Ruth Cohenson's Profile

Limitations of the Research

1.  At best, most homework studies show only an
association, not a causal relationship. 

Do we really know how much homework kids do? 

here
is considerable reason to believe that standardized tests are a poor measure
of intellectual proficiency.  They are, however, excellent indicators of two
things.  The first is affluence:  Up to 90 percent of the difference in
scores among schools, communities, or even states can be accounted for,
statistically speaking, without knowing anything about what happened inside
the classrooms.  All you need are some facts about the average income and
education levels of the students’ parents.  The second phenomenon that
standardized tests measure is how skillful a particular group of students is at
taking standardized tests – and, increasingly, how much class time has been
given over to preparing them to do just that.

 There is no evidence of any academic benefit
from homework in elementary school.  Even if you were untroubled by the
methodological concerns I’ve been describing, the fact is that after decades
of research on the topic, there is no overall positive correlation between
homework and achievement (by any measure) for students before middle school –
or, in many cases, before high school.  More precisely, there’s virtually no
research at all on the impact of homework in the primary grades – and
therefore no data to support its use with young children – whereas research has
been done with students in the upper elementary grades and it generally fails
to find any benefit.