A new study may confirm your teenager’s long-held suspicion that more homework is not necessarily better.
“Our data indicate that it is not necessary to assign huge quantities of homework, but it is important that assignment is systematic and regular,” co-lead author Javier Suarez-Alvarez, PhD, of the University of Oviedo in Spain, said in the news release. “The data suggests that spending 60 minutes a day doing homework is a reasonable and effective time.”
For the study, researchers from the University of Oviedo looked at the academic performance of 7,725 public, private and state-subsidized students in Asturias, Spain. The average age of the students was 13.78 years and 47.2 percent of the participants were girls.
Teens in the study were given questionnaires and asked to indicate how often they did homework and how much time they spent on various subjects. In addition, they were asked if they did their homework on their own or if they had help and if so, how often they got assistance.
The students’ academic achievements in math and science were measured by standardized tests. Prior knowledge was determined using previous grades in those subject areas.
After adjusting for gender differences and socioeconomic backgrounds, the researchers found that the kids were spending between one to two hours on homework in all subjects a day. Students whose teachers systematically assigned homework scored nearly 50 points higher than those who did not get regular assignments.
Findings also showed that students who did their math homework on their own scored 54 points higher than those who required frequent or constant help. The results were similar for assisted and unassisted science homework.
The researchers found that the teachers of the students in the study assigned on average a little more than 70 minutes of homework a day. When students were assigned 90 minutes to 100 minutes of homework a day, their math and science scores declined.
In the 70- to 90-minute homework range, the researchers judged the academic gain too small to justify the extra time. “For that reason, assigning more than 70 minutes of homework per day does not seem very efficient,” explained Suarez-Alvarez.
“The conclusion is that when it comes to homework, how is more important than how much,” said Suarez-Alvarez. “Once individual effort and autonomous working is considered, the time spent becomes irrelevant.”
A 2011 report by the National Center for Educational Statistics found that high school students in the United States spend an average of 6.8 hours a week doing homework.
