Friday Interview: How Much Homework?

The John Locke Foundation’s Mitch Kokai recently spoke with Duke University professor Harris Cooper, a national expert on homework. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio. (Go to http://carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Kokai: Studies show homework levels have remained fairly constant in recent years, except for an increase in out-of-class work in the earliest grades. Shouldn’t we be concerned about that?

Cooper: I would rather use the term vigilance than concern because, obviously, in most instances we are not talking about a large amount of homework. So, it only takes an increase from 20 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day for a 50 percent increase to have occurred. And it’s also going to be the case that children will vary in how well they can accept the notion of sitting at home for 20 or 30 minutes. So, if a parent’s child is showing signs of frustration and fatigue and stress, it certainly should be a cause for concern, especially in those early grades. But vigilance is the first thing. And if, in fact, the child is accepting it and doing it and finding it interesting, then it’s really not a — ought not be — a concern at those earliest grade levels. Another thing that is motivating this increase, I think, is a growing recognition about the importance of reading in the earliest grades. And a lot of early elementary school teachers, who are setting the foundation for our children’s reading skills, have recognized that practice is very important and practicing in different environments is important and also getting parents involved, if only to express the importance of reading and how important they feel school is as laying a good foundation in those earliest grades.

Kokai: Has your research suggested that there is a standard or rule of thumb for appropriate levels of homework?

Cooper: We can come up with some crude rules about what is the right amount of homework, and there is going to be a great deal of variation around that — based upon community standards and concerns about levels of achievement across entire schools and communities. And then also, differences in temperaments from children because, even at the earliest grades, some kids are better at sitting and studying than are others. But within the recognition of that variation, it’s also clearly the case that young children can’t benefit from self-study as much as older children can. And we can talk about what the reasons for that might be. So, that as kids get older, there ought to be an expectation that more homework will help them greater in their school studies. A rule of thumb that educators use that is — and I have to say this carefully — not inconsistent with the research is what is called the ten-minute rule. And what it suggests is that as a rough guide, ten minutes of homework per night, added per grade, will be a good place for educators to start thinking about how much homework kids should do. So, ten minutes for first graders, 20 minutes for second graders and so on.
The research that I have seen — and it’s correlational research — does suggest that, in fact, middle schoolers who report doing about 60 to 90 minutes of homework a night do just as well as middle schoolers who report doing more than that. So, they reach asymptote — as statisticians would suggest — or a law of diminishing returns at that level. And there has been a recent study with high school students, which shows that high school students doing two hours a night, which is 120 minutes — which is almost the ten minute rule — do as well, if not slightly better, than students who report doing more. Now, that’s correlational research, so we can’t say whether or not the students who are doing more than two hours are doing more than two hours because they are struggling. So, their achievement level is causing the amount of time they are spending at homework. But still, with those rough guidelines, we can say that the research is not inconsistent with that.

Kokai: In national media reports, you’ve been quoted discussing problems linked to homework for the youngest elementary aged students.

Cooper: Well, young children have a couple of things about them that suggest that they will only be able to benefit from very limited amounts of homework. The first deals with attention span. Young kids have a lot of trouble tuning out distractions, more so than older kids do. And obviously, in the home environment, there are going to be more of those distractions. So, because of their limited attention spans — and we know everybody’s attention span is decreasing anyway — but still, their attention span is less than it would be the case for a more mature youngster or adolescent. So, clearly, they can only focus for so long, and that’s a developmental issue. It’s a, probably, a cognitive development kind of issue.
They also have less developed study skills. So, for example, we discover that middle school and high school students are good self-testers. They know how to do a problem once, put it aside, come back to it, do it in a different way and see if they come up with the same answer. Young children don’t know how to do that yet. They also — young children — don’t know how to apportion their time as well between hard and easy tasks. So, they’ll dawdle over the easy stuff and discover, towards the end, that they’ve run out of time, or they are now getting tired, or it’s dinnertime or whatever. Whereas, older students will zip through the easy stuff — maybe if they come across a problem which is difficult, they’ll set aside and do the easier stuff first — and then come back to the harder stuff and see if they can solve it. Young children can’t do that. These are the kinds of skills that can be taught and, in many ways, are a good proving ground for these kinds of skills when they do homework. But it will, in fact, limit the ability of homework to have dramatic impacts on how well young children do on their grades in school and on their standardized tests.

Kokai: What can parents do?

Cooper: There are a couple of pieces of advice that are sound for parents. The first one is to be a stage manager. So, they are responsible for the environment, and they can construct an environment which is more or less conducive to home study. They ought to make it conducive to home study. They also have to be monitors of their children. They should be looking for signs of frustration and fatigue, and if they do see it, they should help their child out; they should suggest a break. If it continues, they should talk to their teacher. They are also motivators. It’s important for parents to say to children, especially young children, that what they are doing is important, that they do things that are related to things that they learned in school. That leads to another thing parents need to do — and that’s to be role models. When kids are doing their homework, parents really ought to not be sitting there blasting the television. If their child is reading, for a parent to be sitting in the same room reading is a good way to model. Balance a checkbook if they are doing math. And another thing is mentoring. When teachers ask parents to get involved, they should do so. They should do so gladly, and they should do so considering themselves a member of a team that is trying to educate their child. If kids ask for help, they ought to give guidance and help, not answers. And they ought to actually stay out if the child is doing well, not showing frustration or fatigue. And let the kid work on their own. One of the most important lessons that homework can learn is that I can learn anywhere and I can be a self-generated learner. I can become an autonomous learner and someone who will learn throughout my life, in any environment. So, in many ways, if a child is not struggling in school and not struggling with homework, the best thing for a parent to do is stay away.