teachers homework magazine

Teacher's bookshelf: Rethinking Homework

Nine years after releasing Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs , US education professor Cathy Vatterott is back with a second edition. The former teacher and principal says much has changed since the original publication, but the debate over whether school homework should be seen as essential, alienating or even harmful is an enduring one. Rather than eliminating homework all together, she suggests a new paradigm to guide educators in setting tasks that work for all students. In this extract for Teacher readers – taken from a chapter on effective homework practices – Vatterott discusses the importance of making tasks relevant and giving students more control over their learning.

‘Students are often unmotivated to do homework because they do not perceive it as important. It's just a task to do with no personal relevance or individuality.

‘What's wrong with this picture? In many classrooms, students feel little or no ownership of their learning in general – we teach, we assign tasks, we test, and students are the passive receptacles (Wiliam, 2016). They have no stake in the outcome – it doesn't mean anything to them – because it's not about them. As long as learning and homework are being “done to” them, the goals are ours, not theirs (Kohn, 2006). As a teacher once said, “I've never heard of a child not doing his work; it's our work he's not doing” (Vatterott, 2015).

‘Think about all the imperfections we accept from very young children as they learn skills like feeding and dressing themselves. We instinctively realize that messy high chairs and snow boots worn in summer are less important than mastery of the skill and the pride that comes with it. We fully understand the freedom that is required for children to take ownership of those tasks. Yet when it comes to academic learning, we often fail to appreciate the innate desire for mastery or trust the child's knowledge of how to get there. So we assign a single task as homework and expect all students to comply. And voilà! Learning occurs. Except when it doesn't (Vatterott, 2014) …

‘… Like those milestones in early childhood development, student ownership of homework is not perfect, but it is powerful. When students know themselves as learners and how they best learn, and when they are free to connect personally with the content, learning becomes joyful and intrinsically rewarding and need not be incentivized.

‘How is student ownership of homework achieved? It starts with choice (Anderson, 2016). Homework choice can be as limited as asking students to “pick any 10 of these 30 problems to solve,” as specific as having students work only on learning targets that they are struggling with, or as wide open as a self-selected, self-designed project. Students may not have a choice about the learning goal, but they can almost always be given a choice as to the path they take to reach the goal. For instance, suppose the learning goal for all students is to memorize their multiplication tables. The homework might look like this:

• Create your own method to memorize your multiplication tables. Some ideas other students have tried include reciting, making note cards, drawing a grid or a color-coded chart, or creating a rap song.
• Share your idea with the class tomorrow.
• Practice your method this week.
• Evaluate how well your method worked after the no-count quiz on Friday.'

Copyright © 2018 Cathy Vatterott. Reproduced by permission. Rethinking homework: Best practices that support diverse needs, 2nd Edition, by Cathy Vatterott, published by ASCD, is out now. Learn more about this book and ASCD by visiting www.ascd.org .

Anderson, M. (2016). Learning to choose, choosing to learn: The key to student motivation and achievement . Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Educational Leadership , 69(3), 28–33.

Vatterott, C. (2014). Student-owned homework. Educational Leadership , 71(6), 39–42.

Vatterott, C. (2015). Rethinking grading: Meaningful assessment for standards-based learning . Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Vatterott, C. (2018). Rethinking homework: Best practices that support diverse needs. ASCD.

Wiliam, D. (2016). The secret of effective feedback. Educational Leadership , 73(7), 10–15.

In this extract, Dr Cathy Vatterott discusses the importance of giving students more control over homework tasks. Think about a recent homework task you set for your students. What was the learning goal? Was it important for students to take the same path to that goal? How could you have introduced student choice about the path taken?

Related articles

• Teaching & Learning

Home truths about homework

Teaching during lockdown has presented a vast range of challenges within education but, when we eventually move into the post-Covid world, there could be some opportunities, too. It is unlikely that many teachers are thinking about “building back better” just now, as they try to keep their heads above the water. But one area that could eventually present opportunities for recovery and improvement is homework.

One of the biggest challenges faced by teachers has been trying to provide coherent learning opportunities that support positive and productive engagement. Parents and carers have undoubtedly found this difficult, with the phrase “that’s not how I did it when I was at school” being heard at kitchen tables around the country. Of course, home learning is not new: in Scotland, official figures pre-pandemic suggested that only around 0.1 per cent of school-age pupils were home educated, although the reality may have been higher.

A far more commonplace example of out-of-school education is homework. Obviously, the lockdown experience has involved far more than typical homework activities, such as practising spelling and times tables, or completing a consolidation worksheet. As a result, parents and carers will be more acutely aware than ever of what it is like to be a teacher - and this might be a good thing.

Homework vs homeschooling

The evidence for the value of traditional homework is mixed. The Education Endowment Foundation research summary suggests minimal evidence for effectiveness of homework in primary and slightly stronger justification for use in the secondary sector.

There is a variety of factors relating to students, teachers, parents and the task itself, making homework a complex area of study. It has been suggested that homework can be used effectively, especially in older age groups, for consolidation of learning and for developing traits such as autonomy and self-regulation. At its worst, homework is allocated simply because of long-established expectations or tradition: “It is what we did in school, so you can do it, too.”

It can also affect the home environment, which is especially pertinent during Covid-19, with demands on students and parents exacerbated by financial pressures and a reported increase in mental health issues. These pressures will not end with the return of students to school buildings.

The evidence for the value of homework with young children isn’t great. In fact, a review of the homework literature shows little - if any - influence of homework on academic achievement at primary level. And it is not even clear, on balance, that homework is a positive influence on primary-age students. The challenges that parents, teachers and students face with homework have also been problems for home learning. Notably, many parents and carers - even those who are teachers - will have found it difficult to get the youngest learners to focus. This might not be an issue with the learners themselves but, with our perception of what homework has always been, there is a lack of shared understanding about the very purpose of the activity.

Self-regulation

Advocates of homework often stress its importance in developing self-regulatory skills. This may differ from the experience of many teachers who have to relentlessly chase homework or receive homework that is incomplete, rushed or copied.

The Sutton Trust reported that only 51 per cent of teachers in the most advantaged state schools were getting at least three-quarters of work back during home learning, with just 20 per cent in the most deprived schools.

Unfortunately, the reality is that homework does not necessarily teach learners to be independent; it often has the opposite effect, depending on the nature of the task. It may even kill a love of learning.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. During Covid-19, teachers have had to innovate and experiment with various techniques, tools and apps to keep learners engaged and focused on learning, and averted from the myriad distractions and lures of the internet.

In fact, home learning is a great opportunity to make links between what children learn in school and experience at home. Students can apply what they learn at home and report this back to their teacher, giving unique opportunities for teachers to assess student understanding.

Instead of focusing on independence as a self-regulatory skill, home learning could demonstrate the usefulness and benefits of what they learn in school, transforming homework from an oppressive task that must be completed to an empowering educational tool.

The role of technology

Covid-19 has put a spotlight on the inequalities that exist in society and in education. Learners from low-income backgrounds have suffered most, with many not having the full access needed for home learning. The impact of a learner’s background is not new or surprising, and homework research has long shown inequalities relating to a range of variables, including parental income and educational history. Although undoubtedly a challenge, homework could be used more effectively to close rather than extend educational gaps. Perhaps the holy grail here is to transform the way we view education as a society, into a process rather than the pursuit of an end product.

Homework can be used to extend learning beyond the classroom but, without the correct support, it may end up cementing misunderstandings or aggravating learner anxieties or frustrations towards learning. Battles with parents and carers over task completion can end up being counterproductive and kill the joy of learning.

Technology may be able to help: adaptive learning software, such as that used within the Khan Academy, is a promising way of supporting learners at their level and could be used to revolutionise homework, although all students would need access.

The big tech firms, including the ubiquitous Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, have the resources and expertise to develop user-focused solutions: with the right educational and pedagogical input, they could create fantastic resources to bridge school and home learning. The possibilities to enhance additional support needs provision, especially relating to accessibility, are also an exciting prospect.

We could, too, look at what was already working well before lockdown. Some schools had developed approaches such as “takeaway homework” - whereby pupils choose from a “menu” of different homework options - that proved popular with teachers and learners alike.

At classroom level, some teachers have successfully involved learners in the development of weekly homework planning, co-constructing activities that consolidate the previous week’s learning. This has been well received, with high engagement, but it requires considerable dedicated teaching time and so lends itself more to the primary sector.

As teachers, we are constantly looking for ways to best support our learners. By pushing back against the status quo and reassessing how homework is used, we can transform the value of homework for teachers, learners and parents alike.

Reinventing home learning

Many teachers are sceptical about traditional approaches to homework, whereas others have simply gone along with it because “’twas ever thus”. We need to move away from homework being a tick-box burden and reinvent home learning with activities that nurture students’ interests and reduce learning disparities, rather than the contrary.

Technology has changed the way we live, learn and experience the world, yet homework practices often reflect more traditional methods, such as rote learning or pen-and-paper activities.

So, where do we start? Research from New Zealand during Covid-19 suggests that there are three pedagogical characteristics that influence learners’ experiences of online learning: personalisation, authenticity and collaboration. These could be the guiding principles to transform homework practice.

Starting with personalisation - and building on our new post-Covid understanding of technology - provides a unique opportunity to link learning to students’ life experiences, making it more personalised and authentic.

Homework is rarely collaborative, yet numerous apps, software and platforms give learners the opportunity to share and give each other feedback. Such collaboration helps to develop social-emotional skills, which have suffered during lockdown; it’s also relevant in the modern-day working environments that learners may experience once they leave education. We also, of course, need to provide teachers and learners with the resources to access this effectively.

When learning at home, an adult is not always around to help to engage or motivate the learner, and we cannot expect them to always do this themselves. But by redesigning home-learning activities, making the task more meaningful and engaging, students can get more out of homework.

Likewise, teachers can find homework more rewarding when it is informative and eases rather than adds to their workload. With the advancement of education software, teachers can assess understanding, collect data and give feedback. Such software can also help promote the home-school link and inform parents how to support their child. Where parental support is not available - a problem sometimes overlooked when setting homework - education software can help to scaffold students while they are working independently.

Home learning during the pandemic has provided us with many challenges but, more importantly, it has given us the experience with which to reinvent homework and transform learning in the future. Crucial to this are the relationships between learners, parents or carers, and the teachers, because - as we have found last year - they may not always be on the same educational page.

What should we do next?

Post-lockdown, it is likely that many learners and their parents or carers will, understandably, want a break from home learning. In contrast, some school leaders and politicians may be keen to ramp up homework in a desperate scramble to close attainment gaps.

Perhaps, though, there is another way. Given the skills teachers have learned, especially using technology, and the experiences of parents and carers during home learning, there may now be a better understanding of each other than ever before. Teachers and school leaders could build on this by using the post-lockdown period to pause homework and develop something new, from the ground up. Aims and objectives could be agreed between schools and families, limitations with technology could be considered, and parents and carers could be given support from teachers to help young people learn better and more independently.

To do this, school leaders and teachers might want to go back to the drawing board. Existing homework policies should be abandoned with learners, teachers, parents and carers collaborating to find a better way forward that suits everyone. The label “homework” could even be replaced by something less task focused.

Once implemented, policies and practices should be reviewed on a regular basis by everyone involved. If they aren’t working, then further refinement should be welcomed.

The experiences of home learning have undoubtedly been challenging, but they present an opportunity to reinforce the idea that learning is a lifelong process, something that goes well beyond the confines of school and classroom - whether or not we refer to it as “homework” anymore.

Rick Grammatica is a primary school teacher in Bangkok. Richard Holme is a lecturer in education at the University of Dundee. He blogs at richardholme.wordpress.com and tweets @richardjholme

This article originally appeared in the 30 April 2021 issue

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How to Create Effective Homework

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Based on a recent spate of articles on homework, it’s clear that the homework wars -- how much? how often? -- are still topic of big interest to both parents and teachers. Some teachers hate to give homework; others see it as a vital necessity. But according to some research presented by Annie Murphy Paul, the question isn’t how much, but whether the homework teachers do give actually advances learning.

“A recent study, published in the Economics of Education Review,” Paul wrote in “How Can We Make Homework Worthwhile?” , “reports that homework in science, English and history has ‘little to no impact’ on student test scores. (The authors did note a positive effect for math homework.) Enriching children’s classroom learning requires making homework not shorter or longer, but smarter.” Paul goes on to describe specific practices, like spaced repetition (in which information is presented and repeated spaced out over time), retrieval practice (testing or quizzing not for assessment, but to reinforce material learned), and cognitive disfluency (“desirable difficulties” used to make learning stick) -- all memory/retrieval techniques that may help homework move beyond busy work and advance real learning.

But to get those elements to work, said Fires in the Mind author and speaker Kathleen Cushman, students must be motivated to do their homework in the first place. One example Cushman gave was creating a project so interesting and involved, students naturally wanted to keep working on it after the bell rang. She pointed to a chapter in the book where she describes a particular motivation for some high school students she interviewed, under the heading “Homework We Actually Want to Do”:

“Christina and Nicholas both remembered a global studies unit on the French Revolution in which students acted out a courtroom trial of the king and queen. The project brought even routine homework assignments to life, they said.

“I was the queen. So of course I wanted to do my homework all the time, so I could know the facts of what happened and what didn’t happen, know what I wanted to say when someone tried to say I did this or that thing. I could say, ‘Oh no, I didn’t!’ - because I’d read my homework,” said Christina.

Christina was using a form of retrieval practice -- but because it was so much fun to be the queen, she only knew she wanted to stay in character. The queen had to study the information to get it right.

Another way teachers can take a good, hard look at homework practices, said Cushman, is to ask themselves a few vital questions: “Does this homework ask each student to practice something that the student hasn’t yet mastered? Does the student clearly see its purpose? When students are asked to repeat or rehearse something, does it require them to focus? Or can they do it without really paying attention?” If the homework meets these criteria, she said, then it falls into the desirable realm of “deliberate practice .”

Dan Bisaccio, former high school science teacher and now Director of Science Education at Brown University, said that after years of experience giving homework to high school students, he now “preaches” to his future teachers: “Homework should be practice and extensions of what happens in class and should not be ‘new learning,’” he said. “That is, students [shouldn’t be] having to teach themselves new content or skills.”

He said he agreed with Cushman that motivation is key, and tried to design homework that kept students interested. “Teachers need to clue into what motivates their students, giving them something that they really want to complete, and complete well.” One assignment Bisaccio used, called an “Experience Map,” asked students to create a map of their experiences after a field study or other important project - a technique employing both retrieval practice and the somewhat trickier interleaving, a “desirable difficulty” in which problems of different types are presented in one assignment, making students think harder to come up with solutions and answers.

“We ‘map’ mentally and physically each day. It helps to keep us orientated through our frenzied sun-up to sun-down daily experiences,” reads the assignment. Directions are to draw a field experience map, including -- with regard to the class -- where students have been, what they have done, new challenges, and insights. Special suggestions for drawing include “a place of danger, a favorite place, a place of power, a place with a secret.” Students are also called upon to map the places where they learned the most, where they were challenged the most, and where the funniest experience happened.

In addition, Bisaccio asked students to write what had challenged them most as a learner, what had stretched their limits most -- meant to be reflections just for students themselves, and asked to be kept on the back of the map. “What they wrote on the back was not shared with others,” he said. Once the assignment was completed, maps were posted to form a class atlas of what they had learned.

All the examples included here, however, are examples of homework in a traditional classroom. What about homework in a flipped classroom , where the lectures, usually videos, are the homework? A recent New York Times article on flipped classrooms may provide insight into flipping homework on its head, too: it quoted high school senior Luwayne Harris, saying, “Whenever I had a problem on the homework, I couldn’t do anything about it at home. Now if I have a problem with a video, I can just rewind and watch it over and over again.”

• Our Mission

Rethinking Homework for This Year—and Beyond

A schoolwide effort to reduce homework has led to a renewed focus on ensuring that all work assigned really aids students’ learning.

I used to pride myself on my high expectations, including my firm commitment to accountability for regular homework completion among my students. But the trauma of Covid-19 has prompted me to both reflect and adapt. Now when I think about the purpose and practice of homework, two key concepts guide me: depth over breadth, and student well-being.

Homework has long been the subject of intense debate, and there’s no easy answer with respect to its value. Teachers assign homework for any number of reasons: It’s traditional to do so, it makes students practice their skills and solidify learning, it offers the opportunity for formative assessment, and it creates good study habits and discipline. Then there’s the issue of pace. Throughout my career, I’ve assigned homework largely because there just isn’t enough time to get everything done in class.

A Different Approach

Since classes have gone online, the school where I teach has made a conscious effort as a teaching community to reduce, refine, and distill our curriculum. We have applied guiding questions like: What is most important? What is most transferable? What is most relevant? Refocusing on what matters most has inevitably made us rethink homework.

We have approached both asking and answering these questions through a science of learning lens. In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning , the authors maintain that deep learning is slow learning. Deep learning requires time for retrieval, practice, feedback, reflection, and revisiting content; ultimately it requires struggle, and there is no struggle without time.

As someone who has mastered the curriculum mapping style of “get it done to move on to get that next thing done,” using an approach of “slow down and reduce” has been quite a shift for me. However, the shift has been necessary: What matters most is what’s best for my students, as opposed to my own plans or mandates imposed by others.

Listening to Students

To implement this shift, my high school English department has reduced content and texts both in terms of the amount of units and the content within each unit. We’re more flexible with dates and deadlines. We spend our energy planning the current unit instead of the year’s units. In true partnership with my students, I’m constantly checking in with them via Google forms, Zoom chats, conferences, and Padlet activities. In these check-ins, I specifically ask students how they’re managing the workload for my class and their other classes. I ask them how much homework they’re doing. And I adjust what I do and expect based on what they tell me. For example, when I find out a week is heavy with work in other classes, I make sure to allot more time during class for my tasks. At times I have even delayed or altered one of my assignments.

To be completely transparent, the “old” me is sheepish in admitting that I’ve so dramatically changed my thinking with respect to homework. However, both my students and I have reaped numerous benefits. I’m now laser-focused when designing every minute of my lessons to maximize teaching and learning. Every decision I make is now scrutinized through the lens of absolute worth for my students’ growth: If it doesn’t make the cut, it’s cut. I also take into account what is most relevant to my students.

For example, our 10th-grade English team has redesigned a unit that explores current manifestations of systemic oppression. This unit is new in approach and longer in duration than it was pre-Covid, and it has resulted in some of the deepest and hardest learning, as well as the richest conversations, that I have seen among students in my career. Part of this improved quality comes from the frequent and intentional pauses that I instruct students to take in order to reflect on the content and on the arc of their own learning. The reduction in content that we need to get through in online learning has given me more time to assign reflective prompts, and to let students process their thoughts, whether that’s at the end of a lesson as an exit slip or as an assignment.

Joining Forces to Be Consistent

There’s no doubt this reduction in homework has been a team effort. Within the English department, we have all agreed to allot reading time during class; across each grade level, we’re monitoring the amount of homework our students have collectively; and across the whole high school, we have adopted a framework to help us think through assigning homework.

Within that framework, teachers at the school agree that the best option is for students to complete all work during class. The next best option is for students to finish uncompleted class work at home as a homework assignment of less than 30 minutes. The last option—the one we try to avoid as much as possible—is for students to be assigned and complete new work at home (still less than 30 minutes). I set a maximum time limit for students’ homework tasks (e.g., 30 minutes) and make that clear at the top of every assignment.

This schoolwide approach has increased my humility as a teacher. In the past, I tended to think my subject was more important than everyone else’s, which gave me license to assign more homework. But now I view my students’ experience more holistically: All of their classes and the associated work must be considered, and respected.

As always, I ground this new pedagogical approach not just in what’s best for students’ academic learning, but also what’s best for them socially and emotionally. 2020 has been traumatic for educators, parents, and students. There is no doubt the level of trauma varies greatly ; however, one can’t argue with the fact that homework typically means more screen time when students are already spending most of the day on their devices. They need to rest their eyes. They need to not be sitting at their desks. They need physical activity. They need time to do nothing at all.

Eliminating or reducing homework is a social and emotional intervention, which brings me to the greatest benefit of reducing the homework load: Students are more invested in their relationship with me now that they have less homework. When students trust me to take their time seriously, when they trust me to listen to them and adjust accordingly, when they trust me to care for them... they trust more in general.

And what a beautiful world of learning can be built on trust.

The Power Of Homework

Homework is loved by some, loathed by others (and that’s just the teachers). History teacher, Emily Folorunsho, makes the case for homework and how it could be implemented in your department too.

In some schools, there has been a decline in homework being set, due to the increased workload it brings in terms of marking, chasing students and setting detentions. However, there are tremendous benefits that homework can bring and there are ways to work around some of the issues it can have on teachers’ workloads.

When I think of my own education and the most effective teachers that I had, they all set regular homework and ensured it was done. To master anything in life we need hours of practice therefore I am here to make a case for homework as it ensures that students get the opportunity to further practice what they learnt in school.

What does research say about homework? Inner Drive stated that ‘ Students who were set regular homework by their teacher performed significantly better than those who were set it occasionally.’ It also found that ‘ The frequency that homework was set was found to be more important than the amount of time students spent on it. ’

Research has also shown that doing homework independently encourages autonomy, which has been linked to developing self-regulation. The Education Endowment Foundation has also found that homework has a positive impact (on average +5 months) particularly with pupils in secondary schools. It was also found that homework that is linked to classroom work tends to be more effective.

In particular, studies that included feedback on homework had higher impacts on learning. This is why at KS4 & 5 we set students exam questions to do for homework, as they see it as worthwhile due to further practice and the feedback they know they will receive, as it provides students with further practice in terms of exam technique and structure, as well as application of knowledge. (It is important to note that students also have the opportunity to practice writing in exam conditions during in-class assessments which act as our summative assessments.)

The EEF also found that ‘ The quality of the task set appears to be more important than the quantity of work required from the pupil’. There is some evidence that the impact of homework diminishes as the amount of time pupils spend on it increases. The studies reviewed with the highest impacts set homework twice a week in a particular subject. ’

As we can see above, homework is important. Tom Sherrington writes ‘ homework is a vital element in the learning process; reinforcing the interaction between teacher and student: between home and school and paving the way to students being independent autonomous learners. ’

What is our intent for setting homework in my department?

We want to use homework to enrich, consolidate and give students the opportunity to practice knowledge & skills they have gained in lessons. We plan homework into the design of our curriculum. We also want to use homework as a means to nurture a love for History.

Particularly at KS3, we want homework to build discipline among our students so that by the time they reach their examination years they have developed the skills and characteristics required for learning independently at home.

Furthermore, the building of students’ historical frameworks and their sense of period, to enable access to future learning has been disrupted due to covid; therefore, our hope is that our homework booklets at KS3 will fill in those gaps and strengthen students ’ sense of period.

Implementation: How does my History department set homework?

Homework booklets which compromise of the following tasks for the whole year for each unit:

• Scholarship Reading
• Meanwhile elsewhere tasks

3. Revisit tasks: Quizzes

4. Improving assessments

5. Revision tasks/explicit practice of study skills

We set a variety of tasks within the homework booklet as research has stated that ‘ pupils… want interesting, challenging, and varied tasks that are clearly defined and have adequate deadlines. ’

KS4 & KS5:

1. Show My Homework quizzes

2. Exam questions

How have some of the issues of homework been combatted?

Many teachers are less inclined to set homework due to the problems that are commonly associated with it. However, I have identified some of those issues below and provided ways in which I have attempted to combat these issues in my own classroom.

Issue 1 – The disadvantage gap

It is common knowledge that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to have a quiet working space, are less likely to have access to a device suitable for learning or a stable internet connection and may receive less parental support to complete homework and develop effective learning habits.

These difficulties may increase pupils ’ abilities to do homework and do it well. As a result, these are the ways in which we have tried to combat the issue and close the disadvantage gap in our department:

KS3: Students with a physical booklet do not require a computer or the internet as all the information they need to be able to do the tasks are within that booklet.

KS4/5: Show My Homework quizzes need an electronic device and a reliable internet connection. However, students know they can come up at break, during lunch or after school to the History rooms to use either a device or facilities in the school library.

Furthermore, when writing exam answers we enforce that all answers should be handwritten therefore a device is not required.

Issue 2 – Marking

Another reason why some are hesitant to set homework is due to the marking load implication. However, there are ways in which we can work around this as we can   see below:

KS3: Homework is commonly self or peer-marked at the beginning of the lesson. However, if I do not have time for this, I would live mark students ’ homework whilst they are working independently on the main task.

KS4/5: Quizzes are marked by Show My Homework and students get to see what score they achieved automatically, accessing immediate feedback. I always check who got the highest in the class and then I reward them accordingly the following lesson.

Nevertheless, Exam questions are marked by teachers to provide detailed feedback on their application skills of the knowledge. I work in a school whereby departments get to set their own marking policy under the three pillars of quality presentation, feedback and response.

In my department, as HOD I have banned the marking of classwork but what must be marked is all exam questions and assessments. As a result of a workload-friendly policy, marking exam questions done as part of homework does not act as an additional load.

Issue 3 – Chasing students up & setting detentions

Chasing students that have not done homework is my biggest bugbear however there are ways we can minimise the chasing and the consequence implication of not doing the homework.

In my school we have centralised detentions, which means individual teachers do not need to use their own time to conduct a detention. If your school does not have a centralised detention system maybe have a departmental centralised detention, whereby each person each week conducts the detention.

We used to have departmental detentions before our school adopted centralised detentions, which work perfectly.

Issue 4 – Lack of motivation & discipline

If we can deal with the problem of lack of motivation, then issue 3 almost becomes non-existent. Being able to do work at home is a key skill students need to develop, there will be times in their career whereby they will need to finish off work at home.

However, they will be more inclined to do this due to the reward of pay at the end of the month as well as having greater maturity. Nevertheless, at this present time students need to be able to practice delayed gratification and know that the feeling of motivation may not always be present but that is when discipline kicks in.

Discipline is doing what you know you should do in the absence of feeling motivated. But how can we help students become more disciplined & motivated to do homework? I believe it is in helping students build good habits. Here are a few tips that I got from Harry Fletcher ’ s book: Habits of success:

How to encourage students to start?

• Give clear instructions that make starting sound easy
• Help students commit to a plan of doing homework by planning WHEN and HOW they will act e.g. I will do homework immediately after school. I will study alone in the school library or join homework club. If I am invited to go out and see my friends, I will wait until have finished my homework. I will share this plan with my parents to keep me accountable.
• Share models e.g first examine the model, then see if you can do the similar task.
• Set a default e.g if you are unsure about what to do then use your how to guide.
• Revisit past successes e.g your homework task is almost identical to what we did in class today, the one where you got all the questions right.

Once you get them started how can you keep them going?

• Highlight intrinsic rewards e.g what has been satisfying in completing your homework
• Surprise students with rewards e.g giving students merits/points for the habit of completing homework.
• Build a community through collective activity e.g celebrating when 100% of the class has completed the homework.
• Empathise students success and its significance e.g asking students what they achieved this term as a result of completing homework and how its increased their progress in your subject
• Check what the barriers are to give a more targeted form of solution

In conclusion, although there are recognisable barriers in the setting, completing, and following up on homework there are ways we can dismantle these barriers. Homework is worth setting, reflecting upon & refining and is a vital component in every curriculum.

Emily Folorunsho is Head of History in an inner-city 12 form entry school in London and is also a Lead Practitioner, SLE and governor. Emily co-authored the Collins Black British History Teacher Resources and is passionate about promoting diversity in the curriculum and making History meaningful and relevant to students.

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Homework Helper Apps

Originally published in TEACH Magazine, September/October 2019 Issue

It’s no surprise that some kids often neglect their homework. After spending almost seven hours a day at school, can you really blame them? A little online support, however, can go a long way. With the right aids to help them during their moments of struggle, kids might be likely to do better in their homework. Some of the following resources could lend a helping hand.

Fact Monster (Free – Website)

Packed with information on dozens of topics, this fun-to-use reference site helps users find quick answers to their homework questions. From world events and the human body, to formulas and fractions, Fact Monster’s Homework Help centre has got it all. Users can also find tips on improving writing and study skills, and access multiple tools such as an atlas, dictionary, encyclopedia, periodic table, and spell checker.

Khan Academy (Free – iOS, Android, Website)

This non-profit educational platform has been designed as a useful tool to accelerate student education. Whether it’s a math problem or a historical fact, this site knows no boundaries. Users can learn from the many short video tutorials available. Khan Academy also has personalized learning resources for all ages in subjects such as math, science, computer programming, history, and economics. It’s free and available in more than 36 languages.

National Geographic Kids (Free – Website)

From animal facts to maps to all things space, Nat Geo Kids has a section dedicated to helping students ace their school assignments. Students can even access Nat Geo’s expansive Resource Library of encyclopedic entries spanning topics such as biology, oceanography, earth science, geology, ancient civilizations, and more. Looking for an idea for a science project? There’s a whole host of creative science experiments on subjects like electrical charges, chemical explosions, and food chemistry.

ReadWriteThink (Free – Website)

Convincing kids to take an interest in literacy learning isn’t a cakewalk, but with the use of this site, things might become a little simpler. ReadWriteThink provides students with a variety of free resources to help them enhance their reading and writing skills. Catering to students from K–12, the website offers tools, printouts, and podcasts that students can employ after school. Whether you need book review templates, poem writing tips, or essay writing help, this site provides resources for it all.

Socratic (Free – iOS, Android)

Here’s an app that will help kids breeze through their homework and give them more time to play and unwind! Using Artificial Intelligence, Socratic works by allowing students to take photos of their homework problems in almost any subject and upload them to the app for help. Students in turn receive instant explanations, tutorial videos, definitions, and more. Why wouldn’t they enjoy something that makes their life easier?

Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Senior Contributing Editor

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

She can be reached at [email protected] .

Comments & Discussion

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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Homework – Top 3 Pros and Cons

Pro/Con Arguments | Discussion Questions | Take Action | Sources | More Debates

From dioramas to book reports, from algebraic word problems to research projects, whether students should be given homework, as well as the type and amount of homework, has been debated for over a century. [ 1 ]

While we are unsure who invented homework, we do know that the word “homework” dates back to ancient Rome. Pliny the Younger asked his followers to practice their speeches at home. Memorization exercises as homework continued through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment by monks and other scholars. [ 45 ]

In the 19th century, German students of the Volksschulen or “People’s Schools” were given assignments to complete outside of the school day. This concept of homework quickly spread across Europe and was brought to the United States by Horace Mann , who encountered the idea in Prussia. [ 45 ]

In the early 1900s, progressive education theorists, championed by the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal , decried homework’s negative impact on children’s physical and mental health, leading California to ban homework for students under 15 from 1901 until 1917. In the 1930s, homework was portrayed as child labor, which was newly illegal, but the prevailing argument was that kids needed time to do household chores. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 45 ] [ 46 ]

Public opinion swayed again in favor of homework in the 1950s due to concerns about keeping up with the Soviet Union’s technological advances during the Cold War . And, in 1986, the US government included homework as an educational quality boosting tool. [ 3 ] [ 45 ]

A 2014 study found kindergarteners to fifth graders averaged 2.9 hours of homework per week, sixth to eighth graders 3.2 hours per teacher, and ninth to twelfth graders 3.5 hours per teacher. A 2014-2019 study found that teens spent about an hour a day on homework. [ 4 ] [ 44 ]

Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the very idea of homework as students were schooling remotely and many were doing all school work from home. Washington Post journalist Valerie Strauss asked, “Does homework work when kids are learning all day at home?” While students were mostly back in school buildings in fall 2021, the question remains of how effective homework is as an educational tool. [ 47 ]

Is Homework Beneficial?

Pro 1 Homework improves student achievement. Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicated that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” [ 6 ] Students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework on both standardized tests and grades. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take-home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school. [ 10 ] Read More

Pro 2 Homework helps to reinforce classroom learning, while developing good study habits and life skills. Students typically retain only 50% of the information teachers provide in class, and they need to apply that information in order to truly learn it. Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer, co-founders of Teachers Who Tutor NYC, explained, “at-home assignments help students learn the material taught in class. Students require independent practice to internalize new concepts… [And] these assignments can provide valuable data for teachers about how well students understand the curriculum.” [ 11 ] [ 49 ] Elementary school students who were taught “strategies to organize and complete homework,” such as prioritizing homework activities, collecting study materials, note-taking, and following directions, showed increased grades and more positive comments on report cards. [ 17 ] Research by the City University of New York noted that “students who engage in self-regulatory processes while completing homework,” such as goal-setting, time management, and remaining focused, “are generally more motivated and are higher achievers than those who do not use these processes.” [ 18 ] Homework also helps students develop key skills that they’ll use throughout their lives: accountability, autonomy, discipline, time management, self-direction, critical thinking, and independent problem-solving. Freireich and Platzer noted that “homework helps students acquire the skills needed to plan, organize, and complete their work.” [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 49 ] Read More

Pro 3 Homework allows parents to be involved with children’s learning. Thanks to take-home assignments, parents are able to track what their children are learning at school as well as their academic strengths and weaknesses. [ 12 ] Data from a nationwide sample of elementary school students show that parental involvement in homework can improve class performance, especially among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students. [ 20 ] Research from Johns Hopkins University found that an interactive homework process known as TIPS (Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork) improves student achievement: “Students in the TIPS group earned significantly higher report card grades after 18 weeks (1 TIPS assignment per week) than did non-TIPS students.” [ 21 ] Homework can also help clue parents in to the existence of any learning disabilities their children may have, allowing them to get help and adjust learning strategies as needed. Duke University Professor Harris Cooper noted, “Two parents once told me they refused to believe their child had a learning disability until homework revealed it to them.” [ 12 ] Read More

Con 1 Too much homework can be harmful. A poll of California high school students found that 59% thought they had too much homework. 82% of respondents said that they were “often or always stressed by schoolwork.” High-achieving high school students said too much homework leads to sleep deprivation and other health problems such as headaches, exhaustion, weight loss, and stomach problems. [ 24 ] [ 28 ] [ 29 ] Alfie Kohn, an education and parenting expert, said, “Kids should have a chance to just be kids… it’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.” [ 27 ] Emmy Kang, a mental health counselor, explained, “More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies.” [ 48 ] Excessive homework can also lead to cheating: 90% of middle school students and 67% of high school students admit to copying someone else’s homework, and 43% of college students engaged in “unauthorized collaboration” on out-of-class assignments. Even parents take shortcuts on homework: 43% of those surveyed admitted to having completed a child’s assignment for them. [ 30 ] [ 31 ] [ 32 ] Read More

Con 2 Homework exacerbates the digital divide or homework gap. Kiara Taylor, financial expert, defined the digital divide as “the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology and those that don’t. Though the term now encompasses the technical and financial ability to utilize available technology—along with access (or a lack of access) to the Internet—the gap it refers to is constantly shifting with the development of technology.” For students, this is often called the homework gap. [ 50 ] [ 51 ] 30% (about 15 to 16 million) public school students either did not have an adequate internet connection or an appropriate device, or both, for distance learning. Completing homework for these students is more complicated (having to find a safe place with an internet connection, or borrowing a laptop, for example) or impossible. [ 51 ] A Hispanic Heritage Foundation study found that 96.5% of students across the country needed to use the internet for homework, and nearly half reported they were sometimes unable to complete their homework due to lack of access to the internet or a computer, which often resulted in lower grades. [ 37 ] [ 38 ] One study concluded that homework increases social inequality because it “potentially serves as a mechanism to further advantage those students who already experience some privilege in the school system while further disadvantaging those who may already be in a marginalized position.” [ 39 ] Read More

Con 3 Homework does not help younger students, and may not help high school students. We’ve known for a while that homework does not help elementary students. A 2006 study found that “homework had no association with achievement gains” when measured by standardized tests results or grades. [ 7 ] Fourth grade students who did no homework got roughly the same score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam as those who did 30 minutes of homework a night. Students who did 45 minutes or more of homework a night actually did worse. [ 41 ] Temple University professor Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek said that homework is not the most effective tool for young learners to apply new information: “They’re learning way more important skills when they’re not doing their homework.” [ 42 ] In fact, homework may not be helpful at the high school level either. Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, stated, “I interviewed high school teachers who completely stopped giving homework and there was no downside, it was all upside.” He explains, “just because the same kids who get more homework do a little better on tests, doesn’t mean the homework made that happen.” [ 52 ] Read More

Discussion Questions

1. Is homework beneficial? Consider the study data, your personal experience, and other types of information. Explain your answer(s).

2. If homework were banned, what other educational strategies would help students learn classroom material? Explain your answer(s).

3. How has homework been helpful to you personally? How has homework been unhelpful to you personally? Make carefully considered lists for both sides.

Take Action

1. Examine an argument in favor of quality homework assignments from Janine Bempechat.

2. Explore Oxford Learning’s infographic on the effects of homework on students.

3. Consider Joseph Lathan’s argument that homework promotes inequality .

4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.

5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives .

More School Debate Topics

Should K-12 Students Dissect Animals in Science Classrooms? – Proponents say dissecting real animals is a better learning experience. Opponents say the practice is bad for the environment.

Should Students Have to Wear School Uniforms? – Proponents say uniforms may increase student safety. Opponents say uniforms restrict expression.

Should Corporal Punishment Be Used in K-12 Schools? – Proponents say corporal punishment is an appropriate discipline. Opponents say it inflicts long-lasting physical and mental harm on students.

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Are You Down With or Done With Homework?

• Posted January 17, 2012
• By Lory Hough

The debate over how much schoolwork students should be doing at home has flared again, with one side saying it's too much, the other side saying in our competitive world, it's just not enough.

It was a move that doesn't happen very often in American public schools: The principal got rid of homework.

This past September, Stephanie Brant, principal of Gaithersburg Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., decided that instead of teachers sending kids home with math worksheets and spelling flash cards, students would instead go home and read. Every day for 30 minutes, more if they had time or the inclination, with parents or on their own.

"I knew this would be a big shift for my community," she says. But she also strongly believed it was a necessary one. Twenty-first-century learners, especially those in elementary school, need to think critically and understand their own learning — not spend night after night doing rote homework drills.

Brant's move may not be common, but she isn't alone in her questioning. The value of doing schoolwork at home has gone in and out of fashion in the United States among educators, policymakers, the media, and, more recently, parents. As far back as the late 1800s, with the rise of the Progressive Era, doctors such as Joseph Mayer Rice began pushing for a limit on what he called "mechanical homework," saying it caused childhood nervous conditions and eyestrain. Around that time, the then-influential Ladies Home Journal began publishing a series of anti-homework articles, stating that five hours of brain work a day was "the most we should ask of our children," and that homework was an intrusion on family life. In response, states like California passed laws abolishing homework for students under a certain age.

But, as is often the case with education, the tide eventually turned. After the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, a space race emerged, and, writes Brian Gill in the journal Theory Into Practice, "The homework problem was reconceived as part of a national crisis; the U.S. was losing the Cold War because Russian children were smarter." Many earlier laws limiting homework were abolished, and the longterm trend toward less homework came to an end.

The debate re-emerged a decade later when parents of the late '60s and '70s argued that children should be free to play and explore — similar anti-homework wellness arguments echoed nearly a century earlier. By the early-1980s, however, the pendulum swung again with the publication of A Nation at Risk , which blamed poor education for a "rising tide of mediocrity." Students needed to work harder, the report said, and one way to do this was more homework.

For the most part, this pro-homework sentiment is still going strong today, in part because of mandatory testing and continued economic concerns about the nation's competitiveness. Many believe that today's students are falling behind their peers in places like Korea and Finland and are paying more attention to Angry Birds than to ancient Babylonia.

But there are also a growing number of Stephanie Brants out there, educators and parents who believe that students are stressed and missing out on valuable family time. Students, they say, particularly younger students who have seen a rise in the amount of take-home work and already put in a six- to nine-hour "work" day, need less, not more homework.

Who is right? Are students not working hard enough or is homework not working for them? Here's where the story gets a little tricky: It depends on whom you ask and what research you're looking at. As Cathy Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework , points out, "Homework has generated enough research so that a study can be found to support almost any position, as long as conflicting studies are ignored." Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth and a strong believer in eliminating all homework, writes that, "The fact that there isn't anything close to unanimity among experts belies the widespread assumption that homework helps." At best, he says, homework shows only an association, not a causal relationship, with academic achievement. In other words, it's hard to tease out how homework is really affecting test scores and grades. Did one teacher give better homework than another? Was one teacher more effective in the classroom? Do certain students test better or just try harder?

"It is difficult to separate where the effect of classroom teaching ends," Vatterott writes, "and the effect of homework begins."

Putting research aside, however, much of the current debate over homework is focused less on how homework affects academic achievement and more on time. Parents in particular have been saying that the amount of time children spend in school, especially with afterschool programs, combined with the amount of homework given — as early as kindergarten — is leaving students with little time to run around, eat dinner with their families, or even get enough sleep.

Certainly, for some parents, homework is a way to stay connected to their children's learning. But for others, homework creates a tug-of-war between parents and children, says Liz Goodenough, M.A.T.'71, creator of a documentary called Where Do the Children Play?

"Ideally homework should be about taking something home, spending a few curious and interesting moments in which children might engage with parents, and then getting that project back to school — an organizational triumph," she says. "A nag-free activity could engage family time: Ask a parent about his or her own childhood. Interview siblings."

Instead, as the authors of The Case Against Homework write, "Homework overload is turning many of us into the types of parents we never wanted to be: nags, bribers, and taskmasters."

Leslie Butchko saw it happen a few years ago when her son started sixth grade in the Santa Monica-Malibu (Calif.) United School District. She remembers him getting two to four hours of homework a night, plus weekend and vacation projects. He was overwhelmed and struggled to finish assignments, especially on nights when he also had an extracurricular activity.

"Ultimately, we felt compelled to have Bobby quit karate — he's a black belt — to allow more time for homework," she says. And then, with all of their attention focused on Bobby's homework, she and her husband started sending their youngest to his room so that Bobby could focus. "One day, my younger son gave us 15-minute coupons as a present for us to use to send him to play in the back room. … It was then that we realized there had to be something wrong with the amount of homework we were facing."

Butchko joined forces with another mother who was having similar struggles and ultimately helped get the homework policy in her district changed, limiting homework on weekends and holidays, setting time guidelines for daily homework, and broadening the definition of homework to include projects and studying for tests. As she told the school board at one meeting when the policy was first being discussed, "In closing, I just want to say that I had more free time at Harvard Law School than my son has in middle school, and that is not in the best interests of our children."

One barrier that Butchko had to overcome initially was convincing many teachers and parents that more homework doesn't necessarily equal rigor.

"Most of the parents that were against the homework policy felt that students need a large quantity of homework to prepare them for the rigorous AP classes in high school and to get them into Harvard," she says.

Stephanie Conklin, Ed.M.'06, sees this at Another Course to College, the Boston pilot school where she teaches math. "When a student is not completing [his or her] homework, parents usually are frustrated by this and agree with me that homework is an important part of their child's learning," she says.

As Timothy Jarman, Ed.M.'10, a ninth-grade English teacher at Eugene Ashley High School in Wilmington, N.C., says, "Parents think it is strange when their children are not assigned a substantial amount of homework."

That's because, writes Vatterott, in her chapter, "The Cult(ure) of Homework," the concept of homework "has become so engrained in U.S. culture that the word homework is part of the common vernacular."

These days, nightly homework is a given in American schools, writes Kohn.

"Homework isn't limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important. Most teachers and administrators aren't saying, 'It may be useful to do this particular project at home,'" he writes. "Rather, the point of departure seems to be, 'We've decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week). … This commitment to the idea of homework in the abstract is accepted by the overwhelming majority of schools — public and private, elementary and secondary."

Brant had to confront this when she cut homework at Gaithersburg Elementary.

"A lot of my parents have this idea that homework is part of life. This is what I had to do when I was young," she says, and so, too, will our kids. "So I had to shift their thinking." She did this slowly, first by asking her teachers last year to really think about what they were sending home. And this year, in addition to forming a parent advisory group around the issue, she also holds events to answer questions.

Still, not everyone is convinced that homework as a given is a bad thing. "Any pursuit of excellence, be it in sports, the arts, or academics, requires hard work. That our culture finds it okay for kids to spend hours a day in a sport but not equal time on academics is part of the problem," wrote one pro-homework parent on the blog for the documentary Race to Nowhere , which looks at the stress American students are under. "Homework has always been an issue for parents and children. It is now and it was 20 years ago. I think when people decide to have children that it is their responsibility to educate them," wrote another.

And part of educating them, some believe, is helping them develop skills they will eventually need in adulthood. "Homework can help students develop study skills that will be of value even after they leave school," reads a publication on the U.S. Department of Education website called Homework Tips for Parents. "It can teach them that learning takes place anywhere, not just in the classroom. … It can foster positive character traits such as independence and responsibility. Homework can teach children how to manage time."

Annie Brown, Ed.M.'01, feels this is particularly critical at less affluent schools like the ones she has worked at in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and Los Angeles as a literacy coach.

"It feels important that my students do homework because they will ultimately be competing for college placement and jobs with students who have done homework and have developed a work ethic," she says. "Also it will get them ready for independently taking responsibility for their learning, which will need to happen for them to go to college."

The problem with this thinking, writes Vatterott, is that homework becomes a way to practice being a worker.

"Which begs the question," she writes. "Is our job as educators to produce learners or workers?"

Slate magazine editor Emily Bazelon, in a piece about homework, says this makes no sense for younger kids.

"Why should we think that practicing homework in first grade will make you better at doing it in middle school?" she writes. "Doesn't the opposite seem equally plausible: that it's counterproductive to ask children to sit down and work at night before they're developmentally ready because you'll just make them tired and cross?"

Kohn writes in the American School Board Journal that this "premature exposure" to practices like homework (and sit-and-listen lessons and tests) "are clearly a bad match for younger children and of questionable value at any age." He calls it BGUTI: Better Get Used to It. "The logic here is that we have to prepare you for the bad things that are going to be done to you later … by doing them to you now."

According to a recent University of Michigan study, daily homework for six- to eight-year-olds increased on average from about 8 minutes in 1981 to 22 minutes in 2003. A review of research by Duke University Professor Harris Cooper found that for elementary school students, "the average correlation between time spent on homework and achievement … hovered around zero."

So should homework be eliminated? Of course not, say many Ed School graduates who are teaching. Not only would students not have time for essays and long projects, but also teachers would not be able to get all students to grade level or to cover critical material, says Brett Pangburn, Ed.M.'06, a sixth-grade English teacher at Excel Academy Charter School in Boston. Still, he says, homework has to be relevant.

"Kids need to practice the skills being taught in class, especially where, like the kids I teach at Excel, they are behind and need to catch up," he says. "Our results at Excel have demonstrated that kids can catch up and view themselves as in control of their academic futures, but this requires hard work, and homework is a part of it."

Ed School Professor Howard Gardner basically agrees.

"America and Americans lurch between too little homework in many of our schools to an excess of homework in our most competitive environments — Li'l Abner vs. Tiger Mother," he says. "Neither approach makes sense. Homework should build on what happens in class, consolidating skills and helping students to answer new questions."

So how can schools come to a happy medium, a way that allows teachers to cover everything they need while not overwhelming students? Conklin says she often gives online math assignments that act as labs and students have two or three days to complete them, including some in-class time. Students at Pangburn's school have a 50-minute silent period during regular school hours where homework can be started, and where teachers pull individual or small groups of students aside for tutoring, often on that night's homework. Afterschool homework clubs can help.

Some schools and districts have adapted time limits rather than nix homework completely, with the 10-minute per grade rule being the standard — 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 30 minutes for third-graders, and so on. (This remedy, however, is often met with mixed results since not all students work at the same pace.) Other schools offer an extended day that allows teachers to cover more material in school, in turn requiring fewer take-home assignments. And for others, like Stephanie Brant's elementary school in Maryland, more reading with a few targeted project assignments has been the answer.

"The routine of reading is so much more important than the routine of homework," she says. "Let's have kids reflect. You can still have the routine and you can still have your workspace, but now it's for reading. I often say to parents, if we can put a man on the moon, we can put a man or woman on Mars and that person is now a second-grader. We don't know what skills that person will need. At the end of the day, we have to feel confident that we're giving them something they can use on Mars."

Read a January 2014 update.

Homework Policy Still Going Strong

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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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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The Pros and Cons of Homework

Updated: June 19, 2024

Published: January 23, 2020

Homework is a word that most students dread hearing. After hours upon hours of sitting in class , the last thing we want is more schoolwork over our precious weekends. While it’s known to be a staple of traditional schooling, homework has also become a rather divise topic. Some feel as though homework is a necessary part of school, while others believe that the time could be better invested. Should students have homework? Have a closer look into the arguments on both sides to decide for yourself.

Photo by  energepic.com  from  Pexels

Why should students have homework.

Homework has been a long-standing part of the education system. It helps reinforce what students learn in the classroom, encourages good study habits, and promotes a deeper understanding of subjects. Studies have shown that homework can improve students’ grades and skills. Here are some reasons why homework is important:

1. Homework Encourages Practice

Many people believe that one of the positive effects of homework is that it encourages the discipline of practice. While it may be time consuming and boring compared to other activities, repetition is needed to get better at skills. Homework helps make concepts more clear, and gives students more opportunities when starting their career .

2. Homework Gets Parents Involved

Homework can be something that gets parents involved in their children’s lives if the environment is a healthy one. A parent helping their child with homework makes them take part in their academic success, and allows for the parent to keep up with what the child is doing in school. It can also be a chance to connect together.

3. Homework Teaches Time Management

Homework is much more than just completing the assigned tasks. Homework can develop time management skills , forcing students to plan their time and make sure that all of their homework assignments are done on time. By learning to manage their time, students also practice their problem-solving skills and independent thinking. One of the positive effects of homework is that it forces decision making and compromises to be made.

4. Homework Opens A Bridge Of Communication

Homework creates a connection between the student, the teacher, the school, and the parents. It allows everyone to get to know each other better, and parents can see where their children are struggling. In the same sense, parents can also see where their children are excelling. Homework in turn can allow for a better, more targeted educational plan for the student.

5. Homework Allows For More Learning Time

Homework allows for more time to complete the learning process. School hours are not always enough time for students to really understand core concepts, and homework can counter the effects of time shortages, benefiting students in the long run, even if they can’t see it in the moment.

6. Homework Reduces Screen Time

Many students in North America spend far too many hours watching TV. If they weren’t in school, these numbers would likely increase even more. Although homework is usually undesired, it encourages better study habits and discourages spending time in front of the TV. Homework can be seen as another extracurricular activity, and many families already invest a lot of time and money in different clubs and lessons to fill up their children’s extra time. Just like extracurricular activities, homework can be fit into one’s schedule.

The Other Side: Why Homework Is Bad

While homework has its benefits, there are also many arguments against it. Some believe that homework can cause increased stress, limit time for extracurricular activities, and reduce family time. Studies and expert opinions highlight the drawbacks of too much homework, showing how it can negatively affect students’ well-being and academic experience. Here are some reasons why homework might be bad:

1. Homework Encourages A Sedentary Lifestyle

Should students have homework? Well, that depends on where you stand. There are arguments both for the advantages and the disadvantages of homework.

While classroom time is important, playground time is just as important. If children are given too much homework, they won’t have enough playtime, which can impact their social development and learning. Studies have found that those who get more play get better grades in school , as it can help them pay closer attention in the classroom.

Children are already sitting long hours in the classroom, and homework assignments only add to these hours. Sedentary lifestyles can be dangerous and can cause health problems such as obesity. Homework takes away from time that could be spent investing in physical activity.

2. Homework Isn’t Healthy In Every Home

While many people that think homes are a beneficial environment for children to learn, not all homes provide a healthy environment, and there may be very little investment from parents. Some parents do not provide any kind of support or homework help, and even if they would like to, due to personal barriers, they sometimes cannot. Homework can create friction between children and their parents, which is one of the reasons why homework is bad.

3. Homework Adds To An Already Full-Time Job

School is already a full-time job for students, as they generally spend over 6 hours each day in class. Students also often have extracurricular activities such as sports, music, or art that are just as important as their traditional courses. Adding on extra hours to all of these demands is a lot for children to manage, and prevents students from having extra time to themselves for a variety of creative endeavors. Homework prevents self discovery and having the time to learn new skills outside of the school system. This is one of the main disadvantages of homework.

4. Homework Has Not Been Proven To Provide Results

Endless surveys have found that homework creates a negative attitude towards school, and homework has not been found to be linked to a higher level of academic success.

The positive effects of homework have not been backed up enough. While homework may help some students improve in specific subjects, if they have outside help there is no real proof that homework makes for improvements.

It can be a challenge to really enforce the completion of homework, and students can still get decent grades without doing their homework. Extra school time does not necessarily mean better grades — quality must always come before quantity.

Accurate practice when it comes to homework simply isn’t reliable. Homework could even cause opposite effects if misunderstood, especially since the reliance is placed on the student and their parents — one of the major reasons as to why homework is bad. Many students would rather cheat in class to avoid doing their homework at home, and children often just copy off of each other or from what they read on the internet.

5. Homework Assignments Are Overdone

The general agreement is that students should not be given more than 10 minutes a day per grade level. What this means is that a first grader should be given a maximum of 10 minutes of homework, while a second grader receives 20 minutes, etc. Many students are given a lot more homework than the recommended amount, however.

On average, college students spend as much as 3 hours per night on homework . By giving too much homework, it can increase stress levels and lead to burn out. This in turn provides an opposite effect when it comes to academic success.

The pros and cons of homework are both valid, and it seems as though the question of ‘‘should students have homework?’ is not a simple, straightforward one. Parents and teachers often are found to be clashing heads, while the student is left in the middle without much say.

It’s important to understand all the advantages and disadvantages of homework, taking both perspectives into conversation to find a common ground. At the end of the day, everyone’s goal is the success of the student.

FAQ Section

What are the benefits of assigning homework to students.

Homework reinforces what students learn in the classroom, helps develop good study habits, and promotes a deeper understanding of subjects. It also encourages practice, improves time management skills, and encourages parents to participate in their children’s education.

How much homework is too much for students?

Generally, it is recommended that students receive no more than 10 minutes of homework per grade level per day. For example, a first grader should have no more than 10 minutes of homework, while a fifth grader should have no more than 50 minutes.

What are the potential drawbacks of excessive homework assignments?

Excessive homework can lead to increased stress, a sedentary lifestyle, lack of free time for extracurricular activities, and diminished family time. It can also create a negative attitude towards school and learning.

How does homework impact students’ stress levels and well-being?

Too much homework can significantly increase stress levels and negatively affect students’ well-being. It can lead to anxiety, burnout, and reduced time for physical activity and relaxation.

Does homework promote independent thinking and problem-solving skills?

Yes, homework can promote independent thinking and problem-solving skills by encouraging students to tackle assignments on their own, manage their time effectively, and find solutions to problems without immediate assistance from teachers.

Are there any long-term effects of excessive homework on students?

Excessive homework over long periods can lead to chronic stress, burnout, and a negative attitude towards education. It can also hinder the development of social skills and reduce opportunities for self-discovery and creative pursuits.

How can technology enhance or supplement traditional homework practices?

Technology can provide interactive and engaging ways to complete homework, such as educational apps, online resources, and virtual collaboration tools. It can also offer personalized learning experiences and immediate feedback.

Are there any innovative approaches to homework that schools are adopting?

Some schools are adopting innovative approaches like flipped classrooms, where students watch lectures at home and do hands-on classroom activities. Project-based learning and personalized assignments tailored to individual student needs are also becoming more popular.

How do educators balance the workload with diverse student needs?

Educators can balance the workload by differentiating assignments, considering the individual needs and abilities of students, and providing flexible deadlines. Communication with students and parents helps to ensure that homework is manageable and effective for everyone.

At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone.

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How Do Teachers Spend Summer Break? These Two Spent Theirs in a Bomber Factory

Learn about the experiences of women supporting World War II efforts in the memoir “Slacks and Calluses.”

Constance Bowman Reid

Anybody can build bombers—if we could. 

We were the kind of girls who knew nothing about airplanes except that they had wings and they flew. When one flew overhead we waited until somebody said, "That's a Liberator!" Then we looked into the sky and echoed wisely, "Yes, it is, isn't it?" We were not sure then whether a Liberator was an army or a navy plane, or whether it was a bomber or a fighter; and we had not yet discovered that a B-24 and a Liberator are exactly the same thing.

Perhaps that was why people laughed when we announced that the aircraft industry wanted us to build bombers during summer vacation. Perhaps that was why they rolled on the floor and shrieked.

" You build bombers!" they howled. "An art teacher and an English teacher!" ·

That was the way they said it, laughing uproariously—just as if an art teacher and an English teacher couldn't build bombers. That was enough for us. Clara Marie said by golly, she could build bombers and I said by golly, I could too, although I wasn't quite sure what either of us could do to bombers—that would be useful. Anyhow that was the aircraft industry's problem. They needed help. They wanted school teachers to work during summer vacation. O.K., they had to find something school teachers like us could do.

At least we let the aircraft industry know what they were up against, for we filled out our applications for employment with perfect honesty—putting "No" or "None" after every question. Then, a little embarrassed at our own effrontery in thinking we could be of any use on the production line, we took our applications down to the Employment Office. We maneuvered our swooping hats into position before a tiny window which was presided over by a clerk whose name, according to the little metal standard at her elbow, appropriately was Mrs. Hires. We deposited our applications timidly in front of her.

Mrs. Hires, to our amazement, greeted our applications with expressions of joy. She didn't even look at the "No's" and the "None's." She didn't seem the least bit worried about what we could do on the production line. She just wanted to be sure that we understood ours would not be clean jobs. She asked twice did we understand that we would get our hands dirty . As soon as we had assured her that we understood—we were hired!

"What shift do you want to work?" she asked.

"Which plant?" Mrs. Hires asked patiently, explaining that the Swing Shift at the Main Plant was from 4:30 to 1 and the one at the Parts Plant from 2:30 to 11.

"4:30 to 1," said C.M.

"4:30 to 1," I said.

Mrs. Hires looked pleased. She said that people were  needed on that shift.

Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory

At times charming, hilarious, and incredibly perceptive, Slacks and Calluses brings into focus an overlooked part of the war effort, one that forever changed the way the women were viewed in America.

"Now what do you want to do?" she asked, and the way she asked it sounded as if she meant what could we do.

"What can we do?" we echoed plaintively.

Mrs. Hires opened an official-looking folder.

"Well," she said, as if it were not too difficult a problem, "filing," (filing metal, not cards, she hastened to explain), "riveting, sub-assembly, final installations—"

" Final installations?" we demanded, snatching at the word Final. "Actually in the plane?"

"Yes, actually in the plane,'' she said.

"Are you sure," I said cautiously, for after all we were patriotic Americans, "are you sure that we can make final installations?"

"Oh, of course, anybody can," she said carelessly, and she made strange little marks on our applications and wrote our names in the spaces marked "Last Name First" and sternly stamped in red "Applicant Will Not Write His Own Name Here."

"Now this will expedite matters for you," she told us. "YOU will report here Monday morning at 8 o'clock, and I will have your applications checked by then. That will expedite your Employment Induction," she pointed out sweetly.

Expedite , she said. That was undoubtedly the favorite word of the aircraft industry; and if at the time we thought that the aircraft industry didn't know what it meant, that was before we had been "expedited" through the conveyor-belt process known as Employment Induction.

First, Mrs. Hires gave each of us a bulging 9 by 11 manila envelope which contained seven handbooks and pamphlets, a list of regulations for women's work clothes, a list of the tools we would need, a copy of The Consolidated News , and a membership card for the aircraft union. She said she thought the envelope contained all the information we would need. We thought that it must.

"Do you have any questions?" she asked. She knew that we didn't, because she had just said that all the information we would need was in the envelope; but evidently she liked to prove to herself the super-efficiency of the Employment Induction: Every question answered before it was asked.

"Just follow the instructions on the envelope-and follow the yellow line on the floor,'' she told us.

We followed the yellow line around the corner and into a large office where there were at least three dozen desks, each complete with typewriter and typist. C.M. and I took our places on the row of chairs along the wall and inspected the other new employees who were there ahead of us. They were evidently the scrapings from the manpower barrel-like us. Older women and old men. Scrawny mothers with children tugging at the hems of their housedresses. Fuzzy high school boys.

There were nine steps listed in the procedure for Employment Induction, which was mimeographed on the front of our envelopes; and there were about that many physical steps, since we usually moved from chair to chair and desk to desk as different girls, all spreading at the hips, all wearing glasses, all glancing worriedly at the sheets in their typewriters, called "Bowman!" or "Allen!," never looking up to see who Bowman or Allen was as we handed over our envelopes. This way we moved down the yellow line, the envelopes growing bulkier at each step.

The Requisition Clerk entered on a permanent record our names (now officially C.M. Allen and C.H. Bowman), our job classification ( un classified and un skilled) , our starting date (Wednesday afternoon at 4:30), and our rate of pay (60 cents an hour with an 8 cent bonus for the Swing Shift).

"Do you have any questions?" she asked, stuffing more bright colored sheets of paper into our envelopes.

The Physical Appointment Clerk filled in a description of each of us on half a dozen assorted identification cards. She looked disapprovingly at C.M.'s personal description as it was checked in on her application. Then she looked at C.M.'s eyes.

"I'm sorry,'' she said, "but we will have to change the color of your eyes. We don't have green eyes here."

"Do you have any questions?" she asked absentmindedly as she crossed out "green" and wrote "hazel" after "Color of Eyes."

Step three .

The Birth Certificate Clerk was having her troubles as we arrived.

The Birth Certificate Clerk took our birth certificates and scrutinized them carefully. She seemed to be satisfied that we had been born.

"Do you have any questions ?" she asked as she returned them to us.

Step four .

The Clock Clerk gave us each a number (4126 for C.M. and 4042 for me) and said sternly that we should read the instructions which we would find in our envelopes on punching in and out at the time clock. We had already read the instructions, which had sub-points lettered from "A" to "J," and we were already convinced that we were utterly incapable of coping with a complex machine like a time clock.

"Do you have any questions ?" the Clock Clerk said, quickly handing back our envelopes so that we wouldn't ask any.

Step five .

"Do you have any questions?" she asked as C.M. scrawled her name and I laboriously drew mine so that it would be legible.

The War Manpower Commission Availability Certificate Clerk (whew!) asked us if we had Availability Certificates. When we admitted that we didn't, she said well, she didn't think we needed them anyway.

"You are available," she said, as if it were the only thing she could find in our favor.

"That's us," said C.M. cheerfully. "We are available."

"Do you have any questions?'' asked the clerk, ignoring this small pleasantry.

The Fingerprint Clerk greeted us briskly.

"Put your purse here," he said to me as we came in. "Put your glasses there. Get in here. Stand there. Look here." He held a card up under my chin. I didn't know whether it was a name or a number, but I smiled my most bewitching smile, which looked like a leer when I saw it later on my identification photo. Since my smile had obviously been a failure, C.M. tried an expression of haughty interest when it was her turn. It also looked like a leer on the finished photo.

"Re-lax!" the clerk instructed me, taking my right hand firmly in his as if it didn't belong to me at all. He rolled my thumb on the ink pad and then on the card with a rocking motion like that of a waltz—if a waltz had two dips instead of one. While my hand was practically waltzing without me, I tried to follow with the rest of my body. I had the embarrassed feeling I have when I step on my partner's toes. C.M. watched me carefully so that she would do better, which she did.

Step eight .

The Physical Examination Clerk, efficiently clattering on her keyboard, typed out our medical folders without an error. The nurse, letter perfect, rattled off a list of peculiarly uncheerful ailments in double time.

We said, "No. No. No." Sometimes we stuck in an extra "No" and sometimes we got behind and missed one. Once we said "No" from force of habit when we should have said "Yes."

The second nurse, efficient as always, snatched us up as we said the last "No" and assigned us to barren little individual dressing rooms. A few minutes later a third nurse called "Bowman!" and "Allen!," and the rest of the physical examination was like any other—poke, push, probe, and punch.

The blonde girl in front of me, whose mother hovered over her even in the doctor's office, was illiterate, as the nurse discovered when she tried to give her an eye test. The nurse told us that she was the first illiterate in nearly a thousand women, although the rate among the men hired was higher. C.M. said she supposed that illiterate men had to get jobs while illiterate women had children. The nurse said that she supposed so, and deposited us again in the little dressing rooms.

"Do you have any questions?" she called after us a few minutes later as we followed the yellow line back into the Employment Office.

Step nine .

The Final Induction Clerk, calling "Bowman!" and "Allen!" for the last time, put a sheaf of papers in front of us for us to sign, most of which involved reducing our pay checks by bond, tax, and insurance deductions. I unsuccessfully tried to subtract all these from 68 cents times 52 hours, which I was multiplying in my head. Some of the papers were in very fine print, which we conscientiously tried to read before we signed them. One was an Invention Agreement "'entered into by and between Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (hereinafter called the Company) and Constance Hall Bowman and Clara Marie Allen (hereinafter called the Employees). Witnesseth ; in consideration of the mutual undertakings hereinafter set forth, the parties hereto do hereby agree as follows:" the general idea being that if we built better mousetraps, Consolidated could keep the world from our door. We thought that it was very flattering of Consolidated to be so interested in our inventions, although we could have told them they wouldn't be worth the trouble.

We also signed a sheet saying that we had read the Espionage Act, Executive Order of the President of the United States, No. 8381; and that we had been warned that many of the projects carried on by the company were classified as Secret , Confidential , and Restricted . C.M. asked the Final Induction Clerk how we would know whether a project was Secret, Confidential, or merely Restricted. The clerk merely smiled wisely and said, "You'll know."

"Now," said the Final Induction Clerk with a sigh as she wrote down on our envelopes the same instructions she was giving us, "you will report to Gate Two, Plant One, at 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday afternoon," she repeated. "You will be unclassified helpers, final minor installations on the B-24's."

"On the big bombers ?'' we asked.

The Final Induction Clerk smiled kindly and said yes, on the big bombers .

"Do you have any questions?" she asked, confidently, because she knew we couldn't possibly have any. It was the final test of the efficiency of the Employment Induction.

"The Army and Navy 'E'," she mused. "I bet the 'E' stands for expedite !"

Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory  is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit  Smithsonian Books’ website  to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from  Slacks and Calluses  © 1999 by Smithsonian Insititution

A Note to our Readers Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.

40 Facts About Elektrostal

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 01 Jun 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy , materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes , offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development .

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy , with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

Elektrostal's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and promising future make it a city worth exploring. For more captivating facts about cities around the world, discover the unique characteristics that define each city . Uncover the hidden gems of Moscow Oblast through our in-depth look at Kolomna. Lastly, dive into the rich industrial heritage of Teesside, a thriving industrial center with its own story to tell.

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The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

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Pages:  379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E. Kilunovskaya and V. A. Semenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova  (Moscow, Russian Federation).  (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Kharis Mustafin  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Irina Alborova  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Alina Matzvai  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected]

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