too much homework for kindergarten

Kindergarten Homework: Too Much Too Early?

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Kindergarten has taken some getting used to for Walker Sheppard, who didn’t attend preschool or day care. Besides all the new rules to remember, there’s a new nightly routine: homework.

“We spend anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour on it,” said Michael Sheppard, Walker’s dad.

When the 5-year-old comes home every day, Sheppard said, his son is tired and not ready to sit down and figure out his assignments.

“He doesn’t like it,” said Sheppard, who lives in Pulaski, Va. “The first week he went to school he asked us why he was having to do schoolwork at home.”

That’s a question a lot of parents are asking, especially when it comes to the youngest pupils. Studies by researchers including Harris Cooper, a Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor who wrote The Battle Over Homework , have consistently shown that homework has minimal academic benefits for children in the early-elementary years.

Instead, both the National Education Association and the National PTA endorse Cooper’s so-called 10-minute rule, which calls for roughly 10 minutes of homework a night per grade level beginning in 1st grade. So children in 2nd grade would have 20 minutes, those in 3rd grade would have 30 minutes, and so on. In high school, students may exceed that recommendation depending on the difficulty of the courses they choose.

Split Opinions

Those guidelines don’t even mention kindergarten. But that’s not stopping educators in many places from assigning homework.

Delilah Orti said that every Monday her daughter, Mia, a kindergartner last year in the Miami-Dade Public Schools system in Florida, received a homework packet with about 25 worksheets that were due at the end of that week.

Orti said the packet included work on phonics, spelling, reading comprehension, and social studies. She describes her daughter as a quick learner who was already reading in kindergarten but still needed her help with word problems and science worksheets.

“She could read the words, but she had no idea what they meant,” said Orti.

Orti said Mia spent 30 minutes reading every night and an hour on the packet.

“I felt that it was inappropriate for that age,” said Orti. “What she was getting for homework was more busywork. I don’t think she was getting anything out of it and I think it was way too much.”

But such concerns aren’t shared by administrators or parents at Arlington Traditional School, a countywide elementary school in Arlington, Va., with a waiting list of parents eager for their children to attend.

Kindergartners there are expected to do 30 minutes of homework a night, Monday through Thursday.

Every student at the school is expected to spend 15 minutes reading a night. For kindergartners who can’t read yet, that means their parents are expected to read to them. The other 15 minutes is spent doing things like dictating a story to their parents using words that start with a sound they’ve been learning in class or exercises that involve circling that letter.

“We feel that this is a connection that we want with parents,” said Holly Hawthorne, the school’s principal. “We want them to know what their children are learning at school, we want them to know how they’re doing in school, if the work is too hard, if it’s too easy, we want them to be able to support what the kids are learning at school at home as well.”

Eliminating Packets

Still, some kindergarten teachers remain firm in their opposition to mandatory homework.

Barbara Knapp used to assign her kindergarten pupils at Bradley Elementary School in Corralitos, Calif., weekly homework packets. But that all changed 10 years ago during the Great Recession.

“Teachers were only given two reams of paper a month at my school, so we were forced to cut back,” said Knapp.

She and some of her colleagues at the school located about 90 miles south of San Francisco decided a good way to do that would be to eliminate those homework packets. During that time, she said, she started to research homework and found the case against it for young elementary pupils very compelling.

“The research showed that there was no correlation between school success and the traditional paper-pencil homework in kindergarten,” said Knapp, who has 19 years of classroom-teaching experience.

When she was assigning homework, Knapp said parents sometimes complained that it was frustrating for their children. Other times, it was obvious the parents had done the work rather than the child.

Now, Knapp only assigns nightly reading of her pupils’ choice, a move that she credits with making them better readers. She adds that she hasn’t seen any deterioration in other skills since she eliminated traditional homework, and she’s been able to spend more time on lesson preparation rather than grading homework.

“It’s been great not having to focus on homework,” said Knapp. “Putting together the packet, running them all off, grading them all, it was a huge amount of time that was being taken instead of us planning really wonderful, rich, in-class lessons. Homework took away a lot of planning time for just a bunch of busywork.”

Risk of ‘Busywork’ vs. Parental Bonding

Cathy Vatterott is no fan of busywork at any grade level and doesn’t think homework should be part of kindergarten. She’s a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the author of Rethinking Homework . “There’s enough of an adjustment for young children in kindergarten without throwing in homework,” said Vatterott.

And she worries that adjusting to school routines combined with homework could turn off young students to learning.

“I want to make sure that they don’t hate school,” said Vatterott, who noted that young children learn best through play.

She also points to a 2016 University of Virginia study, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” which found that kindergarten in 2010 was more like the 1st grade of the late 1990s. Vatterott says she’s concerned that children who aren’t developmentally ready for this work might “internalize that they’re not smart or that they’re not good at school.”

But keeping the bond strong between home and school is one of the reasons that Duke researcher Cooper doesn’t mind homework for pupils in kindergarten, with a few caveats.

“The assignments need to be short, simple, and lead to success,” said Cooper. “We don’t want young children to get frustrated with homework. We don’t want them to get bored, and we don’t want them to begin thinking that schoolwork is too difficult for them so that they begin to develop a self-image of not being a good student.”

Finding a Balance

Some kindergarten teachers are embracing short, unique assignments for their pupils that don’t involve worksheets.

Shannon Brescher Shea’s son’s kindergarten teacher provides a list of activities the children can do at home if they choose. The activities ask them, for instance, to draw a picture of what they did over the weekend or collect and count a handful of leaves by ones.

Shea says after visiting her son’s classroom in suburban Rockville, Md., and seeing how much work he does, she’s even more against the idea of mandatory homework for children in kindergarten.

“They are going through so much energy and so much focus at school already and exerting so much self-control that to then have these kids come home and do homework on top of that is a recipe for them not wanting to go to school and not enjoying learning,” said Shea.

Jennifer Craven’s daughter is also in kindergarten this year, and she said so far the young girl has been asked to “practice tying shoes, practice writing her name, and read two books each night.”

Craven, who lives in Meadville, Pa., a city about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, said her family would be doing these activities anyway, and for now, her daughter thinks homework is fun.

“I think this is very age appropriate and I don’t mind the use of the term ‘homework’ at this age, as they will realize what real homework is soon enough,” said Craven.

Michael Sheppard talked to his son’s teacher in Pulaski about the homework she assigns. He said the 30-year classroom veteran acted like it was out of her hands.

Sheppard, 42, who attended school in the same district as his son, Walker, said he didn’t have to deal with homework until well after kindergarten.

“Maybe there should be homework,” said Sheppard. “I just think it would be better starting at 3rd grade.”

A version of this article appeared in the November 28, 2018 edition of Education Week as Kindergarten Homework Debate: Too Much Too Soon?

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When Your Child Has Too Much Homework

• How Much Time Is Ideal?
• Time Management
• Set Up a Homework Corner
• Have a Homework Routine

Are you concerned about the amount of time your child spends on homework each evening? Perhaps you feel like your child is spending a lot of time on their homework, and they are not getting anything out of it.

If your child is overwhelmed by homework, you can help them by examining their habits to find the source of homework trouble. Once you have identified the root of the problem , you can guide your child to a solution.

1) Find Out How Much Time Your Child Should Be Spending on Homework

While there are no set rules on exactly how much homework a child should have, there are some guidelines to help you decide if the amount of homework is too much or just right. 

The most common guideline is the 10-minute rule, which states that a child should have about ten minutes of homework per night for each grade they are in.

With this rule, a first-grader would average 10 minutes of homework, a second grader would have 20 minutes per night, and so on.

The 10-minute rule is recommended by the National PTA and the National Educators Association. Keep in mind that it is a guideline—some high school classes and advanced work classes may have more homework than the general guideline.

Often, teachers will send home a letter explaining their homework policy in the first weeks of school. This policy will often include more personalized guidelines, including how much time homework should take each evening.

2) Check How Well Your Child Uses Their Homework Time

If you realize your child is spending more time on their homework than expected, you will need to do some troubleshooting to solve the problem. Is your child or teen sitting with their homework out, yet they are doing something else, like texting friends or watching a TV program. Check to make sure they are focused on their work during the time they are working.

You want to check this first hand.

Your child or teen may simply not be aware of how distractions can impact their homework time.

If you find your child is not focused on homework, use the following suggestions to help them stay focused during homework time.

3) Make Sure Your Child Has a Homework Corner at Home

Your child or teen will benefit from having a specific place where they can work on their homework. The area should be someplace that is comfortable to work, allows for an age-appropriate amount of parental supervision, and access to any needed supplies or resources.

Completing homework in a specific place will help reinforce habits.   Your child will get used to doing their work in that specific spot.

4 ) Have a Regular Homework Routine to Prevent Procrastination

Sometimes, school-age children will put off doing larger homework assignments rather than trying to complete them a few days before they are due. Rather than spending 10 to 20 minutes for several evenings on the large assignment, they will have to spend hours to get the work done.

Having a regular homework set time in their daily schedule will give them the time to work on their assignments on most days. Tweens and teens will need to make sure they keep track of the different due dates in their different subjects.

Work Straight Through or Take Breaks?  

Remember that 10-minute rule stated earlier? That rule would lead to an eighth-grade student doing 1 hour and 20 minutes of homework each night. High school students can expect even more time on homework.

If your child needs a break and tries to push through, they often find it difficult to maintain focus. They may be seated at the table, but their work will slow down or stop altogether.

Some children and teens are able to sit down and work straight through until their daily homework is completed. Others may find they need to take a short break every 40 minutes.

Some children or teens may also experience a condition that affects their ability to focus for long periods of time. Examples include ADHD, depression , and anxiety .

Children and teens who struggle with focusing for long periods of time will need to keep their abilities in mind when they plan to do their work. They may benefit from a distraction-free area, splitting homework time between before and after school or another creative arrangement that accounts for their needs.

5) Check for Reasons You Need to Follow up With the Teacher

Sometimes homework overload is not something that can be solved only at home.

Your child does not know how to do the assignment. If your child or teen does not know how to do the work, they may take a very long time trying to complete it. Sit down with your child and watch them try to do their work. Do they understand the directions for the assignment? Are they missing skills they need to complete the work?

If it is the first time your child has struggled to understand how to do the homework, encourage your child to discuss the problems with the teacher in the next class session. If your elementary or middle school child is starting to fall into a pattern of struggling with work, you will want to be included in the conversation over the struggle with the material. If your child is in high school, use your knowledge of your teen to decide if they should handle it completely on their own.

You want to let the teacher know quickly if your child cannot do the homework so that the teacher can help address any gaps in knowledge early.

Nationwide schools are adopting rigorous curricula that build from grade to grade. Missing a skill in one grade level can lead to missing building blocks for following years.

Fortunately, teachers can find ways to address gaps in learning. The earlier a teacher is aware of a gap, the faster the gap can be addressed before it becomes a larger gap in learning.

Your child takes an excessive amount of time to complete their homework. Perhaps your child does sit down every evening in a distraction-free area and focuses on their school work, only an assignment that should 10 minutes actually takes 40 minutes. Your child might be working hard and know what to do, but they are very slow, especially compared to other kids in their class.

This may be caused by a learning disability . Children with dyslexia may struggle to learn to read and then read very slowly.   Children with dyscalculia, a disability in math , may take an exceptionally long time to complete work involving numbers, estimation, and math.   Fortunately, there are teaching and learning methods that can help children with these issues once they have been diagnosed.

Your child has multiple assignments due at the same time. This is a situation that you may only expect in high school when you know your teen will have several different subjects and teachers, each with their own calendar of assignments. Teachers may assign a large project with a due date right before or after a break, believing it would be convenient for everyone to have it due. Sometimes school calendars have other days, like the midpoint in a quarter, that seems ideal to have work due.

It's often the convenience of certain dates in the schedule that can cause multiple assignments to be due in middle school. Children in elementary school who see different teachers throughout the day in an effort to individualize to skill level may be surprised to find themselves caught with too much work due at the same time.

Ideally, teachers will plan out large assignments far in advance of the due date so that even if multiple subjects require work to be turned in on the same day, children can plan ahead and work slowly. Sometimes, this doesn't happen.

Teachers are often somewhat isolated from one another in schools, each working in their own classrooms, so teachers may not even know that they are assigning work that will all be due at the same time.

If your child has a truly unreasonable amount of work due at once, talk with the teachers involved. Some schools have set policies limiting the number of large tests or projects that can be due on a single day. Even if your child's school does not have a specific policy, teachers may be able to change due dates or come up with a plan that will allow your child to get the work done without being overwhelmed.

A Final Word From Verywell

Learning to get homework done regularly can help your child develop a growth mindset, where they know that their hard work will lead them to learn and opportunity. Finding ways to overcome difficult periods in school will also help your child or teen learn that they can find ways to meet challenges and be successful in school.

National Education Association. Research spotlight on homework. NEA reviews of the research on best practices in education .

Xu J. Why Do Students Have Difficulties Completing Homework? The Need for Homework Management . J Educ Train Stud . 2013;1(1):98-105. doi:10.11114/jets.v1i1.78

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other Concerns and Conditions With ADHD .

Hulme C, Snowling MJ. Reading disorders and dyslexia . Curr Opin Pediatr . 2016;28(6):731-735. doi:10.1097/MOP.0000000000000411

Kaufmann L, Mazzocco MM, Dowker A, et al. Dyscalculia from a developmental and differential perspective .  Front Psychol . 2013;4:516. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00516

By Lisa Linnell-Olsen Lisa Linnell-Olsen has worked as a support staff educator, and is well-versed in issues of education policy and parenting issues.

Should Kids Get Homework?

Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.

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Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful.

How much homework students should get has long been a source of debate among parents and educators. In recent years, some districts have even implemented no-homework policies, as students juggle sports, music and other activities after school.

Parents of elementary school students, in particular, have argued that after-school hours should be spent with family or playing outside rather than completing assignments. And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students.

But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When done well, it can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills. The key to effective homework, they say, is keeping assignments related to classroom learning, and tailoring the amount by age: Many experts suggest no homework for kindergartners, and little to none in first and second grade.

Value of Homework

Homework provides a chance to solidify what is being taught in the classroom that day, week or unit. Practice matters, says Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University 's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

"There really is no other domain of human ability where anybody would say you don't need to practice," she adds. "We have children practicing piano and we have children going to sports practice several days a week after school. You name the domain of ability and practice is in there."

Homework is also the place where schools and families most frequently intersect.

"The children are bringing things from the school into the home," says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California—Berkeley and the author of "The End of American Childhood." "Before the pandemic, (homework) was the only real sense that parents had to what was going on in schools."

Harris Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework," examined more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that — when designed properly — homework can lead to greater student success. Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary.

"Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing should be appropriate for their developmental level," he says. "For teachers, it's a balancing act. Doing away with homework completely is not in the best interest of children and families. But overburdening families with homework is also not in the child's or a family's best interest."

Negative Homework Assignments

Not all homework for elementary students involves completing a worksheet. Assignments can be fun, says Cooper, like having students visit educational locations, keep statistics on their favorite sports teams, read for pleasure or even help their parents grocery shop. The point is to show students that activities done outside of school can relate to subjects learned in the classroom.

But assignments that are just busy work, that force students to learn new concepts at home, or that are overly time-consuming can be counterproductive, experts say.

Homework that's just busy work.

Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful, experts say. Assignments that look more like busy work – projects or worksheets that don't require teacher feedback and aren't related to topics learned in the classroom – can be frustrating for students and create burdens for families.

"The mental health piece has definitely played a role here over the last couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the last thing we want to do is frustrate students with busy work or homework that makes no sense," says Dave Steckler, principal of Red Trail Elementary School in Mandan, North Dakota.

Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.

With the pressure to cover all topics on standardized tests and limited time during the school day, some teachers assign homework that has not yet been taught in the classroom.

Not only does this create stress, but it also causes equity challenges. Some parents speak languages other than English or work several jobs, and they aren't able to help teach their children new concepts.

" It just becomes agony for both parents and the kids to get through this worksheet, and the goal becomes getting to the bottom of (the) worksheet with answers filled in without any understanding of what any of it matters for," says professor Susan R. Goldman, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois—Chicago .

Homework that's overly time-consuming.

The standard homework guideline recommended by the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association is the "10-minute rule" – 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level. A fourth grader, for instance, would receive a total of 40 minutes of homework per night.

But this does not always happen, especially since not every student learns the same. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy found that primary school children actually received three times the recommended amount of homework — and that family stress increased along with the homework load.

Young children can only remain attentive for short periods, so large amounts of homework, especially lengthy projects, can negatively affect students' views on school. Some individual long-term projects – like having to build a replica city, for example – typically become an assignment for parents rather than students, Fass says.

"It's one thing to assign a project like that in which several kids are working on it together," she adds. "In (that) case, the kids do normally work on it. It's another to send it home to the families, where it becomes a burden and doesn't really accomplish very much."

Private vs. Public Schools

Do private schools assign more homework than public schools? There's little research on the issue, but experts say private school parents may be more accepting of homework, seeing it as a sign of academic rigor.

Of course, not all private schools are the same – some focus on college preparation and traditional academics, while others stress alternative approaches to education.

"I think in the academically oriented private schools, there's more support for homework from parents," says Gerald K. LeTendre, chair of educational administration at Pennsylvania State University—University Park . "I don't know if there's any research to show there's more homework, but it's less of a contentious issue."

How to Address Homework Overload

First, assess if the workload takes as long as it appears. Sometimes children may start working on a homework assignment, wander away and come back later, Cooper says.

"Parents don't see it, but they know that their child has started doing their homework four hours ago and still not done it," he adds. "They don't see that there are those four hours where their child was doing lots of other things. So the homework assignment itself actually is not four hours long. It's the way the child is approaching it."

But if homework is becoming stressful or workload is excessive, experts suggest parents first approach the teacher, followed by a school administrator.

"Many times, we can solve a lot of issues by having conversations," Steckler says, including by "sitting down, talking about the amount of homework, and what's appropriate and not appropriate."

Study Tips for High School Students

Tags: K-12 education , students , elementary school , children

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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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What’s the Right Amount of Homework?

Decades of research show that homework has some benefits, especially for students in middle and high school—but there are risks to assigning too much.

Many teachers and parents believe that homework helps students build study skills and review concepts learned in class. Others see homework as disruptive and unnecessary, leading to burnout and turning kids off to school. Decades of research show that the issue is more nuanced and complex than most people think: Homework is beneficial, but only to a degree. Students in high school gain the most, while younger kids benefit much less.

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.

The guideline doesn’t account for students who may need to spend more—or less—time on assignments. In class, teachers can make adjustments to support struggling students, but at home, an assignment that takes one student 30 minutes to complete may take another twice as much time—often for reasons beyond their control. And homework can widen the achievement gap, putting students from low-income households and students with learning disabilities at a disadvantage.

However, the 10-minute guideline is useful in setting a limit: When kids spend too much time on homework, there are real consequences to consider.

Small Benefits for Elementary Students

As young children begin school, the focus should be on cultivating a love of learning, and assigning too much homework can undermine that goal. And young students often don’t have the study skills to benefit fully from homework, so it may be a poor use of time (Cooper, 1989 ; Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). A more effective activity may be nightly reading, especially if parents are involved. The benefits of reading are clear: If students aren’t proficient readers by the end of third grade, they’re less likely to succeed academically and graduate from high school (Fiester, 2013 ).

For second-grade teacher Jacqueline Fiorentino, the minor benefits of homework did not outweigh the potential drawback of turning young children against school at an early age, so she experimented with dropping mandatory homework. “Something surprising happened: They started doing more work at home,” Fiorentino writes . “This inspiring group of 8-year-olds used their newfound free time to explore subjects and topics of interest to them.” She encouraged her students to read at home and offered optional homework to extend classroom lessons and help them review material.

Moderate Benefits for Middle School Students

As students mature and develop the study skills necessary to delve deeply into a topic—and to retain what they learn—they also benefit more from homework. Nightly assignments can help prepare them for scholarly work, and research shows that homework can have moderate benefits for middle school students (Cooper et al., 2006 ). Recent research also shows that online math homework, which can be designed to adapt to students’ levels of understanding, can significantly boost test scores (Roschelle et al., 2016 ).

There are risks to assigning too much, however: A 2015 study found that when middle school students were assigned more than 90 to 100 minutes of daily homework, their math and science test scores began to decline (Fernández-Alonso, Suárez-Álvarez, & Muñiz, 2015 ). Crossing that upper limit can drain student motivation and focus. The researchers recommend that “homework should present a certain level of challenge or difficulty, without being so challenging that it discourages effort.” Teachers should avoid low-effort, repetitive assignments, and assign homework “with the aim of instilling work habits and promoting autonomous, self-directed learning.”

In other words, it’s the quality of homework that matters, not the quantity. Brian Sztabnik, a veteran middle and high school English teacher, suggests that teachers take a step back and ask themselves these five questions :

• How long will it take to complete?
• Have all learners been considered?
• Will an assignment encourage future success?
• Will an assignment place material in a context the classroom cannot?
• Does an assignment offer support when a teacher is not there?

More Benefits for High School Students, but Risks as Well

By the time they reach high school, students should be well on their way to becoming independent learners, so homework does provide a boost to learning at this age, as long as it isn’t overwhelming (Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). When students spend too much time on homework—more than two hours each night—it takes up valuable time to rest and spend time with family and friends. A 2013 study found that high school students can experience serious mental and physical health problems, from higher stress levels to sleep deprivation, when assigned too much homework (Galloway, Conner, & Pope, 2013 ).

Homework in high school should always relate to the lesson and be doable without any assistance, and feedback should be clear and explicit.

Teachers should also keep in mind that not all students have equal opportunities to finish their homework at home, so incomplete homework may not be a true reflection of their learning—it may be more a result of issues they face outside of school. They may be hindered by issues such as lack of a quiet space at home, resources such as a computer or broadband connectivity, or parental support (OECD, 2014 ). In such cases, giving low homework scores may be unfair.

Since the quantities of time discussed here are totals, teachers in middle and high school should be aware of how much homework other teachers are assigning. It may seem reasonable to assign 30 minutes of daily homework, but across six subjects, that’s three hours—far above a reasonable amount even for a high school senior. Psychologist Maurice Elias sees this as a common mistake: Individual teachers create homework policies that in aggregate can overwhelm students. He suggests that teachers work together to develop a school-wide homework policy and make it a key topic of back-to-school night and the first parent-teacher conferences of the school year.

Parents Play a Key Role

Homework can be a powerful tool to help parents become more involved in their child’s learning (Walker et al., 2004 ). It can provide insights into a child’s strengths and interests, and can also encourage conversations about a child’s life at school. If a parent has positive attitudes toward homework, their children are more likely to share those same values, promoting academic success.

But it’s also possible for parents to be overbearing, putting too much emphasis on test scores or grades, which can be disruptive for children (Madjar, Shklar, & Moshe, 2015 ). Parents should avoid being overly intrusive or controlling—students report feeling less motivated to learn when they don’t have enough space and autonomy to do their homework (Orkin, May, & Wolf, 2017 ; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008 ; Silinskas & Kikas, 2017 ). So while homework can encourage parents to be more involved with their kids, it’s important to not make it a source of conflict.

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More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive, research suggests.

A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.   "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .   The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.   Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.   Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.   "The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.   Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.   Their study found that too much homework is associated with:   • Greater stress : 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.   • Reductions in health : In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.   • Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits : Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.   A balancing act   The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.   Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.   "This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," said Pope, who is also a co-founder of Challenge Success , a nonprofit organization affiliated with the GSE that conducts research and works with schools and parents to improve students' educational experiences..   Pope said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.   "Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.   High-performing paradox   In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."   Student perspectives   The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.   The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer at the Stanford News Service .

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Why Is There So Much Damn Homework In Kindergarten?

It was about a month ago when I dropped my oldest off for her first day of kindergarten.

Having been home with her and her 3-year-old brother for what felt like forever, I had quite a different reaction to dropping her off than most of the other moms there. They had watery eyes and sniffled into wadded-up tissues.

Meanwhile, I poured champagne into Dixie cups for everyone in the pickup zone.

Kidding. I would never have done something like that, mostly because I was too busy running to my car, blasting my music, and peeling out of there.

What I’m getting at is we’re all big fans of kindergarten in this house. My daughter loves it because she has people to talk to all day long, and I love it because she finally has other people to talk to all day long.

But as great as kindergarten is, the amount of homework she has seems like a bit much. I’m not trying to be one of those parents who bitches about everything, but hear me out.

When I was in kindergarten, it was only part-time. We went for 3 hours a day, which was 15 hours weekly.

My daughter is in kindergarten for 6 1/2 hours a day, which adds up to 32 1/2 hours weekly. But when you add in homework, my daughter is spending almost 40 hours a week on schoolwork, which is basically a full-time job.

You’re probably skeptical that my kindergartener has about 8 hours a week of homework. I don’t blame you. Let’s break it down:

Homework Packet

The packet consists of worksheets that must be completed throughout the week. The worksheets mostly consist of writing practice, drawing, and counting exercises. By the time we get her to sit down, focus, and actually finish them, they easily take about 30 minutes each day, or 2 1/2 hours a week.

To be clear, I’m pro-reading. We’re pro-literacy in general. And we usually read a book before bed anyway. But her teacher’s guidelines suggest we read for 20 minutes every day. And when you have a talkative 5-year-old, that makes it take closer to 30. Another 2 1/2 hours. And I have to remember to “log it” ( I hate reading logs ).

We also have a set of 72 flashcards that they ask us to review with our daughter twice a week. They consist of numbers as well as uppercase and lowercase letters. It usually takes us about an hour to get through them, or until someone starts crying (usually me). That’s another 2 hours a week.

For those keeping track, that’s SEVEN hours of homework to add to the 32 1/2 hours she’s already in the classroom every week. Doesn’t that seem excessive?

After all, SHE’S ONLY 5. She should have plenty of time to play with her brother and just enjoy being a kid. She has all day at school to work on projects. Can’t we let them focus on schoolwork while they’re there and let her growing brain get a little bit of a rest when she’s at home?

You might think that I’m too lazy to do homework with her, and that’s not entirely untrue. I mentioned I have a 3-year-old too, right? And I work full-time. So yeah, I’m too tired to walk my kid through 7 hours of homework a week. And she’s pretty damn tired too.

Besides, have you ever actually tried to go through SEVENTY-TWO flashcards with a kid who has the attention span of a goldfish? It’s torture — for everyone involved.

I don’t object to a reasonable amount of homework, but too much homework is a burden to kids as well as parents . I don’t want my 5-year-old daughter to become burned-out on schoolwork, and I don’t want her to have to deal with me when I’m burned-out on her schoolwork .

She loves learning, and she absolutely loves school. I would just prefer there be a little more balance and a little more time to rest and play in the evenings.

After all, you only get one chance to enjoy your childhood.

Breaking News

Yes, there is a limit to how much homework your child should do

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As more students in high school take advanced classes and Common Core guidelines have made kindergarten an academic experience, many parents feel like their children have too much homework.

So how much is too much, and what can parents do about it? Education Matters spoke to experts in the field to answer these questions.

How much homework should my student be doing?

LAUSD has suggested time allocations for students’ homework, and it suggests assigning homework only four days a week. The guidelines aren’t mandatory.

The middle- and high-school homework policy notes ”Special consideration must be given to students in honors, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, School for Advanced Studies (SAS) and highly gifted classes and programs.”

The California state Parent Teacher Assn. encourages local PTAs to work with districts to come up with homework guidelines.

What is the point of homework?

That depends on what grade your child is in. In elementary school, homework is mostly about establishing responsibility, said Katie McGrath, LAUSD’s director of elementary instruction. That includes teaching children to follow directions, learning how to be accountable for keeping homework safe, completing it, and turning it in.

Homework should reinforce lessons students have already learned in class. Perhaps, says Harris Cooper, a Duke psychology professor who studies homework, it includes a bonus question that takes the concept one step further -- preparing students for the next day’s lesson.

In middle school and high school, homework takes on the role of being important to academic achievement, Cooper said. Homework improves academic outcomes, up to a point. Research suggests that middle school students who complete 60 to 90 minutes of homework per night perform as well on standardized tests as the students who spend more time, Cooper said. In high school, that cutoff is at two hours of homework per night.

What’s the “10-minute rule”?

For years, teachers have been using the so-called “10-minute rule” to figure out homework targets. It’s the idea that with each grade of elementary school, a child’s average homework per night should increase about 10 minutes, said Cooper, who has researched this trend.

What do I do if there’s too much homework?

Parents can talk to or email teachers if there is consistently too much homework, or if it’s too difficult. If enough parents speak to the teacher, there might be a pattern that emerges that a teacher can address, either by covering the subject more in class or by assigning different homework. It could also be an opportunity to talk about tutoring or academic help options for a student.

It’s also OK to prioritize sleep and health over homework — LAUSD’s homework policy says that homework can count for only 20% or less of a student’s grade, so skipping an assignment in favor of being healthy once in awhile won’t affect the overall grade too much. Just address the underlying problem before it becomes a pattern.

What is a parent’s role?

Parents should be emotionally supportive and can help explain concepts, but stop short of solving a problem.

“It should really be the student’s responsibility to do homework with the parent playing a minor supporting role,” said Erika Patall, a University of Texas at Austin educational psychology professor who studies student motivation.

Parents can have a conversation with students at the beginning of the year to discuss when the students will do homework, where they’ll do it (it can be helpful to have a designated homework spot in the house, for example), and how students will best budget their time.

Researchers say it’s important for students to feel like they have autonomy and to feel responsible for their homework, as opposed to feeling like someone else is controlling them.

What can teachers do?

Like parents, it helps for teachers to give students a choice, Patall said. She has conducted research and found that when teachers gave students the option between two different assignments on the same topic, students performed better on that unit test and felt more competent and confident.

It also helps if students understand the purpose of homework. Listen to students’ feedback, and explain why this particular piece of homework is important, Patall said, and what role it plays in the lesson.

Is it normal to hate homework?

“Everybody hates homework,” said Janine Bempechat, professor of human development and psychology at Wheelock College in Boston. She interviews students about homework and educational experience.

That includes high-achieving and low-achieving students alike, Bempechat said.

Some parents hate homework too — kids parrot their parents’ behavior, so they’re less likely to react positively if their parent has a negative attitude toward homework.

And homework can be both lonely and exhausting, especially after six hours in school, Bempechat said. Parents can implement little reward systems for completing tasks, like 10-minute breaks to watch a YouTube video or ride a bike around the block.

Can my kid get homework help?

Yes. Depending on the time of day and the teacher, students or parents can email teachers with specific questions if they’ve exhausted other options. Don’t always expect a response, but the teacher will know that your kid is trying, and will be able to address the specific problem.

Here is a list of free tutoring programs throughout L.A. County . There are also homework hotlines that help students struggling with specific problems. Harvey Mudd College has a number that 4th- through 12th-grade students can call for help on science and math problems.

Reach Sonali Kohli on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli or by email at [email protected].

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Sonali Kohli is a former Los Angeles Times reporter. A product of Southern California, she grew up in Diamond Bar and graduated from UCLA. She worked as a metro reporter for the Orange County Register and as a reporter covering education and diversity for Quartz before joining The Times in 2015.

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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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Kindergarten Homework: Too Much Too Early?

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Kindergarten has taken some getting used to for Walker Sheppard, who didn’t attend preschool or day care. Besides all the new rules to remember, there’s a new nightly routine: homework.

“We spend anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour on it,” said Michael Sheppard, Walker’s dad.

When the 5-year-old comes home every day, Sheppard said, his son is tired and not ready to sit down and figure out his assignments.

“He doesn’t like it,” said Sheppard, who lives in Pulaski, Va. “The first week he went to school he asked us why he was having to do schoolwork at home.”

That’s a question a lot of parents are asking, especially when it comes to the youngest pupils. Studies by researchers including Harris Cooper, a Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor who wrote The Battle Over Homework , have consistently shown that homework has minimal academic benefits for children in the early-elementary years.

Instead, both the National Education Association and the National PTA endorse Cooper’s so-called 10-minute rule, which calls for roughly 10 minutes of homework a night per grade level beginning in 1st grade. So children in 2nd grade would have 20 minutes, those in 3rd grade would have 30 minutes, and so on. In high school, students may exceed that recommendation depending on the difficulty of the courses they choose.

Split Opinions

Those guidelines don’t even mention kindergarten. But that’s not stopping educators in many places from assigning homework.

Delilah Orti said that every Monday her daughter, Mia, a kindergartner last year in the Miami-Dade Public Schools system in Florida, received a homework packet with about 25 worksheets that were due at the end of that week.

Orti said the packet included work on phonics, spelling, reading comprehension, and social studies. She describes her daughter as a quick learner who was already reading in kindergarten but still needed her help with word problems and science worksheets.

“She could read the words, but she had no idea what they meant,” said Orti.

Orti said Mia spent 30 minutes reading every night and an hour on the packet.

“I felt that it was inappropriate for that age,” said Orti. “What she was getting for homework was more busywork. I don’t think she was getting anything out of it and I think it was way too much.”

But such concerns aren’t shared by administrators or parents at Arlington Traditional School, a countywide elementary school in Arlington, Va., with a waiting list of parents eager for their children to attend.

Kindergartners there are expected to do 30 minutes of homework a night, Monday through Thursday.

Every student at the school is expected to spend 15 minutes reading a night. For kindergartners who can’t read yet, that means their parents are expected to read to them. The other 15 minutes is spent doing things like dictating a story to their parents using words that start with a sound they’ve been learning in class or exercises that involve circling that letter.

“We feel that this is a connection that we want with parents,” said Holly Hawthorne, the school’s principal. “We want them to know what their children are learning at school, we want them to know how they’re doing in school, if the work is too hard, if it’s too easy, we want them to be able to support what the kids are learning at school at home as well.”

Eliminating Packets

Still, some kindergarten teachers remain firm in their opposition to mandatory homework.

Barbara Knapp used to assign her kindergarten pupils at Bradley Elementary School in Corralitos, Calif., weekly homework packets. But that all changed 10 years ago during the Great Recession.

“Teachers were only given two reams of paper a month at my school, so we were forced to cut back,” said Knapp.

She and some of her colleagues at the school located about 90 miles south of San Francisco decided a good way to do that would be to eliminate those homework packets. During that time, she said, she started to research homework and found the case against it for young elementary pupils very compelling.

“The research showed that there was no correlation between school success and the traditional paper-pencil homework in kindergarten,” said Knapp, who has 19 years of classroom-teaching experience.

When she was assigning homework, Knapp said parents sometimes complained that it was frustrating for their children. Other times, it was obvious the parents had done the work rather than the child.

Now, Knapp only assigns nightly reading of her pupils’ choice, a move that she credits with making them better readers. She adds that she hasn’t seen any deterioration in other skills since she eliminated traditional homework, and she’s been able to spend more time on lesson preparation rather than grading homework.

“It’s been great not having to focus on homework,” said Knapp. “Putting together the packet, running them all off, grading them all, it was a huge amount of time that was being taken instead of us planning really wonderful, rich, in-class lessons. Homework took away a lot of planning time for just a bunch of busywork.”

Risk of ‘Busywork’ vs. Parental Bonding

Cathy Vatterott is no fan of busywork at any grade level and doesn’t think homework should be part of kindergarten. She’s a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the author of Rethinking Homework . “There’s enough of an adjustment for young children in kindergarten without throwing in homework,” said Vatterott.

And she worries that adjusting to school routines combined with homework could turn off young students to learning.

“I want to make sure that they don’t hate school,” said Vatterott, who noted that young children learn best through play.

She also points to a 2016 University of Virginia study, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” which found that kindergarten in 2010 was more like the 1st grade of the late 1990s. Vatterott says she’s concerned that children who aren’t developmentally ready for this work might “internalize that they’re not smart or that they’re not good at school.”

But keeping the bond strong between home and school is one of the reasons that Duke researcher Cooper doesn’t mind homework for pupils in kindergarten, with a few caveats.

“The assignments need to be short, simple, and lead to success,” said Cooper. “We don’t want young children to get frustrated with homework. We don’t want them to get bored, and we don’t want them to begin thinking that schoolwork is too difficult for them so that they begin to develop a self-image of not being a good student.”

Finding a Balance

Some kindergarten teachers are embracing short, unique assignments for their pupils that don’t involve worksheets.

Shannon Brescher Shea’s son’s kindergarten teacher provides a list of activities the children can do at home if they choose. The activities ask them, for instance, to draw a picture of what they did over the weekend or collect and count a handful of leaves by ones.

Shea says after visiting her son’s classroom in suburban Rockville, Md., and seeing how much work he does, she’s even more against the idea of mandatory homework for children in kindergarten.

“They are going through so much energy and so much focus at school already and exerting so much self-control that to then have these kids come home and do homework on top of that is a recipe for them not wanting to go to school and not enjoying learning,” said Shea.

Jennifer Craven’s daughter is also in kindergarten this year, and she said so far the young girl has been asked to “practice tying shoes, practice writing her name, and read two books each night.”

Craven, who lives in Meadville, Pa., a city about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, said her family would be doing these activities anyway, and for now, her daughter thinks homework is fun.

“I think this is very age appropriate and I don’t mind the use of the term ‘homework’ at this age, as they will realize what real homework is soon enough,” said Craven.

Michael Sheppard talked to his son’s teacher in Pulaski about the homework she assigns. He said the 30-year classroom veteran acted like it was out of her hands.

Sheppard, 42, who attended school in the same district as his son, Walker, said he didn’t have to deal with homework until well after kindergarten.

“Maybe there should be homework,” said Sheppard. “I just think it would be better starting at 3rd grade.”

A version of this article appeared in the November 28, 2018 edition of Education Week as Kindergarten Homework Debate: Too Much Too Soon?

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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.

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Homework was always meant to be supplemental to what's learned in school. But it seems like the workload has grown exponentially, and to the possible detriment of our children. Hell, even elementary school students receive take-home assignments and hefty work packets on an almost daily basis. It varies from classroom to classroom, to be sure, but homework seems to be more common than not. Which begs the question, how much homework is too much ? And, perhaps, more importantly, what do elementary school students think about their own homework load? Is it as cumbersome as some of us parents believe it to be, or is it actually manageable and, perhaps, even fun?

My son is in preschool , and currently doesn't receive any homework. He did have one take-home project assigned — an all-about-you kind of assignment — that was, admittedly, extremely fun to work on together. The project didn't have a hard deadline, so there was plenty of time to work on it, and it was essentially open to interpretation, so every child in his class turned in something unique and different. In other words, it was great, but I know this assignment wasn't indicitive of homework assignments to come.

According to a 2007 Metlife study, 45 percent of students in grades three to 12 spend more than an hour a night doing homework . The same study found that six percent of students spend at least three hours a night doing homework. I’ve had friends share that their kindergarteners come home with 10-page packets for homework each night . Shouldn’t kids get to play more, discover more, and learn more in organic, hands-on ways? I thought I’d act some actual students what they thought about their homework load, and their answers, honestly, weren't too surprising:

Elliott, 5th Grade

“It's terrible and a waste of time. It doesn't feel necessary. We spend almost half our our waking ours at school. So it doesn't seem necessary that you spend more than half your day again just learning. My homework is long . There's a lot of it. It requires time that you might not have. I'd say it'd be more convenient if it were on computer versus worksheets, but I understand not everyone has access to a computer or internet.”

Sophie, 3rd Grade

“ Math should be harder , but I get it done fast so it should maybe stay the same. Literacy packet is too long and I don’t like the reading log.”

Ari, Kindergarten

“It’s a little too much.”

Auva, 6th Grade

“It’s stressful.”

Cece, 3rd grade

“I guess it’s OK, but I don’t like to do i‎t.”

Ruby, Kindergarten

“I like i‎t, but I don’t like i‎t at the same time. We have too much .”

Sam, Kindergarten

“I like homework because I get to do math and writing, but it takes too long.”

Gina, 3rd Grade

"It's good."

Kaitlin, 3rd Grade

" Homework is boring and it's just what we do in math in school."

Anjelyna, 4th Grade

“I honestly don’t like my reading homework. I love my math, that’s why I ask for more math work. But it’s OK, I don’t think it’s a lot."

Michael, 3rd Grade

“I really don’t care. It’s just for fun, so I don’t get bored, but I always do it."

Check out Romper's new video series, Bearing The Motherload , where disagreeing parents from different sides of an issue sit down with a mediator and talk about how to support (and not judge) each other’s parenting perspectives. New episodes air Mondays on Facebook.

Kindergarten Homework: Too Much Too Early?

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Kindergarten has taken some getting used to for Walker Sheppard, who didn’t attend preschool or day care. Besides all the new rules to remember, there’s a new nightly routine: homework.

“We spend anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour on it,” said Michael Sheppard, Walker’s dad.

When the 5-year-old comes home every day, Sheppard said, his son is tired and not ready to sit down and figure out his assignments.

“He doesn’t like it,” said Sheppard, who lives in Pulaski, Va. “The first week he went to school he asked us why he was having to do schoolwork at home.”

That’s a question a lot of parents are asking, especially when it comes to the youngest pupils. Studies by researchers including Harris Cooper, a Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor who wrote The Battle Over Homework , have consistently shown that homework has minimal academic benefits for children in the early-elementary years.

Instead, both the National Education Association and the National PTA endorse Cooper’s so-called 10-minute rule, which calls for roughly 10 minutes of homework a night per grade level beginning in 1st grade. So children in 2nd grade would have 20 minutes, those in 3rd grade would have 30 minutes, and so on. In high school, students may exceed that recommendation depending on the difficulty of the courses they choose.

Split Opinions

Those guidelines don’t even mention kindergarten. But that’s not stopping educators in many places from assigning homework.

Delilah Orti said that every Monday her daughter, Mia, a kindergartner last year in the Miami-Dade Public Schools system in Florida, received a homework packet with about 25 worksheets that were due at the end of that week.

Orti said the packet included work on phonics, spelling, reading comprehension, and social studies. She describes her daughter as a quick learner who was already reading in kindergarten but still needed her help with word problems and science worksheets.

“She could read the words, but she had no idea what they meant,” said Orti.

Orti said Mia spent 30 minutes reading every night and an hour on the packet.

“I felt that it was inappropriate for that age,” said Orti. “What she was getting for homework was more busywork. I don’t think she was getting anything out of it and I think it was way too much.”

But such concerns aren’t shared by administrators or parents at Arlington Traditional School, a countywide elementary school in Arlington, Va., with a waiting list of parents eager for their children to attend.

Kindergartners there are expected to do 30 minutes of homework a night, Monday through Thursday.

Every student at the school is expected to spend 15 minutes reading a night. For kindergartners who can’t read yet, that means their parents are expected to read to them. The other 15 minutes is spent doing things like dictating a story to their parents using words that start with a sound they’ve been learning in class or exercises that involve circling that letter.

“We feel that this is a connection that we want with parents,” said Holly Hawthorne, the school’s principal. “We want them to know what their children are learning at school, we want them to know how they’re doing in school, if the work is too hard, if it’s too easy, we want them to be able to support what the kids are learning at school at home as well.”

Eliminating Packets

Still, some kindergarten teachers remain firm in their opposition to mandatory homework.

Barbara Knapp used to assign her kindergarten pupils at Bradley Elementary School in Corralitos, Calif., weekly homework packets. But that all changed 10 years ago during the Great Recession.

“Teachers were only given two reams of paper a month at my school, so we were forced to cut back,” said Knapp.

She and some of her colleagues at the school located about 90 miles south of San Francisco decided a good way to do that would be to eliminate those homework packets. During that time, she said, she started to research homework and found the case against it for young elementary pupils very compelling.

“The research showed that there was no correlation between school success and the traditional paper-pencil homework in kindergarten,” said Knapp, who has 19 years of classroom-teaching experience.

When she was assigning homework, Knapp said parents sometimes complained that it was frustrating for their children. Other times, it was obvious the parents had done the work rather than the child.

Now, Knapp only assigns nightly reading of her pupils’ choice, a move that she credits with making them better readers. She adds that she hasn’t seen any deterioration in other skills since she eliminated traditional homework, and she’s been able to spend more time on lesson preparation rather than grading homework.

“It’s been great not having to focus on homework,” said Knapp. “Putting together the packet, running them all off, grading them all, it was a huge amount of time that was being taken instead of us planning really wonderful, rich, in-class lessons. Homework took away a lot of planning time for just a bunch of busywork.”

Risk of ‘Busywork’ vs. Parental Bonding

Cathy Vatterott is no fan of busywork at any grade level and doesn’t think homework should be part of kindergarten. She’s a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the author of Rethinking Homework . “There’s enough of an adjustment for young children in kindergarten without throwing in homework,” said Vatterott.

And she worries that adjusting to school routines combined with homework could turn off young students to learning.

“I want to make sure that they don’t hate school,” said Vatterott, who noted that young children learn best through play.

She also points to a 2016 University of Virginia study, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” which found that kindergarten in 2010 was more like the 1st grade of the late 1990s. Vatterott says she’s concerned that children who aren’t developmentally ready for this work might “internalize that they’re not smart or that they’re not good at school.”

But keeping the bond strong between home and school is one of the reasons that Duke researcher Cooper doesn’t mind homework for pupils in kindergarten, with a few caveats.

“The assignments need to be short, simple, and lead to success,” said Cooper. “We don’t want young children to get frustrated with homework. We don’t want them to get bored, and we don’t want them to begin thinking that schoolwork is too difficult for them so that they begin to develop a self-image of not being a good student.”

Finding a Balance

Some kindergarten teachers are embracing short, unique assignments for their pupils that don’t involve worksheets.

Shannon Brescher Shea’s son’s kindergarten teacher provides a list of activities the children can do at home if they choose. The activities ask them, for instance, to draw a picture of what they did over the weekend or collect and count a handful of leaves by ones.

Shea says after visiting her son’s classroom in suburban Rockville, Md., and seeing how much work he does, she’s even more against the idea of mandatory homework for children in kindergarten.

“They are going through so much energy and so much focus at school already and exerting so much self-control that to then have these kids come home and do homework on top of that is a recipe for them not wanting to go to school and not enjoying learning,” said Shea.

Jennifer Craven’s daughter is also in kindergarten this year, and she said so far the young girl has been asked to “practice tying shoes, practice writing her name, and read two books each night.”

Craven, who lives in Meadville, Pa., a city about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, said her family would be doing these activities anyway, and for now, her daughter thinks homework is fun.

“I think this is very age appropriate and I don’t mind the use of the term ‘homework’ at this age, as they will realize what real homework is soon enough,” said Craven.

Michael Sheppard talked to his son’s teacher in Pulaski about the homework she assigns. He said the 30-year classroom veteran acted like it was out of her hands.

Sheppard, 42, who attended school in the same district as his son, Walker, said he didn’t have to deal with homework until well after kindergarten.

“Maybe there should be homework,” said Sheppard. “I just think it would be better starting at 3rd grade.”

A version of this article appeared in the November 28, 2018 edition of Education Week as Kindergarten Homework Debate: Too Much Too Soon?

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Home > Capstones & Theses > 864

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Too much homework.

Diana Aguirre , California State University, Monterey Bay Follow

Document Type

Capstone Project (Open Access)

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Liberal Studies

Liberal Studies / History

First Advisor

Linda Bynoe

This capstone examines the correct amount of homework to give Kindergarten to 2 nd -grade students. The primary concern was finding the ideal amount of homework to have the best benefits to students without any harmful effects on students. Some research indicated that students’ grade levels should determine the amount of homework given to students. Some studies explained the negative consequences to family and students when too much homework is required. However, other research proposed that the quality of homework mattered; that busy work was inappropriate to give students. We also examined some of the educational practices of different countries.

Recommended Citation

Aguirre, Diana, "Too Much Homework" (2020). Capstone Projects and Master's Theses . 864. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/caps_thes_all/864

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