The Great Homework Debate

Monica Fuglei posted “The Homework Debate: The Case Against Homework” on November 14, 2013, and being a student who doesn’t enjoy doing excessive homework, I was agreeing with most of the propositions that were brought up against homework, the ones that were saying homework is assigned just so children will have something to do and that homework is assigned to make children hate school, because I have grown up listening to students and parents who object the concept of doing schoolwork for hours after they already spent all day at school. However, there was a link at the bottom of that article that said continue reading, and it lead to plenty of assumptions brought up for why homework has to be beneficial, and that is where I started to disagree

This article form Stanford University introduces the physical and mental faults that homework causes. The author, Clifton B. Parker sited all of his sources and quoted an education scholar at Stanford University which increases the credibility of the article. Clifton B. Parker has written hundreds of articles for Stanford University many of which have to do with education. His article was published in 2014 which gives me the most up to date information on the downfalls of

I believe, as a student, that homework is just a tool that teachers use to keep us busy. Being a student who has received homework for various years, I have found that homework causes me a lot of stress (Ethos). Homework causes kids to get very stressed out, it causes stress in their families, and studies show that it does not improve test scores. Harris Cooper, a worker at Duke University (Ethos), found out that, doing more than 60 to 90 minute of homework in middle school and more than 2 hours in high school is associated with much lower scores (Logos). This just shows that homework is a useless item that students are forced to do. Firstly, students have to wake up from seven until two o'clock everyday,

Kids as of now go to school for eight hours and their brain tends to shut down, causing health complications. It’s not safe for children to inherit these health complications at an earlier age. They will not be able to accomplish the academic success that they intend to do. Homework is suppose to increase the learning capacity of the student and not disservice them

Homework has been around for many years, and parents have had many questions and concerns about the impact it has on their children. Kate McReynolds states in her article Homework that, “In 1957, the Soviet launch of Sputnik challenged the intellectual and military might of the United States. The New York Times ran a series of articles describing the Soviet educational system as superior to the United States’ system. Congress passed the National Defense Education Act and America’s youngsters were charged with restoring the nation’s competitive edge” (2). This means that schools are under the pressure to make sure their students excel and work extremely hard. So by doing so, they assign homework, which will progress to other issues for the students.

Homework has been an area of discussion for teachers, students, and even psychologists. It’s been a practice which has been used throughout the United States to help students learn material, reinforce their day’s lesson, or just as busy work to improve a student’s work ethic. Several people view homework as useless, or just plainly unhelpful; this view has been demonstrated ever since the early twentieth century, where many authors and politicians were vehemently against homework, going as far as to write whole books and draft legislation (legislation which had passed the Californian government and had been law) against homework. This opposition has ever since faded, but is now seeing a new movement around America, and there are reasons as to why that is. In an article from CNN, they quote a study from another article published by The American Journal of Family Therapy which states that: “students in the early elementary school years are getting significantly more homework than is recommended by education leaders, in some cases nearly three times as much homework as is recommended”, and, as such, students are raised within a state of stress from the first grade. Several other studies also find that homework is very hurtful; the Journal of Experimental Education published an article which had made a study that found that the average amount of time students spend on homework each night had been 3.1 hours from a sample of high-performing schools in California, when the recommended time on homework is, at most, one hour each night. Homework has been mandated work for students all around the country, and several others, and the workload seems to only be increasing, and so, how might this workload affect a student’s ability to live a healthy life, a teacher’s work plan, and a psychologist’s view of an enormous workload on a student?

Across the world, children and teens do homework after school. Many people expect homework to be a healthy educational learning tool, but is it really? No, I believe homework is something we need to get rid of. Instead of making it easier to learn, it is creating stress and medical issues with students, finally, it doesn’t affect academic success. Why exactly?

Heavy loads of homework can be shown more as harmful than good, not only for students but also for their families. As shown in Source B it says, “It is the primary arena in which children, parents and schools interact on a daily basis” (Gill and Schossman). Which I can totally disagree with from my experience, stating that every time I come from school to home, I always have to go straight to my room, turn my computer on, and either work on essays or have to search up problems for my algebra assignments, or just information for any class in general, which takes up a whole day of my life. Another reason is it is very time consuming! These homeworks are always getting in my way of either having activities after school or just time to spend with my family, which I hardly ever have a chance to do because of all the work I have, and might I also state that my mom is always worrying about my health since I usually don’t have time to eat too, also she is always asking me if I have time to read the bible with my siblings and father, which I automatically have to state I can’t because again of all this work. Another statement I have is how homework is mainly useless to our education, grabbing information from Source F, “Kids who wouldn’t dream of cheating on a test or copying a research paper think nothing of copying homework” (Chaika). Since doing homework is just such a waste for us we usually just copy it either from other people or from the internet, and since math class usually just gives a packet about what is going to be on the quiz, we end up using that to study which ends up being more helpful for the upcoming test rather than doing

Alfie Kohn, a principal who is also working on a book, says “In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school . . . , in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied. Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.” He is not the only one to have recognized this, many teachers and researchers have, too. Unfortunately, it’s one of the many issues addressed towards schools that is payed no attention

There is a general consensus in educational literature today that homework does have a positive effect on learning, through extending the time available for learning. Teachers are clearly convinced

I strongly believe that homework is extremely bad for children. Simply put children need exercise and sun to stay healthy, children don’t need homework to be successful and most importantly kid are already exhausted after school.

Firstly homework is not proven to be beneficial. Homework does not prove to be beneficial as teachers have monitored their students grades and have found that if children from kindergarten to year 7 get more than 30 minutes of homework, their grades can decrease as they spend more time on homework that won't help them. As well as grades homework can cause family tensions as well because parents may force their child to do

Homework may bring emotional, physical, and socially damaging to students. Most of the students in the U.S. take multiple classes with different subjects each school year. Some of these students see their teacher every day or every other day, this means students are going home every day with homework and that includes weekends. Students already spend 8 hours a day on weekdays in school and then they also have to go home with about 2-4 hours of homework. If there are only 24 hours in a day and 8 are spent at school, another 8 hours sleeping, and about 3 hours of homework that leaves students with 5 hours to eat, shower, socialize, be involved in extracurricular actives, work for those who need to, and time to spend with their family. Above all, it is obvious students do not have enough time in the day to juggle all of this, and that is not counting the students that take bus and arrive home later than other students. Due to not having enough time through the day students will have to pick and choice how they spend their hours outside of school, one of the most common things students sacrifice is their sleep at night and this affects them so bad and they have no idea. According to the research MD Craig Canapari found “Short sleep makes children obese, sleepiness is a significant cause of automobile accidents which is the most common cause of death in teenagers, depression, anxiety, and irritability are all associated with insufficient sleep.”(2012 p.1) Another thing students usually

The general arguments given by teachers and some parents are that homework increases the overall grade averages, sharpens study habits, and helps students become more prepared for college work. Along with that, it helps students learn responsibility for life in the work field of the real work. Although these arguments are valid, there are arguments against homework as well. Homework causes students to be stressed out when there is too much to be done by a certain deadline and takes away the free time of students. Some of the work that students are assigned isn't relevant to what they are studying. Worst of all, it causes that struggling student to lose interest in the study of that subject ("Students and Homework"). While it does have negative outcomes, homework also has it's perks.

Homework, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Does homework truly have a positive effect on improving student achievement? Homework is the task assigned by a teacher to a student to be completed outside of the classroom. Homework can range from reading a story, writing or typing research, solving math problems, or a project. Teachers assign these task in order for the student to increase their knowledge on the topic at hand. Parents, at least most of them, agree that homework needs to be done in order to improve student achievement; however, most student do not like the task, nor do they see the relationship between homework and increased student achievement.