Study finds that more than 70 minutes of homework a day is too much for adolescents

Pre-College Topics High School Life
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A few points to note:

  • The average age in the study was just under 14 years old, far younger than the average student on this college-bound site.
  • The gains measured were in math and science. Period.
  • No one is suggesting that all your homework needs to be done in one sitting.
  • Your choice of extra curricular activities is not part of the study. So, yeah, if you have 5 hours of extra curricular, those additional hours of homework are going to be an issue for you. But right now, your job is student. Everything else is EXTRA, as in "extra curricular." So if the demand is too great, then it needs to be those extra curricular things that go.

As a math teacher, I KNOW that my kids need practice in order to internalize the material. My class policy is that you need to spend 20 minutes of real homework time-- no phone, no food, no texting or checking Twitter or Vine anything else. Then you can stop. If you haven’t finished, then one of two things happens: either I’ve given too much, which will be apparent when I check it tomorrow. Or you don’t get the material, which means I can expect to see you at extra help tomorrow.

Those 12 years of free education are your one shot at a free education. Not taking advantage of them will cripple your chances for so many opportunities down the road. In order to learn the necessary material, it’s going to take more than the 38 minutes a day (on a good day, when there are no assemblies or snow related delays). When I check the homework, I know instantly whether I need to scrap my plan to continue with the new material (that follows from yesterday’s lesson). It lets my students know whether or not they need extra help.

I think that, instead of studying the hours of homework, the study should have concentrated on the quality of homework. All of us parents have worked with our kids on stupid assignments that had no point beyond that of racking up a homework grade. I think the study would have shown far greater results had it compared busy work with homework that had a real purpose in terms of student learning.