Homework: A Cross-Sectional Study

However several critics claim that homework has some negative effects attributed to it that contradict the suggested positive effects. For instance, in 1989 Chen and Stevenson (opponents of homework) have argued in their article, Homework: A Cross-Cultural Examination “that it can have a negative influence on attitudes toward school by satiating students with academic pursuits” (). They claim any activity can remain rewarding for only so long, and children may become overexposed to academic tasks. However, these groups of critics failed to realize that during the time their article was written, the Cold War was at its very peak. Therefore, the cross-sectional study results were affected by an outlier, which could have contributed to the negative attitudes found during the psychological research. According to the documents written by the Milwaukee schools, “children saw signs marking the evacuation route from the city, heard tests of the emergency broadcast and siren systems, and practiced duck and cover drills in schools. School administrators held lengthy discussions about the quality of education

that children received in Milwaukee schools as the United States fought to stay ahead of the Russians” (1).
Also, educators against homework claim that homework leads to general physical and emotional fatigue and can also deny children access to leisure time and community activities. They conveniently ignore that fact that homework has never deprived children of outdoor activities. Lincoln R. Larson, Gary T. Green, and H. K. Cordell published an article Children's Time Outdoors: Results and Implications of the National Kids Survey, which took accurate statistics of the amount of time children took spent outdoors after school. Teens between ages sixteen and nineteen were interviewed directly. The participants were asked about a variety of topics including time spent outdoors, common outdoor activities, and reasons for not spending time outdoors.
Data showed that, in general, most children (> 62.5%) spent at least two hours outdoors daily. Results also indicated that children spent either more time (39.5%) or about the same amount of time (44.8%) outdoors this year as they did last year. Males, younger children, and Hispanics spent more time outside than other demographic groups. Playing or simply hanging out was the most common outdoor activity (84.0% of respondents). Other common activities included biking, jogging, or running (79.9%) and using electronic media outdoors (65.3%), of all which are emotionally and physically draining. Children participated in outdoor nature-based activities less frequently than many alternatives. Interest in other activities such as listening to music, art, or reading (57.0%), watching television, DVDs, or playing video games (48.1%), and using electronic media including Internet and texting (47.8%) were the most common reasons for not spending time outside (1).
In conclusion, experimental research was carried out by Foyle to test the validity of homework.

Four fifth-grade classrooms (not individual students) were exposed to conditions at random, one to a practice homework condition, one to a preparation homework condition, and two to a no-homework control condition. Clearly, assigning only one classroom to each condition, even when done at random, cannot remove confounded classroom differences from the effect of homework. For example, all four classrooms used a cooperative learning approach to teaching social studies, but one classroom (assigned to the practice homework condition) used a different cooperative learning approach from the other three classes. Also, the student, rather than the classroom, was used as the unit for statistical analysis, creating the concern that within-class dependencies among students were

ignored.
Analysis revealed that students differed significantly on a social studies pretest and on a standard measure of intelligence. Students doing homework outperformed no-homework students on unadjusted posttest scores, d = .90, and on posttest scores adjusted for pretest and intelligence differences, d = .99.support the hypothesis that homework helps academic performance” (5). Finally, Townsend (1995) observed and examined the effects and consequences of homework on the acquisition and assimilation of vocabulary knowledge among forty third-grade students in two classes, both taught by the experimenter. “Treatment was given to classes as a whole. The student was used as the unit of analysis. A teacher-prepared posttest measure of vocabulary knowledge suggested that the homework group performed better, d = .71 (6).
In sum, the studies that employed exogenous manipulations all revealed a positive effect of homework on unit tests and academic performance. Given the present declining state of the United States, since homework has been a tested variable that guarantees beneficial results, the debate about homework being helpful should be put to a stop, while students, teachers, and parents take more pride in completing the assignments given to be, as it is of their own benefit.