Limiting Homework

801 Words2 Pages

Homework has been considered a learning aid for years. If students learn in the classroom then taking home the assignments will help even more. Unfortunately studies are showing that homework has little to no benefit. It causes stress, loss of family time, less time for extracurricular activities, and both physical and mental negative side effects. Teachers are also not sticking to the 10 minute rule and giving too much. Homework is not helping to compete with other countries. Grade level is affecting how much the homework helps. The quality has decreased and the quantity has increased. With so many negative side effects homework should be reduced or banned. With so much homework students are finding they are losing sleep, family time, …show more content…

First graders should have as much as 10 minutes of homework and seniors should have two hours of homework a night. Both the National Education Association and National Parent Teacher Association support that limit(Weir). Two hours seems like a lot of homework but in recent studies done students are averaging three to four hours of homework a night. With two hours a night students are averaging 10 hours a week, three hours students are averaging 15 hours a week and students with four hours of homework a night have 20 hours of homework a week. Robert Pressman, PhD, and colleagues recently investigated the 10-minute rule among more than 1,100 students, and found that elementary-school kids were receiving up to three times as much homework as recommended(Weir).That is a lot of work and not all of it benefits students. It could be argued that homework helps develop time management and self discipline but the negatives outweigh the benefits. There is no solid evidence that homework actually helps develops time management and self …show more content…

Sadly the opposite is true about homework students are assigned lesser quality homework. In Pope and Galloway's research, only 20 percent to 30 percent of students said they felt their homework was useful or meaningful (Weir). It is completely useless to assign 20 questions when 5 is just or more effective. Some things do need practice to learn like vocabulary or spelling but five minutes of that a night can help a lot more or the same amount as 30 minutes. It is arguable that the more practice the better but in reality quality always wins. To compete with other countries homework needs to be assigned but surprisingly the students in other countries are assigned less homework and get better grades. Students who have more homework have shown to have lower test scores. This is because overworking can cause learning burnout. Learning burnout is overworking and becoming uninterested in a subject or in school all together. It is argued that homework can make students smarter to compete with the students from other countries but that is simply not

More about Limiting Homework

Open Document