Homework: New Research Suggests It May Be an Unnecessary Evil
By: Alfie Kohn
This article provides a new, fresh take on the academic effects of homework from grades K-12. Reviewing a new intensive study working with the National Education Longitudinal Study [NELS] and the Education Longitudinal Study [ELS], researchers have made progress in identifying actual correlations between homework and standardized test scores. Nevertheless, discrepancies have surfaced throughout studies old and new. The issues with the latter primarily being that the kids in the two similar datasets had exceptionally different answers to the question, “How much time do you spend on homework?” There have been a multitude of dead ends and false positive correlations, leading researchers and the author Alfie Kohn to delineate that there was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”
