CHAPTER 4
HOMEWORK – THE PROBLEM WITH
OPPORTUNITY COST
“YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, BUT NOT EVERYTHING.”
– DAVID ALLEN
If you ask five plumbers why they install drainpipes with a gradient of at least
1.65%, they’ll likely all tell you that this is the minimum safe ‘fall’ to prevent
possible build-up of waste water. If you ask five professional tennis players why
they change racquets regularly during matches, they’ll likely all tell you that
this helps to ensure string tension remains constant. If you ask five teachers
why they assign homework, they’ll likely all tell you something very different –
ranging from providing practice opportunities to flipping classroom learning
to engaging parents in the learning process.
Despite the lack of consensus, the popular justifications for assigning homework
seem reasonable, logical, and even fundamental. However, many seem to reflect
personal preference rather than a robust base of evidence.
In Australia alone, a country with around 10,000 schools, students this year
will collectively complete approximately 350 million hours of homework. That’s
more than 40,000 years’ worth of time. This, by the way, is also a country
where, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, over 90% of
teenagers fail to meet basic daily physical exercise recommendations (one hour
of moderately intense activity).
This is not to suggest that kids should necessarily be running around instead
of doing homework (although a compelling argument could be made for this).
It is merely to say that with such a massive investment of time and energy,
it’s reasonable to assume we must have clear answers to questions like: Does
homework actually work? Is it effective at improving student learning (and, if
so, under what circumstances)? How much homework is ideal? How frequently
should it be assigned? For whom is it best suited?
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10 Things Schools Get Wrong
A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Let’s consider the hypothetical case of Alex and Ben.
Alex and Ben are twin boys. They are 13 years old and they’re enrolled in all the
same Year 7 classes at the local public high school. It is an excellent school and
Alex and Ben are both very dedicated, engaged students.
On Monday, Alex and Ben go to school and enjoy their lessons in science,
English, history, art, and mathematics. They work hard and meaningfully
contribute to each lesson. In this particular school, the homework guidelines
stipulate that each teacher should assign 15 minutes of optional homework per
lesson; students can choose to complete the homework or not – there are no
prizes for completion and no penalties for non-completion.
Alex catches the bus and arrives home from school that day at 4:30 p.m. He has
a quick snack and then heads to his room to begin his homework at 5:00 p.m.
Independently, he completes his science, English, and maths homework – just
in time to join his family for dinner at 6:00 p.m.
After dinner, Alex heads back to his room, where he continues to work until
7:30 p.m. Having completed all his homework, Alex is understandably tired
and, although he wishes he had the energy to read, he settles in to watch a
few YouTube videos of his favourite basketball players. Alex loves basketball,
but often doesn’t have the time or energy to practise as much as he’d like. At
8:30 p.m., he gets ready for bed and has the lights out by 9:00 p.m.
Ben, on the other hand, stays after school that day to practise football for an
hour with a group of friends. They train rigorously but share lots of laughs, too.
After training, Ben catches the bus back to his neighbour’s house, where he and
two friends regularly meet for band practice. Ben plays the guitar and enjoys
creating music in a social environment. After jamming for 45 minutes, Ben
heads home just in time to have dinner with Alex and his family.
Following dinner, while Alex completes his homework, Ben and his dad work
together to plan their next family camping trip. They want to make it really
special, so they discuss various outdoor activities that would be best suited to
different camping locations. They research cultural and historical sites that
might be interesting to visit, and Ben jots down notes to share with his brother
and mum. By 8:00 p.m., the trip is sketched out, so Ben sits with his mum and
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Chapter 4: Homework – The Problem with Opportunity Cost
reads a Harry Potter novel for 30 minutes. At 8:30 p.m., he gets ready for bed
and has the lights out by 9:00 p.m.
What do you think will happen when Alex and Ben arrive for class the
following day? What about the following week, month, or year? Who is better
off: the student diligently doing homework or the student diligently not doing
homework?
Of course, the above scenario is both idealized and contrived, but it’s based on
an inescapable fact: homework takes time. In some cases, it takes a lot of time.
This means homework comes at a significant opportunity cost. When students
are doing homework, they are necessarily not practising football or playing music
with friends, not spending time with Mum and Dad, and not reading for pleasure.
Which begs the question: is homework worth the hundreds of millions of hours
students collectively spend on it each year? And what about the millions of
hours teachers collectively spend marking and assessing this work? And let’s
not forget the time spent on conflicts between parents and children, or the
confrontations between teachers and students.
Is homework truly worth all this trouble?
DOING MY HOMEWORK
Of all the different fields that constitute educational research, you’d be hard
pressed to find one more polarized than that exploring the value of homework.
Even a cursory glance at the last century of literature will turn up comments
ranging from calls to increase homework to pleas to abandon homework
altogether.
Similarly, among academic and educational communities, you will find a wide
spectrum of opinions ranging from staunch supporters to avid critics. Even across
eras, the pendulum has swung from a dominant anti-homework movement in
the early 1900s (California passed a law in 1901, which was revoked in 1917, that
banned homework for students younger than 15 years old) to a strong Cold War
influenced pro-homework movement in the late 20th century.
Among all this debate, the argument in favour of setting regular homework
appears to be based upon a number of key assumptions. Let’s consider each in
turn.
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10 Things Schools Get Wrong
Assumption #1: Homework is an essential part of school.
For many teachers, assigning homework is a lot like eating dinner at night: it’s
something that is part of the daily routine. In her book Rethinking Homework,
University of Missouri professor Dr Cathy Vatterott writes:
Homework is a long-standing education tradition that, until recently, has
seldom been questioned. The concept of homework has become so engrained
in U.S. culture that the word homework is part of the common vernacular.
So prevalent has it become that this concept has bled beyond the classroom.
Many employers now set homework for new or prospective employees, coaches
set homework for professional athletes, and even psychologists set homework
for their patients.
This apparent compulsion to set homework is in part because of its historical
association with the concept of ‘rigour’. Because homework is usually graded
by teachers themselves, it’s easy to see how a perception might develop that
rigorous teachers set more homework, while lazy teachers set less. In this sense,
homework becomes a kind of ‘badge of honour’: good teachers must be willing
to give up more of their personal time to ensure their students undertake more
learning.
Contributing to this perception is the fact that most teachers and parents
are the product of an education system that has long valued homework. Our
teachers set homework and it worked fine for us, so why should we challenge an
apparently legitimised system?
This kind of inertia is hard to shake. Despite the changing face of education,
there remains a pervasive expectation among most individuals that homework
is an essential habit we are expected to foster. Oddly, it can be hard to pin down
the source of this expectation. In a strange kind of cyclical paradox, often
teachers feel that schools expect homework, while schools feel that parents
expect homework, while parents feel that teachers expect homework. In the end,
it’s difficult to determine who’s driving this train.
In practice, these expectations likely fuel each other. But why do so many
believe that we need homework in the first place? It’s interesting to consider
who would be the most disappointed if homework were to suddenly disappear.
Would students be upset? Doubtful. Would teachers rue the lost opportunity
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Chapter 4: Homework – The Problem with Opportunity Cost
to grade assignments? Unlikely. Would parents long for the ‘good old days’
when they got to nag and hassle their children to do their homework?
Probably not.
But of course, we can’t abolish homework, because…
Assumption #2: Homework helps students develop self-regulation skills.
It is true that you can instil an almost Pavlovian discipline in students through
simple reward and punishment (an issue we’ll explore further in Chapter 8).
It takes only a few gold stars or detentions to encourage many students to
regularly complete their homework. The logic is that this ongoing homework
will lead students to develop study skills, time management skills, and
independent learning skills. Presumably, these are skills that teachers don’t have
ample time to fully nurture in the classroom, so students must independently
develop them at home.
Although this sounds plausible, there is an absolute dearth of research to
support (or refute) this assumption. In fact, a recent review only returned five
published articles since 1986 that explored the link between homework and
student self-regulation skills. Of these, only one conducted an experimental
intervention, while the remainder merely assessed correlations.
Regarding the one paper that conducted an experimental intervention, the
data did show that homework could significantly improve student self-efficacy,
self-reflection, and time management. But here’s the twist: the homework these
students were assigned explicitly explored self-efficacy, self-reflection, and time
management strategies. In other words, self-regulation was not a by-product of
completing the homework, it was the homework. Demonstrating that students
can improve self-regulation skills by committing time to explicitly learning
those skills is no different from demonstrating that students can learn a second
language by committing time to explicitly learning that language.
The remaining four correlational papers all demonstrated that students who
score higher on scales of self-regulation often complete more homework.
Unfortunately, as the authors all rightly pointed out, this correlation in no
way suggests a causation, and in fact can easily be understood in the opposite
direction. While it’s possible that students might develop self-regulation skills
by completing more homework, it’s equally plausible that students who already
possess these skills simply have a larger capacity for homework.
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10 Things Schools Get Wrong
In the end, none of this work speaks to the assumption that homework drives
the development of discipline. As University of Arizona professor Etta Kralovec
has plainly stated:
There’s been no research done on whether homework teaches responsibility,
self-discipline, or motivation. That’s just a value judgment. The
counterargument can just as easily be made that homework teaches kids to
cheat, to do the least amount of work, or to get by.
From a personal perspective, as I consider my 15 years of high school classroom
teaching, this concept makes me feel particularly uneasy. I know that, for the
most part, I set homework that I thought was meaningful. I also leveraged my
relationship with students to encourage homework completion. But looking
back, if I’m really being honest, I can’t be sure what habits I was actually fostering
in my students. Did they truly hone their study skills, or did they merely learn
how to play the game of grades? Did they develop time management skills, or
did they frequently complete assignments during the 5 minutes prior to class?
Did they ever practise independent learning, or did they always rely on me to
tell them what work was relevant?
When homework is neither particularly engaging nor inherently motivating,
educators have no choice but to rely on extrinsic motivation to drive compliance.
For the most part, this works – but there’s no evidence to suggest that it
engenders self-regulation. In fact, the only thing rewards might engender is a
basic form of obedience.
But this might not be a bad thing, because…
Assumption #3: Students must accept obedience to succeed in the ‘real world’.
It’s important for students to obediently complete work they don’t particularly
care for because non-enjoyable work is a natural condition of the ‘real world’.
As adults, we all must regularly perform mundane tasks, like filing our taxes,
renewing our car insurance, and sitting through professional training seminars.
None of these things are deeply meaningful to most of us, and in a perfect world
we wouldn’t have to do them. Unfortunately, obedience dictates that we must
tick these boxes to avoid punishment.
But here’s the thing: while failing to file taxes carries real social consequences,
failing to compete an extra hour of schoolwork while at home does not. The
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Chapter 4: Homework – The Problem with Opportunity Cost
problem with this line of thinking becomes obvious when you recognize the
clear distinction between the mundane tasks adults face (which serve as the
motor of society) and those we impose onto children (which carry little to no
broad social significance). Nevertheless, in the world of education, we have
decided to conflate the two.
This philosophy is perhaps best captured by author Alfie Kohn, who writes that
premature exposure to practices like compulsory homework ‘is rationalized by
invoking a notion called BGUTI: Better Get Used To It. The logic here is that we
have to prepare [students] for the bad things that are going to be done to [them]
later… by doing it to [them] now.’
BGUTI sounds a little ridiculous, both as an acronym and as a justification for
homework, doesn’t it? It feels like we are imagining an unnecessarily pessimistic
future for our children in which ‘success’ is dependent upon obediently
complying with the requests of superiors and completing whatever routine tasks
are imposed.
The entire exercise becomes even more questionable when we consider the full
cost of homework – the activities, social interactions, and other opportunities
students are necessarily missing out on in order to learn the lessons of BGUTI;
opportunities which may prove equally (if not more) relevant to the ‘real world’.
Could it be possible that this practice is nothing more than a self-fulfilling
prophecy? That rather than preparing students for modern society, BGUTI
actually fashions modern society in its own image?
But hey – maybe it is all worth it because…
Assumption #4: Homework boosts learning.
Now we’re getting to the crux of the issue. Over the last 75 years, an extensive
body of research has accumulated, which – as previously noted – supports the
entire spectrum of potential viewpoints on homework.
Unfortunately, almost all of this research suffers from various methodological
challenges:
• Many studies are correlational, making it impossible to concretely
determine the effect of homework on learning.
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10 Things Schools Get Wrong
• Homework does not occur in a vacuum and, unfortunately, many
studies fail to account for variations in classroom learning and
instruction that support homework.
• Many studies rely on students’ often inaccurate (if not outright
fallacious) memory of how much time they spent completing
homework and which learning techniques they employed.
• Many studies fail to elucidate the type, quality, or make-up of varied
homework assignments.
• Many studies define and measure learning only according to grades
and/or test scores.
These challenges aside, there is a wealth of data available to help us better orient
our decision-making. In general, this work demonstrates that homework does
have a positive effect on student learning. However, once we move beyond
generalities into specifics, a much more convoluted picture emerges. Let’s start
by delineating between age ranges.
There is a clear consensus that homework confers little to no learning benefits
among primary years students. In fact, global effect sizes range between 0.0
and 0.2, meaning the correlation between homework and learning would be
classified as ‘below small’.
The reasons for this are likely twofold. First, without advanced neurological
maturation, few young students have developed strong inhibitory mechanisms.
This makes it incredibly difficult for them to sustain attention, and leaves them
highly susceptible to the myriad distractions in the home. Second, because
of a lack of experience, young students often (and understandably) employ
ineffective strategies that do little to advance learning. For instance, whereas
older students typically devote study time to focusing on material they struggle
with, younger students typically devote study time to focusing on material they
already comprehend.
Fortunately, these two issues can be mitigated through adult intervention.
When parents participate in a young child’s homework by offering accurate
and constructive feedback, they can help maintain attention and ensure
the use of effective learning strategies. Unfortunately, as a result of varied
social, economic, and familial circumstances, not all students have access
to the type of adult support which might make homework meaningful at
this young age.
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Chapter 4: Homework – The Problem with Opportunity Cost
When we shift our focus to older students, the news becomes slightly better.
Homework appears to have a small impact on learning in middle years (global
effect sizes range between 0.2 and 0.4) and a moderate impact on learning
in upper years (global effect sizes range between 0.5 and 0.7). Although the
reasons for these gains are still up for debate, likely explanations include the
increased development of cognitive control, a more consistent implementation
of effective learning strategies, and an increased motivation to succeed.
Perhaps the most important research finding with regard to homework is that
any measurable correlation between duration and outcome is not linear. Put
simply, more homework does not necessarily mean more learning. Rather,
homework can generally benefit learning only up to a certain time point;
beyond this point, homework can often impair learning. Among primary year
students, this point appears to be ~15 minutes; among middle year students it
appears to be ~45 minutes; and among upper year students it appears to be ~60
minutes.
This means homework can indeed improve learning, but only when it’s done in
shorter stints than most people would assume.
Unfortunately, most schools greatly exceed these learning limits. Although it’s
difficult to arrive at a precise figure, in the US, the UK, and Australia, primary
year students are assigned an average of 35 minutes of homework per night,
while middle and upper year students are assigned an average of 90 minutes
per night.
Do you see the problem? Herein lies the primary issue of opportunity cost.
Many schools assign too much homework, which needlessly pushes students
beyond their natural ‘limits’. Beyond potentially harming learning, this practice
also reduces the time students have to undertake personally meaningful
activities which may drive different forms of social, emotional, and personal
learning not typically reflected in exams.
Beyond learning, there is research linking increased homework to decreased
wellbeing. Some surveys report that approximately 60% of students cite
homework as a primary source of stress (compared to less than 1% who describe
it as a non-stressor), while upwards of 30% of students in some countries are
categorized as ‘clinically depressed’ as a result of pressures from unceasing
academic work.
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10 Things Schools Get Wrong
This is a crucial aspect of the opportunity cost argument that is too often
overlooked. It has long been known that pursuing personal passions with like-
minded peers is a great way to combat stress and support wellbeing. By reducing
the amount of personal time students have at home, there is a high likelihood
that homework is significantly contributing to the sharp rise in student stress
and mental illness reported around the world.
SO NOW THEN…
What can we conclude from this long, ambiguous story of homework?
First, homework generally appears to be a powerful tool that can support student
learning in certain circumstances. Unfortunately, this power is often used with
little regard for the opportunity cost involved. Perhaps an ideal approach would
be to neither exalt nor vilify homework, but simply to understand its benefits
and boundaries, and employ the tool accordingly.
Second, it’s always important to strategically consider the format that homework
assumes. At a practical level, several analyses have demonstrated that homework
largely boosts learning when it is task-based and focused on the practice/
rehearsal of previously learned knowledge or skills. Whenever homework
introduces novel material, requires deep consideration, or takes a project-based
approach, learning diminishes significantly. This is likely due to the necessity
of expert guidance and feedback when undertaking deeper forms of learning –
a scaffold that is mostly unavailable (at least in real time) when working from
home. As such, structuring homework around material which students are at
least moderately acquainted with will generally produce the best outcomes.
But beyond mere practical considerations, would it be possible to reimagine
the format of homework in a way that cultivates a love of learning (rather than
simple obedience), or inspires collaboration between children and their parents
(rather than isolated work)? There are certainly many different forms this could
take, but opportunity cost could be greatly diminished if homework were used
to embrace activities students would normally undertake and were used to
increase motivation by fostering relationships.
Third, long-form homework should be dropped from all primary schools: there
is no compelling or even reasonable argument to be made for its inclusion. With
that said, there is strong evidence to suggest that reading with parents is a great
way for young learners to develop their cognitive and emotional capacity while
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Chapter 4: Homework – The Problem with Opportunity Cost
simultaneously boosting their reading skills. Perhaps this idea aligns with the
broader ambition of homework alluded to in the previous paragraph.
With regard to secondary schools, short-form homework should remain the
default. Additional work should only be assigned when it conveys a clear,
demonstrable learning purpose (and never as a pretext to signal teaching
‘rigour’). Furthermore, it might make sense to include students in the homework
setting process. Seeing as it’s their time, their effort, and their learning on the
line, perhaps it’s worthwhile getting their input.
Fourth, remember that homework occurs at home. Homework should not
be about schools reaching into the homes of students in order to extend
lesson time. As Maya Angelou, the great American poet wrote, ‘The ache for
home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be
questioned.’ Any homework assigned should not simply extend lessons because
of inadequate time or organization during the school day.
In the end, we return to where we began: opportunity cost. If homework is to be
employed, then it’s important that the associated benefits outweigh those that
might be gleaned from other activities students will necessarily be sacrificing.
Unfortunately, when research suggests that students undertake too much
homework, and as a result experience reduced wellbeing, we have an obligation
to scrutinize this endeavour. Is it possible to assign less but better homework
that boosts learning while freeing up more time for children to engage in
sports, play in bands, talk to parents, and read for pleasure at home? Surely the
non-academic benefits of such activities must outweigh the opportunity cost
associated with pushing homework beyond the limits of student learning.
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