how much homework in 5th grade

How Much Homework Is Enough? Depends Who You Ask

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Editor’s note: This is an adapted excerpt from You, Your Child, and School: Navigate Your Way to the Best Education ( Viking)—the latest book by author and speaker Sir Ken Robinson (co-authored with Lou Aronica), published in March. For years, Robinson has been known for his radical work on rekindling creativity and passion in schools, including three bestselling books (also with Aronica) on the topic. His TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” holds the record for the most-viewed TED talk of all time, with more than 50 million views. While Robinson’s latest book is geared toward parents, it also offers educators a window into the kinds of education concerns parents have for their children, including on the quality and quantity of homework.

The amount of homework young people are given varies a lot from school to school and from grade to grade. In some schools and grades, children have no homework at all. In others, they may have 18 hours or more of homework every week. In the United States, the accepted guideline, which is supported by both the National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association, is the 10-minute rule: Children should have no more than 10 minutes of homework each day for each grade reached. In 1st grade, children should have 10 minutes of daily homework; in 2nd grade, 20 minutes; and so on to the 12th grade, when on average they should have 120 minutes of homework each day, which is about 10 hours a week. It doesn’t always work out that way.

In 2013, the University of Phoenix College of Education commissioned a survey of how much homework teachers typically give their students. From kindergarten to 5th grade, it was just under three hours per week; from 6th to 8th grade, it was 3.2 hours; and from 9th to 12th grade, it was 3.5 hours.

There are two points to note. First, these are the amounts given by individual teachers. To estimate the total time children are expected to spend on homework, you need to multiply these hours by the number of teachers they work with. High school students who work with five teachers in different curriculum areas may find themselves with 17.5 hours or more of homework a week, which is the equivalent of a part-time job. The other factor is that these are teachers’ estimates of the time that homework should take. The time that individual children spend on it will be more or less than that, according to their abilities and interests. One child may casually dash off a piece of homework in half the time that another will spend laboring through in a cold sweat.

Do students have more homework these days than previous generations? Given all the variables, it’s difficult to say. Some studies suggest they do. In 2007, a study from the National Center for Education Statistics found that, on average, high school students spent around seven hours a week on homework. A similar study in 1994 put the average at less than five hours a week. Mind you, I [Robinson] was in high school in England in the 1960s and spent a lot more time than that—though maybe that was to do with my own ability. One way of judging this is to look at how much homework your own children are given and compare it to what you had at the same age.

Many parents find it difficult to help their children with subjects they’ve not studied themselves for a long time, if at all.

There’s also much debate about the value of homework. Supporters argue that it benefits children, teachers, and parents in several ways:

• Children learn to deepen their understanding of specific content, to cover content at their own pace, to become more independent learners, to develop problem-solving and time-management skills, and to relate what they learn in school to outside activities.
• Teachers can see how well their students understand the lessons; evaluate students’ individual progress, strengths, and weaknesses; and cover more content in class.
• Parents can engage practically in their children’s education, see firsthand what their children are being taught in school, and understand more clearly how they’re getting on—what they find easy and what they struggle with in school.

Want to know more about Sir Ken Robinson? Check out our Q&A with him.

Q&A With Sir Ken Robinson

Ashley Norris is assistant dean at the University of Phoenix College of Education. Commenting on her university’s survey, she says, “Homework helps build confidence, responsibility, and problem-solving skills that can set students up for success in high school, college, and in the workplace.”

That may be so, but many parents find it difficult to help their children with subjects they’ve not studied themselves for a long time, if at all. Families have busy lives, and it can be hard for parents to find time to help with homework alongside everything else they have to cope with. Norris is convinced it’s worth the effort, especially, she says, because in many schools, the nature of homework is changing. One influence is the growing popularity of the so-called flipped classroom.

In the stereotypical classroom, the teacher spends time in class presenting material to the students. Their homework consists of assignments based on that material. In the flipped classroom, the teacher provides the students with presentational materials—videos, slides, lecture notes—which the students review at home and then bring questions and ideas to school where they work on them collaboratively with the teacher and other students. As Norris notes, in this approach, homework extends the boundaries of the classroom and reframes how time in school can be used more productively, allowing students to “collaborate on learning, learn from each other, maybe critique [each other’s work], and share those experiences.”

Even so, many parents and educators are increasingly concerned that homework, in whatever form it takes, is a bridge too far in the pressured lives of children and their families. It takes away from essential time for their children to relax and unwind after school, to play, to be young, and to be together as a family. On top of that, the benefits of homework are often asserted, but they’re not consistent, and they’re certainly not guaranteed.

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The National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association have suggested that a healthy number of hours that students should be spending can be determined by the “10-minute rule.” This means that each grade level should have a maximum homework time incrementing by 10 minutes depending on their grade level (for instance, ninth-graders would have 90 minutes of homework, 10th-graders should have 100 minutes, and so on).

As ‘finals week’ rapidly approaches, students not only devote effort to attaining their desired exam scores but make a last attempt to keep or change the grade they have for semester one by making up homework assignments.

High schoolers reported doing an average of 2.7 hours of homework per weeknight, according to a study by the Washington Post from 2018 to 2020 of over 50,000 individuals. A survey of approximately 200 Bellaire High School students revealed that some students spend over three times this number.

The demographics of this survey included 34 freshmen, 43 sophomores, 54 juniors and 54 seniors on average.

When asked how many hours students spent on homework in a day on average, answers ranged from zero to more than nine with an average of about four hours. In contrast, polled students said that about one hour of homework would constitute a healthy number of hours.

Junior Claire Zhang said she feels academically pressured in her AP schedule, but not necessarily by the classes.

“The class environment in AP classes can feel pressuring because everyone is always working hard and it makes it difficult to keep up sometimes.” Zhang said.

A total of 93 students reported that the minimum grade they would be satisfied with receiving in a class would be an A. This was followed by 81 students, who responded that a B would be the minimum acceptable grade. 19 students responded with a C and four responded with a D.

“I am happy with the classes I take, but sometimes it can be very stressful to try to keep up,” freshman Allyson Nguyen said. “I feel academically pressured to keep an A in my classes.”

Up to 152 students said that grades are extremely important to them, while 32 said they generally are more apathetic about their academic performance.

Last year, nine valedictorians graduated from Bellaire. They each achieved a grade point average of 5.0. HISD has never seen this amount of valedictorians in one school, and as of now there are 14 valedictorians.

“I feel that it does degrade the title of valedictorian because as long as a student knows how to plan their schedule accordingly and make good grades in the classes, then anyone can be valedictorian,” Zhang said.

Bellaire offers classes like physical education and health in the summer. These summer classes allow students to skip the 4.0 class and not put it on their transcript. Some electives also have a 5.0 grade point average like debate.

Close to 200 students were polled about Bellaire having multiple valedictorians. They primarily answered that they were in favor of Bellaire having multiple valedictorians, which has recently attracted significant acclaim .

Senior Katherine Chen is one of the 14 valedictorians graduating this year and said that she views the class of 2022 as having an extraordinary amount of extremely hardworking individuals.

“I think it was expected since freshman year since most of us knew about the others and were just focused on doing our personal best,” Chen said.

Chen said that each valedictorian achieved the honor on their own and deserves it.

“I’m honestly very happy for the other valedictorians and happy that Bellaire is such a good school,” Chen said. “I don’t feel any less special with 13 other valedictorians.”

Nguyen said that having multiple valedictorians shows just how competitive the school is.

“It’s impressive, yet scary to think about competing against my classmates,” Nguyen said.

Offering 30 AP classes and boasting a significant number of merit-based scholars Bellaire can be considered a competitive school.

“I feel academically challenged but not pressured,” Chen said. “Every class I take helps push me beyond my comfort zone but is not too much to handle.”

Students have the opportunity to have off-periods if they’ve met all their credits and are able to maintain a high level of academic performance. But for freshmen like Nguyen, off periods are considered a privilege. Nguyen said she usually has an hour to five hours worth of work everyday.

“Depending on the day, there can be a lot of work, especially with extra curriculars,” Nguyen said. “Although, I am a freshman, so I feel like it’s not as bad in comparison to higher grades.”

According to the survey of Bellaire students, when asked to evaluate their agreement with the statement “students who get better grades tend to be smarter overall than students who get worse grades,” responders largely disagreed.

Zhang said that for students on the cusp of applying to college, it can sometimes be hard to ignore the mental pressure to attain good grades.

“As a junior, it’s really easy to get extremely anxious about your GPA,” Zhang said. “It’s also a very common but toxic practice to determine your self-worth through your grades but I think that we just need to remember that our mental health should also come first. Sometimes, it’s just not the right day for everyone and one test doesn’t determine our smartness.”

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Comments (8).

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Anonymous • Jul 16, 2024 at 3:27 pm

didnt realy help

Anonymous • Nov 21, 2023 at 10:32 am

It’s not really helping me understand how much.

josh • May 9, 2023 at 9:58 am

Kassie • May 6, 2022 at 12:29 pm

Im using this for an English report. This is great because on of my sources needed to be from another student. Homework drives me insane. Im glad this is very updated too!!

Kaylee Swaim • Jan 25, 2023 at 9:21 pm

I am also using this for an English report. I have to do an argumentative essay about banning homework in schools and this helps sooo much!

Izzy McAvaney • Mar 15, 2023 at 6:43 pm

I am ALSO using this for an English report on cutting down school days, homework drives me insane!!

E. Elliott • Apr 25, 2022 at 6:42 pm

I’m from Louisiana and am actually using this for an English Essay thanks for the information it was very informative.

Nabila Wilson • Jan 10, 2022 at 6:56 pm

Interesting with the polls! I didn’t realize about 14 valedictorians, that’s crazy.

Do our kids have too much homework?

by: Marian Wilde | Updated: January 31, 2024

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Many students and their parents are frazzled by the amount of homework being piled on in the schools. Yet many researchers say that American students have just the right amount of homework.

“Kids today are overwhelmed!” a parent recently wrote in an email to GreatSchools.org “My first-grade son was required to research a significant person from history and write a paper of at least two pages about the person, with a bibliography. How can he be expected to do that by himself? He just started to learn to read and write a couple of months ago. Schools are pushing too hard and expecting too much from kids.”

Diane Garfield, a fifth grade teacher in San Francisco, concurs. “I believe that we’re stressing children out,” she says.

But hold on, it’s not just the kids who are stressed out . “Teachers nowadays assign these almost college-level projects with requirements that make my mouth fall open with disbelief,” says another frustrated parent. “It’s not just the kids who suffer!”

“How many people take home an average of two hours or more of work that must be completed for the next day?” asks Tonya Noonan Herring, a New Mexico mother of three, an attorney and a former high school English teacher. “Most of us, even attorneys, do not do this. Bottom line: students have too much homework and most of it is not productive or necessary.”

Research about homework

How do educational researchers weigh in on the issue? According to Brian Gill, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, there is no evidence that kids are doing more homework than they did before.

“If you look at high school kids in the late ’90s, they’re not doing substantially more homework than kids did in the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s or the ’40s,” he says. “In fact, the trends through most of this time period are pretty flat. And most high school students in this country don’t do a lot of homework. The median appears to be about four hours a week.”

Education researchers like Gill base their conclusions, in part, on data gathered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

“It doesn’t suggest that most kids are doing a tremendous amount,” says Gill. “That’s not to say there aren’t any kids with too much homework. There surely are some. There’s enormous variation across communities. But it’s not a crisis in that it’s a very small proportion of kids who are spending an enormous amount of time on homework.”

Etta Kralovec, author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning , disagrees, saying NAEP data is not a reliable source of information. “Students take the NAEP test and one of the questions they have to fill out is, ‘How much homework did you do last night’ Anybody who knows schools knows that teachers by and large do not give homework the night before a national assessment. It just doesn’t happen. Teachers are very clear with kids that they need to get a good night’s sleep and they need to eat well to prepare for a test.

“So asking a kid how much homework they did the night before a national test and claiming that that data tells us anything about the general run of the mill experience of kids and homework over the school year is, I think, really dishonest.”

Further muddying the waters is an AP/AOL poll that suggests that most Americans feel that their children are getting the right amount of homework. It found that 57% of parents felt that their child was assigned about the right amount of homework, 23% thought there was too little and 19% thought there was too much.

One indisputable fact

One homework fact that educators do agree upon is that the young child today is doing more homework than ever before.

“Parents are correct in saying that they didn’t get homework in the early grades and that their kids do,” says Harris Cooper, professor of psychology and director of the education program at Duke University.

Gill quantifies the change this way: “There has been some increase in homework for the kids in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. But it’s been an increase from zero to 20 minutes a day. So that is something that’s fairly new in the last quarter century.”

The history of homework

In his research, Gill found that homework has always been controversial. “Around the turn of the 20th century, the Ladies’ Home Journal carried on a crusade against homework. They thought that kids were better off spending their time outside playing and looking at clouds. The most spectacular success this movement had was in the state of California, where in 1901 the legislature passed a law abolishing homework in grades K-8. That lasted about 15 years and then was quietly repealed. Then there was a lot of activism against homework again in the 1930s.”

The proponents of homework have remained consistent in their reasons for why homework is a beneficial practice, says Gill. “One, it extends the work in the classroom with additional time on task. Second, it develops habits of independent study. Third, it’s a form of communication between the school and the parents. It gives parents an idea of what their kids are doing in school.”

The anti-homework crowd has also been consistent in their reasons for wanting to abolish or reduce homework.

“The first one is children’s health,” says Gill. “A hundred years ago, you had medical doctors testifying that heavy loads of books were causing children’s spines to be bent.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. There were also concerns about excessive amounts of stress .

“Although they didn’t use the term ‘stress,'” says Gill. “They worried about ‘nervous breakdowns.'”

“In the 1930s, there were lots of graduate students in education schools around the country who were doing experiments that claimed to show that homework had no academic value — that kids who got homework didn’t learn any more than kids who didn’t,” Gill continues. Also, a lot of the opposition to homework, in the first half of the 20th century, was motivated by a notion that it was a leftover from a 19th-century model of schooling, which was based on recitation, memorization and drill. Progressive educators were trying to replace that with something more creative, something more interesting to kids.”

The more-is-better movement

Garfield, the San Francisco fifth-grade teacher, says that when she started teaching 30 years ago, she didn’t give any homework. “Then parents started asking for it,” she says. “I got In junior high and high school there’s so much homework, they need to get prepared.” So I bought that one. I said, ‘OK, they need to be prepared.’ But they don’t need two hours.”

Cooper sees the trend toward more homework as symptomatic of high-achieving parents who want the best for their children. “Part of it, I think, is pressure from the parents with regard to their desire to have their kids be competitive for the best universities in the country. The communities in which homework is being piled on are generally affluent communities.”

The less-is-better campaign

Alfie Kohn, a widely-admired progressive writer on education and parenting, published a sharp rebuttal to the more-homework-is-better argument in his 2006 book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing . Kohn criticized the pro-homework studies that Cooper referenced as “inconclusive… they only show an association, not a causal relationship” and he titled his first chapter “Missing Out on Their Childhoods.”

Vera Goodman’s 2020 book, Simply Too Much Homework: What Can We Do? , repeats Kohn’s scrutiny and urges parents to appeal to school and government leaders to revise homework policies. Goodman believes today’s homework load stresses out teachers, parents, and students, deprives children of unstructured time for play, hobbies, and individual pursuits, and inhibits the joy of learning.

Homework guidelines

What’s a parent to do, you ask? Fortunately, there are some sanity-saving homework guidelines.

Cooper points to “The 10-Minute Rule” formulated by the National PTA and the National Education Association, which suggests that kids should be doing about 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level. In other words, 10 minutes for first-graders, 20 for second-graders and so on.

Too much homework vs. the optimal amount

Cooper has found that the correlation between homework and achievement is generally supportive of these guidelines. “We found that for kids in elementary school there was hardly any relationship between how much homework young children did and how well they were doing in school, but in middle school the relationship is positive and increases until the kids were doing between an hour to two hours a night, which is right where the 10-minute rule says it’s going to be optimal.

“After that it didn’t go up anymore. Kids that reported doing more than two hours of homework a night in middle school weren’t doing any better in school than kids who were doing between an hour to two hours.”

Garfield has a very clear homework policy that she distributes to her parents at the beginning of each school year. “I give one subject a night. It’s what we were studying in class or preparation for the next day. It should be done within half an hour at most. I believe that children have many outside activities now and they also need to live fully as children. To have them work for six hours a day at school and then go home and work for hours at night does not seem right. It doesn’t allow them to have a childhood.”

International comparisons

How do American kids fare when compared to students in other countries? Professors Gerald LeTendre and David Baker of Pennsylvania State University conclude in their 2005 book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, that American middle schoolers do more homework than their peers in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, but less than their peers in Singapore and Hong Kong.

One of the surprising findings of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. LeTendre notes: “That really flummoxes people because they say, ‘Doesn’t doing more homework mean getting better scores?’ The answer quite simply is no.”

Homework is a complicated thing

To be effective, homework must be used in a certain way, he says. “Let me give you an example. Most homework in the fourth grade in the U.S. is worksheets. Fill them out, turn them in, maybe the teacher will check them, maybe not. That is a very ineffective use of homework. An effective use of homework would be the teacher sitting down and thinking ‘Elizabeth has trouble with number placement, so I’m going to give her seven problems on number placement.’ Then the next day the teacher sits down with Elizabeth and she says, ‘Was this hard for you? Where did you have difficulty?’ Then she gives Elizabeth either more or less material. As you can imagine, that kind of homework rarely happens.”

Shotgun homework

“What typically happens is people give what we call ‘shotgun homework’: blanket drills, questions and problems from the book. On a national level that’s associated with less well-functioning school systems,” he says. “In a sense, you could sort of think of it as a sign of weaker teachers or less well-prepared teachers. Over time, we see that in elementary and middle schools more and more homework is being given, and that countries around the world are doing this in an attempt to increase their test scores, and that is basically a failing strategy.”

Quality not quantity?

“ The Case for (Quality) Homework: Why It Improves Learning, and How Parents Can Help ,” a 2019 paper written by Boston University psychologist Janine Bempechat, asks for homework that specifically helps children “confront ever-more-complex tasks” that enable them to gain resilience and embrace challenges.

Similar research from University of Ovideo in Spain titled “ Homework: Facts and Fiction 2021 ” says evidence shows that how homework is applied is more important than how much is required, and it asserts that a moderate amount of homework yields the most academic achievement. The most important aspect of quality homework assignment? The effort required and the emotions prompted by the task.

Robyn Jackson, author of How to Plan Rigorous Instruction and other media about rigor says the key to quality homework is not the time spent, but the rigor — or mental challenge — involved. ( Read more about how to evaluate your child’s homework for rigor here .)

Nightly reading as a homework replacement

Across the country, many elementary schools have replaced homework with a nightly reading requirement. There are many benefits to children reading every night , either out loud with a parent or independently: it increases their vocabulary, imagination, concentration, memory, empathy, academic ability, knowledge of different cultures and perspectives. Plus, it reduces stress, helps kids sleep, and bonds children to their cuddling parents or guardians. Twenty to 30 minutes of reading each day is generally recommended.

But, is this always possible, or even ideal?

No, it’s not.

Alfie Kohn criticizes this added assignment in his blog post, “ How To Create Nonreaders .” He cites an example from a parent (Julie King) who reports, “Our children are now expected to read 20 minutes a night, and record such on their homework sheet. What parents are discovering (surprise) is that those kids who used to sit down and read for pleasure — the kids who would get lost in a book and have to be told to put it down to eat/play/whatever — are now setting the timer… and stopping when the timer dings. … Reading has become a chore, like brushing your teeth.”

The take-away from Kohn? Don’t undermine reading for pleasure by turning it into another task burdening your child’s tired brain.

Additional resources

Books Simply Too Much Homework: What Can We do? by Vera Goodman, Trafford Publishing, 2020

The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Children and What Parents Can Do About It by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, Crown Publishers, 2007

The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing by Alfie Kohn, Hatchett Books, 2006 The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Etta Kralovec and John Buell, Beacon Press, 2001.

The Battle Over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents by Harris M. Cooper, Corwin Press, 2001.

Seven Steps to Homework Success: A Family Guide to Solving Common Homework Problems by Sydney Zentall and Sam Goldstein, Specialty Press, 1998.

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5 Ways to Make Homework More Meaningful

Use these insights from educators—and research—to create homework practices that work for everyone.

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Homework tends to be a polarizing topic. While many teachers advocate for its complete elimination, others argue that it provides students with the extra practice they need to solidify their learning and teach them work habits—like managing time and meeting deadlines—that have lifelong benefits. 

We recently reached out to teachers in our audience to identify practices that can help educators plot a middle path. 

On Facebook , elementary school teacher John Thomas responded that the best homework is often no-strings-attached encouragement to read or play academically adjacent games with family members. “I encourage reading every night,” Thomas said, but he doesn’t use logs or other means of getting students to track their completion. “Just encouragement and book bags with self selected books students take home for enjoyment.” 

Thomas said he also suggests to parents and students that they can play around with “math and science tools” such as “calculators, tape measures, protractors, rulers, money, tangrams, and building blocks.” Math-based games like Yahtzee or dominoes can also serve as enriching—and fun—practice of skills they’re learning.

At the middle and high school level, homework generally increases, and that can be demotivating for teachers, who feel obliged to review or even grade halfhearted submissions. Student morale is at stake, too: “Most [students] don’t complete it anyway,” said high school teacher Krystn Stretzinger Charlie on Facebook . “It ends up hurting them more than it helps.”    

So how do teachers decide when to—and when not to—assign homework, and how do they ensure that the homework they assign feels meaningful, productive, and even motivating to students? 

1. Less is More

A 2017 study analyzed the homework assignments of more than 20,000 middle and high school students and found that teachers are often a bad judge of how long homework will take. 

According to researchers, students spend as much as 85 minutes or as little as 30 minutes on homework that teachers imagined would take students one hour to complete. The researchers concluded that by assigning too much homework , teachers actually increased inequalities between students in exchange for “minimal gains in achievement.” Too much homework can overwhelm students who “have more gaps in their knowledge,” the researchers said, and creates situations where homework becomes so time-consuming and frustrating that it turns students off to classwork more broadly.

To counteract this, middle school math teacher Crystal Frommert said she focuses on quality over quantity. Frommert cited the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics , which recommends only assigning “what’s necessary to augment instruction” and adds that if teachers can “get sufficient information by assigning only five problems, then don’t assign fifty.” 

Instead of sending students home with worksheets and long problem sets from textbooks that often repeat the same concepts, Frommert recommended assigning part of a page, or even a few specific problems—and explaining to students why these handpicked problems will be helpful practice. When students know there’s thought behind the problems they’re asked to solve at home, “they pay more attention to the condensed assignment because it was tailored for them,” Frommert said. 

On Instagram , high school teacher Jacob Palmer said that every now and then he condenses homework down to just one problem that is particularly engaging and challenging: “The depth and exploration that can come from one single problem can be richer than 20 routine problems.” 

2. Add Choice to the Equation 

Former educator and coach Mike Anderson said teachers can differentiate homework assignments without placing unrealistic demands on their workload by offering students some discretion in the work they complete and explicitly teaching them “how to choose appropriately challenging work for themselves.” 

Instead of assigning the same 20 problems or response questions on a given textbook page to all students, for example, Anderson suggested asking students to refer to the list of questions and choose and complete a designated number of them (three to five, for example) that give students “a little bit of a challenge but that [they] can still solve independently.” 

To teach students how to choose well, Anderson has students practice choosing homework questions in class before the end of the day, brainstorming in groups and sharing their thoughts about what a good homework question should accomplish. The other part, of course, involves offering students good choices: “Make sure that options for homework focus on the skills being practiced and are open-ended enough for all students to be successful,” he said. 

Once students have developed a better understanding of the purpose of challenging themselves to practice and grow as learners, Anderson also periodically asks them to come up with their own ideas for problems or other activities they can use to reinforce learning at home. A simple question, such as “What are some ideas for how you might practice this skill at home?” can be enough to get students sharing ideas, he said. 

Jill Kibler, a former high school science teacher, told Edutopia on Facebook that she implemented homework choice in her classroom by allowing students to decide how much of the work they’ve recently turned in that they’d like to redo as homework: “Students had one grading cycle (about seven school days) to redo the work they wanted to improve,” she said. 

3. Break the Mold 

According to high school English teacher Kate Dusto, the work that students produce at home doesn’t have to come in the traditional formats of written responses to a problem. On Instagram , Dusto told Edutopia that homework can often be made more interesting—and engaging—by allowing students to show evidence of their learning in creative ways. 

“Offer choices for how they show their learning,” Dusto said. “Record audio or video? Type or use speech to text? Draw or handwrite and then upload a picture?” The possibilities are endless. 

Former educator and author Jay McTighe noted that visual representations such as graphic organizers and concept maps are particularly useful for students attempting to organize new information and solidify their understanding of abstract concepts. For example, students might be asked to “draw a visual web of factors affecting plant growth” in biology class or map out the plot, characters, themes, and settings of a novel or play they’re reading to visualize relationships between different elements of the story and deepen their comprehension of it. 

Simple written responses to summarize new learning can also be made more interesting by varying the format, McTighe said. For example, ask students to compose a tweet in 280 characters or less to answer a question like “What is the big idea that you have learned about _____?” or even record a short audio podcast or video podcast explaining “key concepts from one or more lessons.”

4. Make Homework Voluntary 

When elementary school teacher Jacqueline Worthley Fiorentino stopped assigning mandatory homework to her second-grade students and suggested voluntary activities instead, she found that something surprising happened: “They started doing more work at home.” 

Some of the simple, voluntary activities she presented students with included encouraging at-home reading (without mandating how much time they should spend reading); sending home weekly spelling words and math facts that will be covered in class but that should also be mastered by the end of the week: “It will be up to each child to figure out the best way to learn to spell the words correctly or to master the math facts,” she said; and creating voluntary lesson extensions such as pointing students to outside resources—texts, videos or films, webpages, or even online or in-person exhibits—to “expand their knowledge on a topic covered in class.”

Anderson said that for older students, teachers can sometimes make whatever homework they assign a voluntary choice. “Do all students need to practice a skill? If not, you might keep homework invitational,” he said, adding that teachers can tell students, “If you think a little more practice tonight would help you solidify your learning, here are some examples you might try.”

On Facebook , Natisha Wilson, a K–12 gifted students coordinator for an Ohio school district, said that when students are working on a challenging question in class, she’ll give them the option to “take it home and figure it out” if they’re unable to complete it before the end of the period. Often students take her up on this, she said, because many of them “can’t stand not knowing the answer.” 

5. Grade for Completion—or Don’t Grade at All  

Former teacher Rick Wormeli argued that work on homework assignments isn’t “evidence of final level of proficiency”; rather, it’s practice that provides teachers with “feedback and informs where we go next in instruction.” 

Grading homework for completion—or not grading at all, Wormeli said—can help students focus on the real task at hand of consolidating understanding and self-monitoring their learning. “When early attempts at mastery are not used against them, and accountability comes in the form of actually learning content, adolescents flourish.” 

High school science teacher John Scali agreed , confirming that grading for “completion and timeliness” rather than for “correctness” makes students “more likely to do the work, especially if it ties directly into what we are doing in class the next day” without worrying about being “100% correct.” On Instagram , middle school math teacher Traci Hawks noted that any assignments that are completed and show work—even if the answer is wrong—gets a 100 from her.

But Frommert said that even grading for completion can be time-consuming for teachers and fraught for students if they don’t have home environments that are supportive of homework or if they have jobs or other after-school activities. 

Instead of traditional grading, she suggested alternatives to holding students accountable for homework, such as student presentations or even group discussions and debates as a way to check for understanding. For example, students can debate which method is best to solve a problem or discuss their prospective solutions in small groups. “Communicating their mathematical thinking deepens their understanding,” Frommert said. 

How Much Homework Is Too Much?

Are schools assigning too much homework.

Posted October 19, 2011

Timothy, a fifth grader, spends up to thirteen hours a day hunched over a desk at school or at home, studying and doing homework. Should his parents feel proud? Now imagine, for comparison's sake, Timothy spending thirteen hours a day hunched over a sewing machine instead of a desk.

Parents have the right to complain when schools assign too much homework but they often don't know how to do so effectively.

Drowning in Homework ( an excerpt from Chapter 8 of The Squeaky Wheel )

I first met Timothy, a quiet, overweight eleven-year-old boy, when his mother brought him to therapy to discuss his slipping grades. A few minutes with Timothy were enough to confirm that his mood, self-esteem , and general happiness were slipping right along with them. Timothy attended one of the top private schools in Manhattan, an environment in which declining grades were no idle matter.

I asked about Timothy's typical day. He awoke every morning at six thirty so he could get to school by eight and arrived home around four thirty each afternoon. He then had a quick snack, followed by either a piano lesson or his math tutor, depending on the day. He had dinner at seven p.m., after which he sat down to do homework for two to three hours a night. Quickly doing the math in my head, I calculated that Timothy spent an average of thirteen hours a day hunched over a writing desk. His situation is not atypical. Spending that many hours studying is the only way Timothy can keep up and stay afloat academically.

But what if, for comparison's sake, we imagined Timothy spending thirteen hours a day hunched over a sewing machine instead of a desk. We would immediately be aghast at the inhumanity because children are horribly mistreated in such "sweatshops." Timothy is far from being mistreated, but the mountain of homework he faces daily results in a similar consequence- he too is being robbed of his childhood.

Timothy's academics leave him virtually no time to do anything he truly enjoys, such as playing video games, movies, or board games with his friends. During the week he never plays outside and never has indoor play dates or opportunities to socialize with friends. On weekends, Timothy's days are often devoted to studying for tests, working on special school projects, or arguing with his mother about studying for tests and working on special school projects.

By the fourth and fifth grade and certainly in middle school, many of our children have hours of homework, test preparation, project writing, or research to do every night, all in addition to the eight hours or more they have to spend in school. Yet study after study has shown that homework has little to do with achievement in elementary school and is only marginally related to achievement in middle school .

Play, however, is a crucial component of healthy child development . It affects children's creativity , their social skills, and even their brain development. The absence of play, physical exercise, and free-form social interaction takes a serious toll on many children. It can also have significant health implications as is evidenced by our current epidemic of childhood obesity, sleep deprivation, low self- esteem, and depression .

A far stronger predictor than homework of academic achievement for kids aged three to twelve is having regular family meals. Family meals allow parents to check in, to demonstrate caring and involvement, to provide supervision, and to offer support. The more family meals can be worked into the schedule, the better, especially for preteens. The frequency of family meals has also been shown to help with disordered eating behaviors in adolescents.

Experts in the field recommend children have no more than ten minutes of homework per day per grade level. As a fifth- grader, Timothy should have no more than fifty minutes a day of homework (instead of three times that amount). Having an extra two hours an evening to play, relax, or see a friend would constitute a huge bump in any child's quality of life.

So what can we do if our child is getting too much homework?

1. Complain to the teachers and the school. Most parents are unaware that excessive homework contributes so little to their child's academic achievement.

2. Educate your child's teacher and principal about the homework research-they are often equally unaware of the facts and teachers of younger children (K-4) often make changes as a result.

3. Create allies within the system by speaking with other parents and banding together to address the issue with the school.

You might also like: Is Excessive Homework in Private Schools a Customer Service Issue?

View my short and quite personal TED talk about Psychological Health here:

Check out my new book, Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt and Other Evreyday Psychological Injuries (Hudson Street Press).

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Copyright 2011 Guy Winch

Follow me on Twitter @GuyWinch

Guy Winch, Ph.D. , is a licensed psychologist and author of Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts.

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Homework: To give and how much to give, that is the question

So, how much homework do you give per night? How do you determine what is the best amount? In addition to the impact that homework has on academic achievement, Christian teachers also are thinking about the impact of homework on the total well-being of students and their families. What about homework’s intrusion into precious family time? What about the student with slow processing who takes twice the time as other students to complete assignments? What about a parent’s choice to engage their child in other types of learning or work outside of the normal school day hours, essentially eliminating time to complete homework? These questions require the Christian teachers’ consideration because our role is to assist parents in the education of their children. Biblically, the parents “make the call,” so to speak.

Research informs one area of decision-making regarding homework. That area is the connection between academic achievement and the amount of time a student spends doing homework. Harris Cooper reviewed more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and drew some conclusions which may be helpful. [1] Here is a brief summary of the meta-analysis of the research on homework: 1. The amount of homework assigned to students should be different based on the grade of the student.

• Elementary: homework does not increase academic performance, but can positively contribute to establishing work habits.  Recommended: grade in school times 10 minutes = time spent on homework (a student in fifth grade would be 5 x 10=50 minutes a night)
• Middle School:   Recommended:  90-120 minutes average per night
• High School:   every 30 minutes of additional homework per night yields a 5% increase in the student’s GPA up to a point.  Recommended: 120-180 minutes per night

How Much Homework Should Students Have (Ask the Experts)

November 2, 2017 rethinkmathteacher.com Teaching Resources 1

The debate over homework wages on as test scores decline, parent frustration increases, and the ability to cheat eases with new apps and smartphones. We ask the experts, ‘How Much Homework Should Students Have?”

The NEA says that students should have 10 minutes of homework per night, times the grade that they are in (so 3 rd graders should have 30 minutes a night, 7 th graders should have 70 minutes per night, etc.) http://www.nea.org/tools/16938.htm

Our experts weigh in:

We want Children to Understand that they are always Learners

– Maurice J. Elias of Edutopia.org

“We want children to understand that they are always learners. In school, we refer to them as “students” but outside of school, as children, they are still learners. So it makes no sense to even advertise a “no homework” policy in a school. It sends the wrong message.”

“Children should be encouraged to read, write, perform arithmetic, better understand the world around them in terms of civics, science, and the arts, and, of course, develop their people skills — their emotional intelligence. This encouragement should be part of everyday family interactions outside of school, and the school should provide developmental guidance to all parents, in the appropriate languages, to help them do this.”

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/homework-vs-no-homework-wrong-question-maurice-elias

Homework can be Damaging

– Shana Mckay of ScaffoldedMath.com

My answer to this question has changed over the years. Now as a mom, the thought of someday fighting with my daughter over homework during the precious few hours I will see her each week makes my heart ache. I also recently read in Jo Boaler’s book Mathematical Mindsets that homework widens the achievement gap. If 30% of a kid’s grade is participation in homework, and that kid has a job to support her family, her grade will never be as high– making it impossible for her to compete for the top colleges. The feeling that “I’m not good enough despite my effort” is also damaging, especially when a kid starts having the choice to take more math or not. So I am really torn. I hope this is an OK answer! It’s something I struggle with. Jo Boaler suggests reflection homework as a way to give homework that is not rote practice. I like this idea.

https://scaffoldedmath.blogspot.com/

– Linda Kardamis of Teach4TheHeart.com

More work doesn’t necessitate more learning. It can be overwhelming, especially your to lower skilled students. Less work can lead to greater quality of work, and promote more family time.  I recommend assigning less problems, giving time in class to complete, and having students write on their paper how long it took them to complete.

https://teach4theheart.com/why-you-should-give-way-less-homework/

Some, with Peer Help Time in Class

– Jamie Riggs of MissMathDork.com

After working in a district where homework was a HUGE issue, based on their home circumstances, I started taking a different stance on homework.  I still wanted my students to practice, we just started doing it in different ways.  I devoted 15 minutes of my class every day to enrichment and remediation. During this 15 minutes of time students had multiple options – 1) get homework help from a peer, 2) help a peer, 3) work on an extension activity alone or with a peer, 4) get help from the teacher at the roundtable, 5) create your own math project to work on.  Students were empowered to make their own choice.  Because of the culture that I had set in my classroom, students had no problem asking each other for help or being the peer helper.  Those who wanted to work alone could, those who wanted help got it, the only rule in the classroom was that everyone had to be working on something mathematical, either on the list or approved by me.  It took a little while to get it rolling, but eventually, those 15 minutes of time were my favorite 15 minutes of the day.

www.MissMathDork.com

Enough to be Meaningful and to Reinforce the Skill

– Kathy Ngo Martin of PreAlgebraTeachers.com

I think students should receive enough homework to review the skills being worked on. I don’t believe students should have “busy work.” I can’t say a set amount of minutes or problems, but I will say I usually assign between 10-20 problems per night, and we usually do 5 together in class.

www.PreAlgebraTeachers.com

Ditch that Homework

– Matt Miller and Alice Keeler, authors of “Ditch that Homework”

“Research can’t prove it’s a best practice. It causes family conflict and stress. Plus, it widens the gap between the haves and the have nots.”

http://www.alicekeeler.com/2017/07/27/ditch-homework-make-homework-obsolete/

Done Right, It Can Be Awesome

– Matt Foster of TeamTomEducation.com

When done right, homework can be a time for shared reading with parents. It can build healthy work habits and inspire students to complete passion projects normally not allowed in a school day.

My take is simple. There are some horrible types of homework. And there some types of homework that are simply awesome.

Here are my top 5 things to avoid and 4 must-haves in homework.

• Never assign homework that requires adult assistance for a student to figure out.
• Never assign homework that surpasses the Rule of 10. Ten minutes multiplied by the grade level equals maximum homework time.
• Never assign homework without choice.
• Never grade homework for accuracy.
• Never assume all students have equal access to parental support and resources.

To gain benefits from homework, here are 4 must-haves.

• Provide choice in homework tasks and topics to tap into a variety of skills and interests.
• Provide homework that builds fluency with already mastered skills or concepts.
• Provide passion projects that students want to do.
• Provide options for recording homework.

TeamTomEducation.com

Homework in Primary School has an Effect of Around Zero

– John Hattie, author of Visible Learning for Teachers

“Homework in primary school has an effect of around zero. In high school it’s larger. (…) Which is why we need to get it right. Not why we need to get rid of it (…) Five to ten minutes has the same effect of one hour to two hours (…) The best thing you can do is to reinforce something you’ve already learnt.”

https://visible-learning.org/2014/09/john-hattie-interview-bbc-radio-4/

Work for Home

– John Bennett of johncbennettjr.com

I’d rather think in terms of ‘Work for Home’ (W4H) than homework (HW). It’s not the HW that the teacher assigns for grading that has any value. It’s the W4H that’s aligned with what the student (with teacher input) believes needs needs further work for better learning – not for grading – that’s important. This emphasizes the learning, not the assumed needs from the teacher for grading!!!

Meet the Experts

Learn more at teach4theheart.com , or follow on Facebook @Teach4theHeart

Join at  www.PreAlgebraTeachers.com , follow on Facebook , or join her Facebook group

nice blog on maths for sharing those who want to how to learn the basics.

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Homework: How Much is Too Much?

We’ve settled into our regular school routines and I’m sure we’re all, on one level or another, dealing with our kids’ homework.  Our regular guest blogger Barbara Marques brings us her personal insight to homework struggles at home and then lends her professional experience as a teacher to give us some hints and tips in how to handle that daily workload.

  By Barbara Marques

When my oldest daughter was in first grade, we were spending more than an hour a night on math, reading and spelling homework.  By September of her second grade year, we were already up to over two hours a night!

The Daily Drama

At homework time, my daughter’s sweet personality would change before my eyes. She became frustrated and angry – and things only went downhill from there. At one point, I contacted her teacher and kindly suggested that she back off on the homework. I was faced with an interesting irony.  As a teacher, I firmly believed in the value of homework and assigned it nightly. As a parent, I was overwhelmed by the volume assigned to my child!

How Much is Too Much Homework?

Just how much homework should elementary students have? The National Education Association (NEA) endorses the following guidelines:  10-20 minutes of homework for 1 st graders, ten minutes per grade level for 2 nd through 12 th graders (for example, 20 minutes for a 2 nd grader or 50 minutes for a 5 th grader). 

The Important Functions of Homework

As a teacher, I know that elementary school homework has many important functions. For example, there is power in repeated practice (just ask any math or reading teacher). Homework also helps young children develop study skills, organization (using a daily planner) and accountability. As parents, we can view homework as an opportunity to work one-on-one with our children and communicate that education matters. It allows us to see firsthand where our children struggle.

How to Deal with Too Much Work

If your elementary child is spending more than an hour a night on homework, a parent-teacher conference is in order. In my case, my daughter’s homework struggle was an indicator of a bigger problem – dyslexia – which may have been overlooked for another couple of years if I hadn’t gone in to talk with the teacher about how long it was taking us to get through a chapter book in the 2 nd grade.  

The Procrastination Factor

Sometimes teachers genuinely overdo it with homework – sometimes our kids just make it seem that way.  A distracted child (mine included) can take a 20 minute assignment and stretch it out over an hour or longer. (Try to sitting in the same, quiet room with them to keep them on task.)  Add a little procrastination to the mix – like they’ve had two weeks to read a chapter book and create a shoebox diorama, but didn’t start until 8:00 tonight – and a valid homework can suddenly seem excessive. 

There are Guidelines

Most school districts have implemented guidelines on how much homework should be assigned. When I taught middle school, we were asked to keep homework time down to 15 minutes per core subject.  As a general rule, the educational benefit of any work your child’s teacher sends home should equal the time spent on it – if not, they’re just doing busy work. If your district has no guidelines in place, consider speaking up at the next school board meeting.

Barbara Marques is a former Texas math and social studies teacher and the mother of two elementary school-aged daughters.

Leave us a comment if you have found good solutions in your home for getting through homework or if you just want to vent?

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Homework; the term elicits a myriad of responses. Students are naturally opposed to the idea of homework. No student ever says, “I wish my teacher would assign me more homework.” Most students begrudge homework and find any opportunity or possible excuse to avoid doing it.

Educators themselves are split on the issue. Many teachers assign daily homework seeing it as a way to further develop and reinforce core academic skills, while also teaching students responsibility. Other educators refrain from assigning daily homework. They view it as unnecessary overkill that often leads to frustration and causes students to resent school and learning altogether. 

Parents are also divided on whether or not they welcome homework. Those who welcome it see it as an opportunity for their children to reinforce critical learning skills. Those who loathe it see it as an infringement of their child’s time. They say it takes away from extra-curricular activities, play time, family time, and also adds unnecessary stress.

Research on the topic is also inconclusive. You can find research that strongly supports the benefits of assigning regular homework, some that denounce it as having zero benefits, with most reporting that assigning homework offers some positive benefits, but also can be detrimental in some areas.

The Effects of Homework

Since opinions vary so drastically, coming to a consensus on homework is nearly impossible. We sent a survey out to parents of a school regarding the topic, asking parents these two basic questions:

• How much time is your child spending working on homework each night?
• Is this amount of time too much, too little, or just right?

The responses varied significantly. In one 3 rd grade class with 22 students, the responses regarding how much time their child spends on homework each night had an alarming disparity. The lowest amount of time spent was 15 minutes, while the largest amount of time spent was 4 hours. Everyone else fell somewhere in between. When discussing this with the teacher, she told me that she sent home the same homework for every child and was blown away by the vastly different ranges in time spent completing it. The answers to the second question aligned with the first. Almost every class had similar, varying results making it really difficult to gauge where we should go as a school regarding homework.

While reviewing and studying my school’s homework policy and the results of the aforementioned survey, I discovered a few important revelations about homework that I think anyone looking at the topic would benefit from:

1. Homework should be clearly defined. Homework is not unfinished classwork that the student is required to take home and complete. Homework is “extra practice” given to take home to reinforce concepts that they have been learning in class. It is important to note that teachers should always give students time in class under their supervision to complete class work. Failing to give them an appropriate amount of class time increases their workload at home. More importantly, it does not allow the teacher to give immediate feedback to the student as to whether or not they are doing the assignment correctly. What good does it do if a student completes an assignment if they are doing it all incorrectly? Teachers must find a way to let parents know what assignments are homework and which ones are classwork that they did not complete.

2. The amount of time required to complete the same homework assignment varies significantly from student to student. This speaks to personalization. I have always been a big fan of customizing homework to fit each individual student. Blanket homework is more challenging for some students than it is for others. Some fly through it, while others spend excessive amounts of time completing it.  Differentiating homework will take some additional time for teachers in regards to preparation, but it will ultimately be more beneficial for students.

The National Education Association recommends that students be given 10-20 minutes of homework each night and an additional 10 minutes per advancing grade level. The following chart adapted from the National Education Associations recommendations can be used as a resource for teachers in Kindergarten through the 8 th grade.

It can be difficult for teachers to gauge how much time students need to complete an assignment. The following charts serve to streamline this process as it breaks down the average time it takes for students to complete a single problem in a variety of subject matter for common assignment types. Teachers should consider this information when assigning homework. While it may not be accurate for every student or assignment, it can serve as a starting point when calculating how much time students need to complete an assignment. It is important to note that in grades where classes are departmentalized it is important that all teachers are on the same page as the totals in the chart above is the recommended amount of total homework per night and not just for a single class.

Kindergarten – 4th Grade (Elementary Recommendations)

*If students are required to write the questions, then you will need to add 2 additional minutes per problem. (i.e. 1-English problem requires 4 minutes if students are required to write the sentence/question.)

5th – 8th Grade (Middle School Recommendations)

*If students are required to write the questions, then you will need to add 2 additional minutes per problem. (i.e. 1-English problem requires 5 minutes if students are required to write the sentence/question.)

Assigning Homework Example

It is recommended that 5 th graders have 50-60 minutes of homework per night. In a self-contained class, a teacher assigns 5 multi-step math problems, 5 English problems, 10 spelling words to be written 3x each, and 10 science definitions on a particular night.

3. There are a few critical academic skill builders that students should be expected to do every night or as needed. Teachers should also consider these things. However, they may or may not, be factored into the total time to complete homework. Teachers should use their best judgment to make that determination:

• Independent Reading – 20-30 minutes per day
• Study for Test/Quiz - varies
• Multiplication Math Fact Practice (3-4) – varies - until facts are mastered
• Sight Word Practice (K-2) – varies - until all lists are mastered

4. Coming to a general consensus regarding homework is almost impossible.  School leaders must bring everyone to the table, solicit feedback, and come up with a plan that works best for the majority. This plan should be reevaluated and adjusted continuously. What works well for one school may not necessarily be the best solution for another.

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Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

A s kids return to school, debate is heating up once again over how they should spend their time after they leave the classroom for the day.

The no-homework policy of a second-grade teacher in Texas went viral last week , earning praise from parents across the country who lament the heavy workload often assigned to young students. Brandy Young told parents she would not formally assign any homework this year, asking students instead to eat dinner with their families, play outside and go to bed early.

But the question of how much work children should be doing outside of school remains controversial, and plenty of parents take issue with no-homework policies, worried their kids are losing a potential academic advantage. Here’s what you need to know:

For decades, the homework standard has been a “10-minute rule,” which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. Second graders, for example, should do about 20 minutes of homework each night. High school seniors should complete about two hours of homework each night. The National PTA and the National Education Association both support that guideline.

But some schools have begun to give their youngest students a break. A Massachusetts elementary school has announced a no-homework pilot program for the coming school year, lengthening the school day by two hours to provide more in-class instruction. “We really want kids to go home at 4 o’clock, tired. We want their brain to be tired,” Kelly Elementary School Principal Jackie Glasheen said in an interview with a local TV station . “We want them to enjoy their families. We want them to go to soccer practice or football practice, and we want them to go to bed. And that’s it.”

A New York City public elementary school implemented a similar policy last year, eliminating traditional homework assignments in favor of family time. The change was quickly met with outrage from some parents, though it earned support from other education leaders.

New solutions and approaches to homework differ by community, and these local debates are complicated by the fact that even education experts disagree about what’s best for kids.

The research

The most comprehensive research on homework to date comes from a 2006 meta-analysis by Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper, who found evidence of a positive correlation between homework and student achievement, meaning students who did homework performed better in school. The correlation was stronger for older students—in seventh through 12th grade—than for those in younger grades, for whom there was a weak relationship between homework and performance.

Cooper’s analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement—test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills. On the other hand, some studies he examined showed that homework can cause physical and emotional fatigue, fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children. At the end of his analysis, Cooper recommended further study of such potential effects of homework.

Despite the weak correlation between homework and performance for young children, Cooper argues that a small amount of homework is useful for all students. Second-graders should not be doing two hours of homework each night, he said, but they also shouldn’t be doing no homework.

Not all education experts agree entirely with Cooper’s assessment.

Cathy Vatterott, an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school.

“Correlation is not causation,” she said. “Does homework cause achievement, or do high achievers do more homework?”

Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs , thinks there should be more emphasis on improving the quality of homework tasks, and she supports efforts to eliminate homework for younger kids.

“I have no concerns about students not starting homework until fourth grade or fifth grade,” she said, noting that while the debate over homework will undoubtedly continue, she has noticed a trend toward limiting, if not eliminating, homework in elementary school.

The issue has been debated for decades. A TIME cover in 1999 read: “Too much homework! How it’s hurting our kids, and what parents should do about it.” The accompanying story noted that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to a push for better math and science education in the U.S. The ensuing pressure to be competitive on a global scale, plus the increasingly demanding college admissions process, fueled the practice of assigning homework.

“The complaints are cyclical, and we’re in the part of the cycle now where the concern is for too much,” Cooper said. “You can go back to the 1970s, when you’ll find there were concerns that there was too little, when we were concerned about our global competitiveness.”

Cooper acknowledged that some students really are bringing home too much homework, and their parents are right to be concerned.

“A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” he said. “If you take too little, they’ll have no effect. If you take too much, they can kill you. If you take the right amount, you’ll get better.”

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Homework: A New User's Guide

Cory Turner

If you made it past the headline, you're likely a student, concerned parent, teacher or, like me, a nerd nostalgist who enjoys basking in the distant glow of Homework Triumphs Past (second-grade report on Custer's Last Stand, nailed it!).

Whoever you are, you're surely hoping for some clarity in the loud, perennial debate over whether U.S. students are justifiably exhausted and nervous from too much homework — even though some international comparisons suggest they're sitting comfortably at the average.

Well, here goes. I've mapped out six, research-based polestars that should help guide you to some reasonable conclusions about homework.

How much homework do U.S. students get?

The best answer comes from something called the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP . In 2012, students in three different age groups — 9, 13 and 17 — were asked, "How much time did you spend on homework yesterday?" The vast majority of 9-year-olds (79 percent) and 13-year-olds (65 percent) and still a majority of 17-year-olds (53 percent) all reported doing an hour or less of homework the day before.

Another study from the National Center for Education Statistics found that high school students who reported doing homework outside of school did, on average, about seven hours a week.

If you're hungry for more data on this — and some perspective — check out this exhaustive report put together last year by researcher Tom Loveless at the Brookings Institution.

An hour or less a day? But we hear so many horror stories! Why?

The fact is, some students do have a ton of homework. In high school we see a kind of student divergence — between those who choose or find themselves tracked into less-rigorous coursework and those who enroll in honors classes or multiple Advanced Placement courses. And the latter students are getting a lot of homework. In that 2012 NAEP survey, 13 percent of 17-year-olds reported doing more than two hours of homework the previous night. That's not a lot of students, but they're clearly doing a lot of work.

Source: Met Life Survey of the American Teacher, The Homework Experience, 2007. LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

That also tracks with a famous survey from 2007 — from MetLife — that asked parents what they think of their kids' homework load. Sixty percent said it was just right. Twenty-five percent said their kids are getting too little. Just 15 percent of parents said their kids have too much homework.

Research also suggests that the students doing the most work have something else in common: income. "I think that the debate over homework in some ways is a social class issue," says Janine Bempechat, professor of human development at Wheelock College. "There's no question that in affluent communities, children are really over-taxed, over-burdened with homework."

But the vast majority of students do not seem to have inordinate workloads. And the ones who do are generally volunteering for the tough stuff. That doesn't make it easier, but it does make it a choice.

Do we know how much homework students in other countries are doing?

Sort of. Caveats abound here. Education systems and perceptions of what is and isn't homework can vary remarkably overseas. So any comparison is, to a degree, apples-to-oranges (or, at least, apples-to-pears). A 2012 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development pegged the U.S. homework load for 15-year-olds at around six hours per week. That's just above the study's average. It found that students in Hong Kong are also doing about six hours a week. Much of Europe checks in between four and five hours a week. In Japan, it's four hours. And Korea's near the bottom, at three hours.

Source: OECD, PISA 2012 Database, Table IV.3.48. LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

How much homework is too much?

Better yet, how much is just right? Harris Cooper at Duke University has done some of the best work on homework. He and his team reviewed dozens of studies, from 1987 to 2003, looking for consensus on what works and what doesn't. A common rule of thumb, he says, is what's called the 10-minute rule. Take the child's grade and multiply by 10. So first-graders should have roughly 10 minutes of homework a night, 40 minutes for fourth-graders, on up to two hours for seniors in high school. A lot of of schools use this. Even the National PTA officially endorses it.

Homework clearly improves student performance, right?

Not necessarily. It depends on the age of the child. Looking over the research, there's little to no evidence that homework improves student achievement in elementary school. Then again, the many experts I spoke with all said the same thing: The point of homework in those primary grades isn't entirely academic. It's about teaching things like time-management and self-direction.

But, by high school the evidence shifts. Harris Cooper's massive review found, in middle and high school, a positive correlation between homework and student achievement on unit tests. It seems to help. But more is not always better. Cooper points out that, depending on the subject and the age of the student, there is a law of diminishing returns. Again, he recommends the 10-minute rule.

What kinds of homework seem to be most effective?

This is where things get really interesting. Because homework should be about learning, right? To understand what kinds of homework best help kids learn, we really need to talk about memory and the brain.

Let's start with something called the spacing effect . Say a child has to do a vocabulary worksheet. The next week, it's a new worksheet with different words and so on. Well, research shows that the brain is better at remembering when we repeat with consistency, not when we study in long, isolated chunks of time. Do a little bit of vocabulary each night, repeating the same words night after night.

Similarly, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, Henry "Roddy" Roediger III , recommends that teachers give students plenty of little quizzes, which he says strengthen the brain's ability to remember. Don't fret. They can be low-stakes or no-stakes, says Roediger: It's the steady recall and repetition that matter. He also recommends, as homework, that students try testing themselves instead of simply re-reading the text or class notes.

There's also something known as interleaving . This is big in the debate over math homework. Many of us — myself included — learned math by focusing on one concept at a time, doing a worksheet to practice that concept, then moving on.

Well, there's evidence that students learn more when homework requires them to choose among multiple strategies — new and old — when solving problems. In other words, kids learn when they have to draw not just from what they learned in class that day but that week, that month, that year.

One last note: Experts agree that homework should generally be about reinforcing what students learned in class (this is especially true in math). Sometimes it can — and should — be used to introduce new material, but here's where so many horror stories begin.

Tom Loveless, a former teacher, offers this advice: "I don't think teachers should ever send brand-new material that puts the parent in the position of a teacher. That's a disaster. My own personal philosophy was: Homework is best if it's material that requires more practice but they've already received initial instruction."

Or, in the words of the National PTA: "Homework that cannot be done without help is not good homework."

FAQs about homework for kids

By Amanda Morin

Expert reviewed by Shira Moskovitz, MA

Updated February 17, 2023

At a glance

Homework lets kids practice skills, prepares them to learn new things, and expands on ideas introduced in class.

Many schools use the “10-minute rule” — that’s 10 minutes per grade level.

There are ways to help with homework without doing it for your child.

Getting kids to do their homework can be a hassle in any household. It’s even more challenging if your child struggles with the work.

Homework challenges can leave parents and caregivers with questions. For example, how much help can I give my child without taking away from the learning experience? Why does my child even have homework — and so much of it? What is my role in the homework process?

Here are answers to common questions about homework.

What’s the point of homework?

When you watch your child struggling with homework, it’s natural to wonder if those assignments are really necessary. That’s a question parents and teachers often debate.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), teachers shouldn’t give homework just to give homework. The assignments should serve one of three purposes:

Practice: Kids use a new skill they just learned or work on a skill that they need to review. 

Preparation: Kids get ready for something they’re going to learn. Maybe kids are reading about butterflies because that’s what the science class will be discussing tomorrow.

Extension: Kids learn more about a topic that was covered in the classroom. They’re doing something like developing a project for the science fair or writing a poem in the same style as one they read in class.

How much homework is too much?

There are guidelines for how much time kids should spend on homework. The NEA recommends something called the “10-minute rule.”

Based on this rule, students should spend about 10 minutes per grade level on homework every night. That means a second grader will usually be able to finish in about 20 minutes. A sixth grader should be able to get homework done in about an hour. 

For some kids, it’s not always that simple. When kids have trouble with reading, writing, math, focus, or organization, homework can take longer. Still, keeping up shouldn’t mean they have to spend all their time on homework or lose sleep to finish.

You may be tempted to jump in and help. But avoid doing your child’s homework. Instead, use the “10-minute rule” to decide when it’s time to stop — even if your child hasn’t finished all of their work. Then speak with the teacher about finding ways to get it done, or reducing the amount of homework that’s coming home every night.

Learn more about signs your child may have too much homework .

How can you help with homework?

There are many ways you can ease your child’s homework stress. Begin by helping your child create a homework station and learn how to use a homework planner to organize and manage time. 

You can also use this three-point “check” system for homework.

1. Check in. Check-ins give you a chance to talk with your child about what homework support they might need. They also let your child know you think homework is important.

Check in with your child at a consistent time each day that works for your family’s schedule. Talk about the homework together: where to find assignments, where and when to work, and what your child can do if stuck on a problem or task. Discuss any long-term projects and make a plan for when the work will get done. 

2. Check up. Find a time that works for you and your child to talk about how the homework is going, and if there are any tricky assignments. 

Some kids may want a little space to work through challenges on their own. But if your child needs help with the directions and steps of the homework, you can work through it together. You can also give them tips on how to handle trouble spots independently.

3. Check over. Checking over means looking at your child’s homework when it’s finished. You can ask your child to leave out the completed homework so you can check it when you’re available. 

Your job here isn’t to fix mistakes, but to make note of possible issues. Maybe you notice that your child hasn’t followed the directions. Or maybe your child didn’t finish a few problems. Talk about these issues with your child.

A homework contract can outline how and when you’ll help your child with homework. Download the contract and work on it together with your child. 

How can teachers help with homework? 

It’s a good idea to keep in touch with your child’s teacher about homework. Teachers are your partners in the homework process.

Talk with the teacher about homework policies, like whether late assignments are accepted. Once you know the expectations, you have a place to start if you need to speak with the teacher about making accommodations for your child.

If your child has trouble with an assignment, you can send a friendly email to let the teacher know. The teacher might be able to share why the task was challenging. The teacher may also suggest tools and strategies that can help.

You may think your child likes it when you step in and take over the homework. But learning to do it independently will teach your child important skills — not to mention the value of perseverance.

Get more tips about how to help kids who learn and think differently approach homework . 

Key takeaways

Set up a homework station and show your child how to use a planner. These changes can make homework less of a struggle.

If your child is spending more than 10 minutes per grade level on homework, touch base with the teacher. It might make sense to reduce your child’s workload.

Use a check in, check up, and check over system. This can help you be a positive part of the homework process.

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How To: Choose the Right Amount of Daily Homework

Despite the differences in the recommendations from these sources, the table shows broad agreement about how much homework to assign at each grade. At grades 1-3, homework should be limited to an hour or less per day, while in grades 4-6, homework should not exceed 90 minutes. The upper limit in grades 7-8 is 2 hours and the limit in high school should be 2.5 hours.

Teachers can use the homework time recommendations included here as a point of comparison: in particular, schools should note that assigning homework that exceeds the upper limit of these time estimates is not likely to result in additional learning gains--and may even be counter-productive (Cooper, Robinson, & Patall, 2006).

It should also be remembered that the amount of homework assigned each day is not in itself a sign of high academic standards. Homework becomes a powerful tool to promote learning only when students grasp the purpose of each homework assignment, clearly understand homework directions, perceive that homework tasks are instructionally relevant, and receive timely performance feedback (e.g., teacher comments; grades) on submitted homework (Jenson, Sheridan, Olympia, & Andrews, 1994).

Attachments

• Download This Blog Entry in PDF Format: How To: Choose the Right Amount of Daily Homework
• Barkley, R. A. (2008). 80+ classroom accommodations for children or teens with ADHD. The ADHD Report, 16 (4), 7-10.
• Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987-2003. Review of Educational Research, 76 (1), 1-62. 
• Jenson, W. R., Sheridan, S. M., Olympia, D., & Andrews, D. (1994). Homework and students with learning disabilities and behavior disorders: A practical, parent-based approach. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 27 , 538-548.

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How much homework to give (5th Grade)?

Discussion in ' Elementary Education Archives ' started by 3rdgrdteach , Aug 19, 2006 .

3rdgrdteach Rookie

Aug 19, 2006

I will be teaching fifth grade for the first time in a private school. I have taught previously in 3rd and 4th grade in public school. In the past, I have assigned 10 minutes or reading per the childrens' grade level (30 in third, 4o in 4th), plus a paragraph reading response (so approximately 35-45 minutes total time for reading). My previous experience with math has been Saxon Math which provided nightly skills practice which took most students 10-20 minutes (depending on math ability) to complete. We would occassionally assign weekly assignments in social studies and science, but would usually give some class time to complete. All told, my students in the past had about one hour of homework each night. If I follow my previous guidelines, my fifth graders this year would be reading for 50 minutes and, after responding, an hour would be spent on reading homework alone! I will be teaching from the Everyday Math series, so the math homework doesn't look too time consuming. However, I am under the impression that some sort of science and social studies homework is expected, so I was planning on doing a weekly assigment (assigned Mon or Tues and due Thurs or Fri). I am also looking to use a spelling contract that students will be responible for on "their own time" (either when they finish classwork early or at home). With all of these pieces combined, these poor kids are looking at an hour and a half to two hours of homework a night and that seems like a lot for me to ask of a fifth graders. So upper grade teachers (and parents of students in the upper grades) I need your help. I was going to post on the 4-8 board, but this board seems to get more traffic, so here I am. So here is my question, am I asking too much from my fifth graders and if so, what can I do to modify my homework plan? ANY suggestions/feedback is welcome. TIA!  

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MrsC Multitudinous

Our general guideline in 10 minutes homework per grade level--so the grade 5 students would have no more than 50 minutes of total homework per night. They were also encouraged to do 15 minutes of pleasure reading each night. In my opinion, more than this is too much.  

NYSTeacher Companion

I'm teaching 5th grade this year as well (my first year teaching)) and I plan on giving about an hour of homework. I wasn't really sure if all the 5th grade clases (there are 6 of us) will be giving the same amount/same stuff, etc. I planned on origianlly doing 45 minutes but after talking to a fellow teacher I've decided: An hour of homework each night (Monday - Thursday): 30 minutes of reading/reader's response spelling math worksheet then usually something else, whether it be Scieince, Social Studies, Health, etc. But it should take students no more than a hour to complete.  

hescollin Fanatic

We have 15 to 20 minutes of library reading each night. We are an AR school. Spelling words. 6 activities to go with books for book reports each grading period. All other homework is to be completed in the classroom. Homework is considered busy work. Students need to relax and enjoy family and being kids.  

goopp Devotee

I'm teaching 5th grade for the 1st time, too. The teacher next to me gives about 1 hour of homework a night. With everything else they do, I figure if I give an hour of homework, the parents are going to do most of it, which defeats the purpose. My students have to read 400 minutes per month, so I tell them that if they read 20 minutes a day, they will get it without a problem. I give them a sheet with various spelling activities, and they are responsible for doing at least 10 of them in 2 weeks. Some will do 1 per night, others will do them all the first or last night...they need to learn to budget their time, so I let them decide. They usually have a math worksheet, and sometimes science/health/social studies. Even with reading 20 minutes, the homework should take them 40 minutes to an hour. A lot will depend on their learning level. We've only been in school a week, but no one has complained yet...once they get into fall football, soccer and basketball I'll know if I'm asking too much, and if they will have time to get it all done. If they aren't going to do it themselves at home, I'd rather use it as classwork. I spend too much time planning activities and worksheets to have a parent do them.  

Teach2Inspire Comrade

I also give about an hour of homework Monday - Thursday. This would include Spelling, Math, and Reading 20 minutes and having a parent sign their reading log each night. In my Welcome Back letter, I also explain to the parents that there will be several occasions thoughout the year when there will be addtional work. A state report, 4 book report/or alternative book report activities, and a science project.  

Upsadaisy Moderator

I'm with the rest. A total of about one hour should be plenty.  

Ann2006 Cohort

Anything more than that really will defeat the purpose. Students may rush through work and not get the practice they need from the assignment. They have plenty of time in the future for tons of homework!!!! Not yet.  

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Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Senior Contributing Editor

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

She can be reached at [email protected] .

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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How Much Homework Do American Kids Do?

Various factors, from the race of the student to the number of years a teacher has been in the classroom, affect a child's homework load.

In his Atlantic essay , Karl Taro Greenfeld laments his 13-year-old daughter's heavy homework load. As an eighth grader at a New York middle school, Greenfeld’s daughter averaged about three hours of homework per night and adopted mantras like “memorization, not rationalization” to help her get it all done. Tales of the homework-burdened American student have become common, but are these stories the exception or the rule?

A 2007 Metlife study found that 45 percent of students in grades three to 12 spend more than an hour a night doing homework, including the six percent of students who report spending more than three hours a night on their homework. In the 2002-2003 school year, a study out of the University of Michigan found that American students ages six through 17 spent three hours and 38 minutes per week doing homework.

A range of factors plays into how much homework each individual student gets:

Older students do more homework than their younger counterparts.

This one is fairly obvious: The National Education Association recommends that homework time increase by ten minutes per year in school. (e.g., A third grader would have 30 minutes of homework, while a seventh grader would have 70 minutes).

Studies have found that schools tend to roughly follow these guidelines: The University of Michigan found that students ages six to eight spend 29 minutes doing homework per night while 15- to 17-year-old students spend 50 minutes doing homework. The Metlife study also found that 50 percent of students in grades seven to 12 spent more than an hour a night on homework, while 37 percent of students in grades three to six spent an hour or more on their homework per night. The National Center for Educational Statistics found that high school students who do homework outside of school average 6.8 hours of homework per week.

Race plays a role in how much homework students do.

Asian students spend 3.5 more hours on average doing homework per week than their white peers. However, only 59 percent of Asian students’ parents check that homework is done, while 75.6 percent of Hispanic students’ parents and 83.1 percent of black students’ parents check.

Teachers with less experience assign more homework.

The Metlife study found that 14 percent of teachers with zero to five years of teaching experience assigned more than an hour of homework per night, while only six percent of teachers with 21 or more years of teaching experience assigned over an hour of homework.

Math classes have homework the most frequently.

The Metlife study found that 70 percent of students in grades three to 12 had at least one homework assignment in math. Sixty-two percent had at least one homework assignment in a language arts class (English, reading, spelling, or creative writing courses) and 42 percent had at least one in a science class.

Regardless of how much homework kids are actually doing every night, most parents and teachers are happy with the way things are: 60 percent of parents think that their children have the “right amount of homework,” and 73 percent of teachers think their school assigns the right amount of homework.

Students, however, are not necessarily on board: 38 percent of students in grades seven through 12 and 28 percent of students in grades three through six report being “very often/often” stressed out by their homework.

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How Much Time Should Be Spent on Homework Based on Grade?

• 18 July 2020
• Posted by: ryan
• Category: Tutoring

A common question that parents always ask is, “How much time should my child dedicate to homework every day?” It’s not an easy question to answer. As we all know, every student learns differently from each other. While some kids do, substantially, better in school, by completing one hour of homework every day. There might be some others, who require two hours of homework, but only see a slight improvement in their grades.

To get to the bottom of this, we went to the experts for the answers! So here’s a break down of how much time your child should spend on homework according to their grade.

What is The Recommended Homework Time in Elementary School?

So before we give you a solid figure. We took a look at the results of a May 2012 study from the Los Angeles Unified School District . (Figure 1 below)

If your child is starting out in kindergarten and they receive some basic worksheets to complete for homework, the standard time they should spend on completing homework is 10 minutes per night.

Keep in mind, kindergarten childen might have shorter attention spans, than older kids, and might need a few intervals in between to complete their homework. So let them do it for 5 minutes, then take a 5 minute break, then continue for another 5 minutes to complete.

Usually,  Grade 1 – 3 students receive one to three homework assignments per week. They suggest that your child spend at least 20 – 30 minutes per night on homework.

Grade 4 – 5 students who receive two to four assignments per week, should focus between 40 – 50 minutes on completing each assignment.

What is The Recommended Homework Time in Middle and High school?

As your child enters middle and high school, naturally, their home work time will increase. As subjects get harder and more information needs to be retained for exams, more time is needed to practice. Here are the home work time estimations for older students from the Los Angeles Unified School District . (Figure 2 below)

Students in middle school are from Grades 6 – 8.  As class subjects require more attention and practice, middle school students get assigned three to five sets of assignments per week. We recommend that your child spend between 45 – 75 minutes per night.

Once your child is in highschool, Grade 9 – 12 students usually receive four to five sets of homework per week. According to Figure 2,  high school students should focus about 25-30 minutes on each subject.

For example, if your child is in Grade 10 and has a Math and English assignment to do for homework, they should spend at least 30 minutes on English and 30 minutes on Math. If they take one or two short breaks, it works out to be 75 – 150 minutes per set to complete both assignments.

Get Homework Help For Your Kids At ICan Education! 

Does your child need help completing their homework? ICan Education can help as we offer flexible Homework Help with tutors in Brampton, Mississauga, Milton, and Burlington!

ICAN Education tutoring centre has several locations in the GTA West, Mississauga, Brampton, Milton, and Burlington. To locate the closest ICAN Education centre near you, click  here .

Do you have any tips to share with other parents and students about completing homework? Let us know by posting your comments below and let’s move the conversation to our Twitter Page @icanedu. Don’t forget to ‘Like’  ICAN Education’s Facebook  and say ‘hi!’!

Grade Calculator

Use this calculator to find out the grade of a course based on weighted averages. This calculator accepts both numerical as well as letter grades. It also can calculate the grade needed for the remaining assignments in order to get a desired grade for an ongoing course.

(optional) Final Grade Goal Weight of Remaining Tasks Grade Format: Points, percentage, mix Letters Weight Format: Percentage Points Show Final Grade Planning Options Final Grade Calculator Use this calculator to find out the grade needed on the final exam in order to get a desired grade in a course. It accepts letter grades, percentage grades, and other numerical inputs. Related GPA Calculator The calculators above use the following letter grades and their typical corresponding numerical equivalents based on grade points. Letter Grade GPA Percentage A+ 4.3 97-100% A 4 93-96% A- 3.7 90-92% B+ 3.3 87-89% B 3 83-86% B- 2.7 80-82% C+ 2.3 77-79% C 2 73-76% C- 1.7 70-72% D+ 1.3 67-69% D 1 63-66% D- 0.7 60-62% F 0 0-59% Brief history of different grading systems In 1785, students at Yale were ranked based on "optimi" being the highest rank, followed by second optimi, inferiore (lower), and pejores (worse). At William and Mary, students were ranked as either No. 1, or No. 2, where No. 1 represented students that were first in their class, while No. 2 represented those who were "orderly, correct and attentive." Meanwhile at Harvard, students were graded based on a numerical system from 1-200 (except for math and philosophy where 1-100 was used). Later, shortly after 1883, Harvard used a system of "Classes" where students were either Class I, II, III, IV, or V, with V representing a failing grade. All of these examples show the subjective, arbitrary, and inconsistent nature with which different institutions graded their students, demonstrating the need for a more standardized, albeit equally arbitrary grading system. In 1887, Mount Holyoke College became the first college to use letter grades similar to those commonly used today. The college used a grading scale with the letters A, B, C, D, and E, where E represented a failing grade. This grading system however, was far stricter than those commonly used today, with a failing grade being defined as anything below 75%. The college later re-defined their grading system, adding the letter F for a failing grade (still below 75%). This system of using a letter grading scale became increasingly popular within colleges and high schools, eventually leading to the letter grading systems typically used today. However, there is still significant variation regarding what may constitute an A, or whether a system uses plusses or minuses (i.e. A+ or B-), among other differences. An alternative to the letter grading system Letter grades provide an easy means to generalize a student's performance. They can be more effective than qualitative evaluations in situations where "right" or "wrong" answers can be easily quantified, such as an algebra exam, but alone may not provide a student with enough feedback in regards to an assessment like a written paper (which is much more subjective). Although a written analysis of each individual student's work may be a more effective form of feedback, there exists the argument that students and parents are unlikely to read the feedback, and that teachers do not have the time to write such an analysis. There is precedence for this type of evaluation system however, in Saint Ann's School in New York City, an arts-oriented private school that does not have a letter grading system. Instead, teachers write anecdotal reports for each student. This method of evaluation focuses on promoting learning and improvement, rather than the pursuit of a certain letter grade in a course. For better or for worse however, these types of programs constitute a minority in the United States, and though the experience may be better for the student, most institutions still use a fairly standard letter grading system that students will have to adjust to. The time investment that this type of evaluation method requires of teachers/professors is likely not viable on university campuses with hundreds of students per course. As such, although there are other high schools such as Sanborn High School that approach grading in a more qualitative way, it remains to be seen whether such grading methods can be scalable. Until then, more generalized forms of grading like the letter grading system are unlikely to be entirely replaced. However, many educators already try to create an environment that limits the role that grades play in motivating students. One could argue that a combination of these two systems would likely be the most realistic, and effective way to provide a more standardized evaluation of students, while promoting learning. Search 360 IMAGES How Much Homework Do American Kids Do? Homework Help 5th Grade Math Fifth Grade Weekly Spiral LA homework sheet week 6 5th Grade Schedule (Self-Contained) Homework for 5th Graders: Complete with ease How Much Homework Do Fifth Graders Get? The 10 Correct Answer VIDEO Homework 5th grade EDP My Homework || 5th Grade HomeWork assignment || King Jame I || for @victoriapultz6371 5th grade homework 📚 lol 😂 I like homework but it’s been a long day I don’t want to do it lol 😝 Oh Homework, Oh Homework Vruttagalu How to Solve Summer Vacations Homework || Class Five || Homework || 5th Standard ||Solution COMMENTS What's the Right Amount of Homework? The National PTA and the National Education Association support the " 10-minute homework guideline "—a nightly 10 minutes of homework per grade level. But many teachers and parents are quick to point out that what matters is the quality of the homework assigned and how well it meets students' needs, not the amount of time spent on it. How Much Homework Is Enough? Depends Who You Ask From kindergarten to 5th grade, it was just under three hours per week; from 6th to 8th grade, it was 3.2 hours; and from 9th to 12th grade, it was 3.5 hours. There are two points to note. Students spend three times longer on homework than average, survey This means that each grade level should have a maximum homework time incrementing by 10 minutes depending on their grade level (for instance, ninth-graders would have 90 minutes of homework, 10th-graders should have 100 minutes, and so on). ... Some electives also have a 5.0 grade point average like debate. Close to 200 students were polled ... Do our kids have too much homework? Garfield, the San Francisco fifth-grade teacher, says that when she started teaching 30 years ago, she didn't give any homework. "Then parents started asking for it," she says. "I got In junior high and high school there's so much homework, they need to get prepared." So I bought that one. I said, 'OK, they need to be prepared.' 5 Ways to Make Homework More Meaningful 1. Less is More. A 2017 study analyzed the homework assignments of more than 20,000 middle and high school students and found that teachers are often a bad judge of how long homework will take. According to researchers, students spend as much as 85 minutes or as little as 30 minutes on homework that teachers imagined would take students one ... How Much Homework Is Too Much? Experts in the field recommend children have no more than ten minutes of homework per day per grade level. As a fifth- grader, Timothy should have no more than fifty minutes a day of homework ... Should Kids Get Homework? Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary. ... 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level ... Homework: To give and how much to give, that is the question Recommended: grade in school times 10 minutes = time spent on homework (a student in fifth grade would be 5 x 10=50 minutes a night) Middle School: Recommended: 90-120 minutes average per night; High School: every 30 minutes of additional homework per night yields a 5% increase in the student's GPA up to a point. How much homework is too much? Many districts follow the guideline of 10 minutes per grade level. This is a good rule of thumb and can be modified for specific students or subjects that need more or less time for assignments. This can also be helpful to gauge if you are providing too much (or too little) homework. Consider surveying your students on how much time is needed ... Key Lessons: What Research Says About the Value of Homework Too much homework may diminish its effectiveness. While research on the optimum amount of time students should spend on homework is limited, there are indications that for high school students, 1½ to 2½ hours per night is optimum. Middle school students appear to benefit from smaller amounts (less than 1 hour per night). How Much Homework Should Students Have (Ask the Experts) Here are my top 5 things to avoid and 4 must-haves in homework. Never assign homework that requires adult assistance for a student to figure out. Never assign homework that surpasses the Rule of 10. Ten minutes multiplied by the grade level equals maximum homework time. Never assign homework without choice. Never grade homework for accuracy. Homework: How Much is Too Much? Just how much homework should elementary students have? The National Education Association (NEA) endorses the following guidelines: 10-20 minutes of homework for 1 st graders, ten minutes per grade level for 2 nd through 12 th graders (for example, 20 minutes for a 2 nd grader or 50 minutes for a 5 th grader). The Important Functions of Homework. Outlining Simple Homework Guidelines for K-8 Teachers The following chart adapted from the National Education Associations recommendations can be used as a resource for teachers in Kindergarten through the 8 th grade. Grade Level. Recommended Amount of Homework Per Night. Kindergarten. 5 - 15 minutes. 1 st Grade. 10 - 20 minutes. 2 nd Grade. 20 - 30 minutes. Is Homework Good for Kids? Here's What the Research Says For decades, the homework standard has been a "10-minute rule," which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. Second graders, for example, should do about 20 ... Homework: A New User's Guide : NPR Ed : NPR Take the child's grade and multiply by 10. So first-graders should have roughly 10 minutes of homework a night, 40 minutes for fourth-graders, on up to two hours for seniors in high school. A lot ... FAQs about homework for kids At a glance. Homework lets kids practice skills, prepares them to learn new things, and expands on ideas introduced in class. Many schools use the "10-minute rule" — that's 10 minutes per grade level. There are ways to help with homework without doing it for your child. Getting kids to do their homework can be a hassle in any household. How To: Choose the Right Amount of Daily Homework Despite the differences in the recommendations from these sources, the table shows broad agreement about how much homework to assign at each grade. At grades 1-3, homework should be limited to an hour or less per day, while in grades 4-6, homework should not exceed 90 minutes. The upper limit in grades 7-8 is 2 hours and the limit in high ... How much homework to give (5th Grade)? Aug 19, 2006. Our general guideline in 10 minutes homework per grade level--so the grade 5 students would have no more than 50 minutes of total homework per night. They were also encouraged to do 15 minutes of pleasure reading each night. In my opinion, more than this is too much. MrsC, Aug 19, 2006. Does Homework Really Help Students Learn? A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher. "Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids' lives," says Wheelock's Janine Bempechat. "It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. How Much Homework Do American Kids Do? Race plays a role in how much homework students do. Asian students spend 3.5 more hours on average doing homework per week than their white peers. However, only 59 percent of Asian students ... How much homework does your kids have? (1st-5th grade) ADHD should qualify for an IEP. What you're describing is way too much homework. Homework should be no more than 10 minutes per grade level - so a 4th grader would have no more than 40 minutes of homework. IEPs and 504s are a lot of extra work for the school, so expect them to drag their feet and resist. How Much Time Should Be Spent on Homework Based on Grade? We recommend that your child spend between 45 - 75 minutes per night. Once your child is in highschool, Grade 9 - 12 students usually receive four to five sets of homework per week. According to Figure 2, high school students should focus about 25-30 minutes on each subject. For example, if your child is in Grade 10 and has a Math and ... Grade Calculator Grade Calculator. Use this calculator to find out the grade of a course based on weighted averages. This calculator accepts both numerical as well as letter grades. It also can calculate the grade needed for the remaining assignments in order to get a desired grade for an ongoing course. Assignment/Exam. essay homework paper phd project resume review speech study thesis