Can We Talk About the Education Elites Valuation of Homework?

Researchers at the University of Chicago led by Erin A. Maloney analyzed the math attitudes and abilities of more than 400 first- and second-graders, using a data set that was part of a larger, unrelated study. The kids were tested twice on their math skills, once at the beginning of the year and once toward the end; they were also asked how nervous all things math-related made them, like tests or being called on by a teacher to answer an addition question. Their parents took surveys, too, to measure their math anxiety and how much they'd helped their kids with homework over the school year.

In the end, the kids with math-anxious parents learned less math during the school year, and they were also more likely become more math-anxious themselves — but only if their parents had helped them with homework. "Notably, when parents reported helping with math homework less often, children's math achievement and attitudes were not related to parents' math anxiety," Maloney and her co-authors write in their paper. So if the parents who hate math didn't try helping with homework, their kids fared about as well as the children of parents who had less math anxiety

Did doing it make any difference? The Maltese et al. study looked at the effect on test scores and on grades. They emphasized the latter, but let’s get the former out of the way first.

Was there a correlation between the amount of homework that high school students reported doing and their scores on standardized math and science tests? Yes, and it was statistically significant but “very modest”: Even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours’ worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test. Is that really worth the frustration, exhaustion, family conflict, loss of time for other activities, and potential diminution of interest in learning? And how meaningful a measure were those tests in the first place, since, as the authors concede, they’re timed measures of mostly mechanical skills? (Thus, a headline that reads “Study finds homework boosts achievement” can be translated as “A relentless regimen of after-school drill-and-skill can raise scores a wee bit on tests of rote learning.”)

But it was grades, not tests, that Maltese and his colleagues really cared about. They were proud of having looked at transcript data in order to figure out “the exact grade a student received in each class [that he or she] completed” so they could compare that to how much homework the student did. Previous research has looked only at students’ overall grade-point averages.


And the result of this fine-tuned investigation? There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”