. The study reported that the students felt that they had little time for relaxing and hobbies. More than two thirds of students said they used alcohol or drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with the stress.
Back to the Stanford study for a second; many of the students claimed that the homework was “pointless” or “mindless.” The study argues that homework should have a purpose and benefit, which should be to cultivate learning. One of the main reasons is that school feels like a full-time job at this point. We, as in BC High students, are in school from 8:25 till 2:40; most of us have some sort of extracurricular activity on top of that, and most of us have significant commutes, which means we are getting home much later. On top of a rigorous day at school, an afterschool activity, and a commute, we have to deal with a varying amount of homework every night. Sometimes it is 2 hours, sometimes 3, sometimes even 4. I will give you an example of a day in my life last year to provide a specific example, because we are not a one size fits all community.
I live in Middleboro and Bridgewater, so I ride the train to school which takes 50 minutes to an hour. A spring day last year would start by waking up at 5:30 and then leaving my house to get to the train at 6:30-6:35, getting on the train at 6:50, getting off the train at 7:50, and arriving at the school before classes started at 8:20. I would go through the school day and stay after for track practice. After track, I would most likely get on the train at 5:00 and get home at 6:15. I would eat dinner, shower, and then start my homework around 7:30-8, and usually I would finish somewhere between 10:30ish to 11:30ish. Can you see how that can be misconstrued as a full-time job?
Some of you might be thinking (especially any teacher reading this), why didn’t you use the 30-minute rule? Well, because most (and I mean MOST) of the time the 30-minute rule is an ineffective rule that justifies giving students a lot of homework. If you use the 30-minute rule and don’t finish a homework assignment, it still has to be completed sometime, and you’ll be behind in class. It is only effective when a teacher plans for the 30-minute rule and tells you to stop at 30 minutes to get an idea of how long an assignment takes their students. The 30-minute rule is there to justify giving a lot of homework because if you say in class that the homework took a long time, you will probably be told about the 30-minute rule. But if you used the 30-minute rule, you would have an unfinished homework assignment which means, depending on the class, you would be lost and behind, and you would still have to do it at some point. If you should have to justify giving a lot of homework, then it is probably too much.
Parker, Clifton B. “Stanford Research Shows Pitfalls of Homework.” Stanford University , 10 Mar. 2014, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/march/too-much-homework-031014.html .
Communications, NYU Web. NYU Study Examines Top High School Students’ Stress and Coping Mechanisms . http://www.nyu.edu/content/nyu/en/about/news-publications/news/2015/august/nyu
-study-examines-top-high-school-students-stress-and-coping-mechanisms .
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Watch CBS News
Study: Too Much Homework Can Make Your Child Sick
March 22, 2014 / 6:05 PM PDT / CBS San Francisco
STANFORD (CBS SACRAMENTO) – A new study found that too much homework is bad for children's health. Researchers at Stanford say hitting the books for three or more hours a night won't necessarily make a child perform better in school, but it can make them sick.
"The three hours of homework a night was an average, by the way," Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-author of the study, told CNN. "We have kids in the study who were doing way more."
Researchers analyzed data from over 4,300 students from 10 high-performing public and private high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. The researchers set out to determine the relationship between the amount of homework and the well-being of students. They also wanted to understand how homework can stress out a student.
They were able to determine that excessive homework is associated with high stress levels, physical health problems, and lack of balance in children's lives.
"We found a clear connection between the students' stress and physical impacts – migraines, ulcers and other stomach problems, sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and weight loss," Pope said.
According to the Brookings Institute's 2014 Brown Center Report on American Education, homework hasn't changed much since 1984.
Pope found that in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, homework kept coming up as a tension point. Some parents wanted less but some parents wanted more.
"We realized that we need intervention around homework," Pope said.
The researchers used students' self-reporting on homework because they felt it was important to explore the students firsthand experiences with homework.
The most important factor in childhood stress is family support.
"Parents' first responsibility is to the health of their child," Pope said. "Parents need to be advocates and cheerleaders, not graders and correctors. And you certainly don't want to say to your kid, 'Give me half of the homework!'"
Pope feels that high school students should not have more than 90 minutes of homework a night. She also said there is not a correlation between homework and academic achievement in elementary school.
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Community • Thrive on Campus
How Homework Can Add to Your Child’s Daily Stressors
Jessica Hicks
Welcome to our special section, Thrive on Campus , devoted to covering the urgent issue of mental health among college and university students from all angles. If you are a college student, we invite you to apply to be an Editor-at-Large , or to simply contribute (please tag your pieces ThriveOnCampus). We welcome faculty, clinicians, and graduates to contribute as well. Read more here .
We talk a lot about work-life integration as employees, but looking back, I realize my journey with work-life integration actually started before I had any professional experience — it began in high school when countless hours of homework and extracurricular activities frequently led to sleepless nights.
For some students, homework is a necessary task to get done in the evenings. For others, it can become all-consuming, stretching into the early hours of the morning and leading to sleep deprivation , greater stress, and less time to dedicate to family, friends, and other activities. Research by Stanford University researchers also found that students who struggled to balance their homework with extracurricular activities and social time experienced health reductions such as headaches, exhaustion, weight loss, and stomach problems.
Debates surrounding homework and its intended purposes and real-life outcomes have circulated academia, school hallways, and dinner tables for quite some time. A team of Duke University researchers analyzed homework studies from 1987-2003 and found that manipulated homework study designs “revealed a positive relationship between homework and achievement” and “[w]ith only rare exceptions, the relationship between the amount of homework students do and their achievement outcomes was found to be positive and statistically significant. Therefore, [we think] it would not be imprudent, based on the evidence in hand, to conclude that doing homework causes improved academic achievement.” On the other hand, research syntheses cast doubt that homework is an effective instructional tool and instead argue that it “contributes to a corporate-style, competitive U.S. culture that overvalues work to the detriment of personal and familial well-being.”
This discussion recently resurfaced in a Washington Post opinion piece questioning if parents should be able to excuse their young children from homework assignments. Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews argues that elementary school homework should be limited to free reading time — based on research that shows homework’s impact on elementary schoolers’ academic achievement is trivial.
Homework is still often regarded as a rite of passage. You’d be hard pressed to identify a teacher that doesn’t assign homework, largely because it can be beneficial if it is given in the right amount and has a particular purpose. Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-leader of the Stanford homework study, says homework that qualifies as busy work — an assignment given merely as routine practice or policy — discourages learning and can cause students to feel as though their efforts are pointless. “Any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development,” Pope told Stanford News .
Furthermore, Kirsten Weir of The American Psychological Association says homework can produce academic benefits, such as increased understanding and retention of materials, as well as nonacademic advantages including the development of personal responsibility, good study habits, and time-management skills — if the time it takes to complete homework assignments isn’t terribly overwhelming. Harris Cooper, Ph.D., a social psychologist and leading homework researcher, also notes that there is a limit to how much benefit students can reap from take-home assignments. Cooper recommends the 10-minute rule, in which students should complete 10 minutes of homework per night for each grade level, beginning in the first grade. So, first graders should have roughly 10 minutes of homework each night, sixth graders should have an hour, and high school seniors should have about two hours.
Such a rule might seem unrealistic for older students who are enrolled in particularly competitive schools or AP or honors-level classes, or even college courses. Some students also struggle with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders, which can make homework completion more challenging . If you feel as though the amount of homework your child receives is not appropriate for his or her age, grade level, or learning style, speak to your child’s teacher or academic adviser. The U.S. Department of Education recommends approaching teachers with a cooperative spirit, and working together to strategize a plan to lessen the problem at hand, whether it be working out a tailored schedule for your child or securing extra help from the teacher or an after school program. If you are in college yourself, and still struggling with this problem, talk to professors on your own, and often they can help you find a tutor.
It’s important for both parents and students to recognize that stressful challenges with homework are not unusual and are fixable. Though finding a balance between school work, extracurriculars, and a social life can be difficult, it can also help later on in life by enforcing a familiarity and fluency with work-life integration.
Subscribe here for all the latest news on how you can keep Thriving.
More on Mental Health on Campus:
What Campus Mental Health Centers Are Doing to Keep Up With Student Need
If You’re a Student Who’s Struggling With Mental Health, These 7 Tips Will Help
The Hidden Stress of RAs in the Student Mental Health Crisis
What’s the optimum amount of homework to set a teenager?
Director of the Centre for Professional Education, University of Warwick
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Adam Boddison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Coaxing teenagers to sit down and do their homework is never an easy task. But is it actually worth their while to slave away for hours on end every evening? Not according to a new study of Spanish secondary school students which has concluded that the optimum amount of homework for children is around one hour a day.
Researchers at the University of Oviedo studied the maths and science homework and test results of 7,451 adolescents with an average age of around 13. They found a relationship between the amount of homework completed and children’s attainment. But the authors acknowledge they can’t say definitively that one hour of homework a night in total actually causes better test results.
Previous research in this area is both inconsistent and inconclusive. Some has shown the positive effects of homework and some its negative effects. In 2012, The Guardian reported on Department of Education research showing that two to three hours per day produced greater effects on achieving the highest results. In 2014, research at Stanford University found that too much homework can have a negative impact on children.
Homework can help to establish a routine and to develop independent learning skills that will be useful for professional life. Conversely, it could be argued that working at home in the evenings is the beginning of an unhealthy work-life balance and that there are academic drawbacks in studying instead of sleeping.
Not all children need to study the same
It’s unclear whether the children in the Spanish study achieve more as a result of doing the “optimum” amount of homework. Children of different abilities may take different amounts of time to complete their homework. If we subscribe to the idea that there is an “optimum” time, then we are effectively saying that children who work more quickly should complete more homework than children who work more slowly, which is arguably a disincentive for the fastest – and probably the most able – children.
The study also acknowledges that the nature of the homework has more influence over the outcomes than the time taken to complete it. This is an important point and is underpinned by a common sense view that an hour of inappropriate homework will be less effective than 45 minutes of appropriate homework.
It is only through understanding what the goals of homework are that we can properly consider how much should be set. There has been much disagreement about this among researchers: some argue that homework is about consolidating new knowledge and improving test scores, while others argue that homework is about developing skills .
The reality is that teachers set homework with different purposes, so any optimal amount of homework is unlikely to apply to all situations. In the context of mathematics, homework is often about practising a particular process – such as solving equations – whereas in other subject areas there may be a more conceptual focus, such as research into a particular aspect of history.
Giving some an advantage
Even if we accept that there is an optimum amount of homework, there are numerous other factors that need to be considered, including the subject area, the length of the school day, the socio-economic background of the student and the age, gender and culture of the student. With so many factors to consider, it is challenging to ensure both equity and excellence – and it is most likely impossible to generalise about an optimum amount of homework.
For example, parents from middle-class families are more likely to be able to support their children with homework or to hire a tutor. This means those children from disadvantaged backgrounds become further disadvantaged as they are likely to have less academic support at home.
The cultural variations between children are also significant, not only from the family perspective, but from the expectations of society. For example, children in China and the UK have very different expectations and experiences in terms of the volume of homework set. It has also long been argued that girls outperform boys in coursework , which is not dissimilar to homework.
So it is difficult to generalise that all 13-year-olds should be set no more than one hour of homework a day. Every child has a unique set of individual needs that may vary over time. There has been much discussion in recent years about personalised learning in the classroom, but less so about the benefits of personalised learning through homework. One hour a day may well be the optimum amount of homework for some children in some circumstances, but let us not forget that every child has different needs.
- Education equity
- Education attainment
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Stanford study finds homework counterproductive, ineffective.
Conducted by Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education and a published author in the “Journal of Experimental Education”, research has found students experience more stress, more physical health problems, a lack of balance and even social isolation when assigned too much homework.
The research used a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle class California communities where the median household income exceeded $90,000. 93 percent of the students at these high schools went on to either two- or four-year colleges and had an average of 3.1 hours of homework per night.
Using a survey with open-ended response questions, the research examined students’ perceptions about homework, students’ well-being and their behavioral engagement.
“Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good,” Denise Pope said, according to Stanford Daily. “The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students’ advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being.”
Pope’s findings question the value of homework, and Pope argues that homework should not be assigned in large amounts or as a simple routine practice. This directly conflicts with many of the homework policies held by many of the higher-level classes, especially honors and Advanced Placement (AP) courses, where homework is given both regularly and in rigorous amounts.
Pope and researchers found that many students felt their homework was “pointless” or “mindless”, and there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much they liked it. Many said they only did their homework in order to keep their grades up.
“This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points,” Pope said. “Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development.”
Along with that, Pope and researchers have found that too much homework can be ineffective and even counterproductive. They cite prior research that shows that homework’s benefit plateaus at about two hours per night. The researchers believe that 90 minutes to two and a half hours a night is how much homework a high school student should have, but for many students at Paly, especially those in higher-level classes, this is considered an easy homework load.
Their study finds that too much homework is associated with greater stress, health issues and overall less time for extracurricular pursuits. In the survey data, 56 percent of students considered homework their primary source of stress, while 43 percent attributed this to tests and 33 percent to the pressure to get good grades. Less than one percent said homework was not a factor in their stress.
In the open-ended response questions, many students said homework led to a loss of sleep and other health-related issues including headaches and exhaustion.
Homework was also proven to detract time from friends and family, from extracurricular activities and from the development of “critical life skills.” In both the survey and the open-ended responses, students indicated that they were more likely to drop classes, not see friends or family and not pursue hobbies because of too much time spent on homework.
Researchers also concluded that too much homework was associated with less time to foster personal responsibility skills. Many students felt forced to choose homework over their extracurricular activities and social time.
“Young people are spending more time alone, which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities,” researchers said.
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Denise Pope, Stanford Graduate School of Education: (650) 725-7412, [email protected] Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, [email protected] Subscribe to Stanford Report
Stanford educator Denise Pope finds that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to evaluating homework assignments for K-12 students. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero) The quality of a ...
In 2013, research conducted at Stanford University found that students in high-achieving communities who spend too much time on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, a lack of ...
This study used survey data to examine relations among homework, student well-being, and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper middle class communities. Results indicated that students in these schools average more than 3 hr of homework per night.
In the Stanford Report story about the research, Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of the study published in the Journal of Experimental Education, says, "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good." The study was ...
For students at competitive high schools in upper middle-class areas, homework may be a double-edged sword. The authors of a study published in the peer-refereed Journal of Experimental Education concluded that, on the one hand, heavy homework loads and associated pressure to achieve in these schools are providing the students with "the skills required to get ahead in a competitive ...
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In a study led by Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, researchers found that excessive homework proved detrimental to student well-being and engagement. The ...
students get older, homework shows an increasing trend in how much it affects the student's learning. One important study revealed that "the average high school student in a class doing homework would outperform 75% of the students in a no-homework class. In junior high school, the average homework effect was half this magnitude.
A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter. "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a
A Stanford researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter. ... Their study found that too ...
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The quality of a homework assignment is important to student achievement, says Stanford Graduate School of Education senior lecturer Denise Pope. But the devil is in the details, according to Pope, who recently published a book that included research on the subject. "The quality of the homework assignment and whether or not students find it meaningful can have a significant
Homework can affect both students' physical and mental health. According to a study by Stanford University, 56 per cent of students considered homework a primary source of stress. Too much homework can result in lack of sleep, headaches, exhaustion and weight loss. Excessive homework can also result in poor eating habits, with families ...
A new study found that too much homework is bad for children's health. Researchers at Stanford say hitting the books for three or more hours a night won't necessarily make a child perform ...
Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-leader of the Stanford homework study, says homework that qualifies as busy work — an assignment given merely as routine practice or policy — discourages learning and can cause students to feel as though their efforts are pointless.
In 2014, research at Stanford University found that too much homework can have a negative impact on children. Homework can help to establish a routine and to develop independent learning skills ...
Conducted by Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education and a published author in the "Journal of Experimental Education", research has found students experience more stress, more physical health problems, a lack of balance and even social isolation when assigned too much homework. The research used a sample of 4,317 students...
Students often fail to see the point of their homework assignments—and that's a problem, says Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education. "A lot of them think it's busy work or meaningless. If you have a lot and don't see the purpose of it, you're not going to do it well.". In this episode of School's ...
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