they do their homework today because

Is it time to get rid of homework? Mental health experts weigh in.

It's no secret that kids hate homework. And as students grapple with an ongoing pandemic that has had a wide range of mental health impacts, is it time schools start listening to their pleas about workloads?

Some teachers are turning to social media to take a stand against homework. 

Tiktok user @misguided.teacher says he doesn't assign it because the "whole premise of homework is flawed."

For starters, he says, he can't grade work on "even playing fields" when students' home environments can be vastly different.

"Even students who go home to a peaceful house, do they really want to spend their time on busy work? Because typically that's what a lot of homework is, it's busy work," he says in the video that has garnered 1.6 million likes. "You only get one year to be 7, you only got one year to be 10, you only get one year to be 16, 18."

Mental health experts agree heavy workloads have the potential do more harm than good for students, especially when taking into account the impacts of the pandemic. But they also say the answer may not be to eliminate homework altogether.

Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold , says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health."

"More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies," she says, adding that staying up late to finish assignments also leads to disrupted sleep and exhaustion.

Cynthia Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Talkspace , says heavy workloads can also cause serious mental health problems in the long run, like anxiety and depression. 

And for all the distress homework  can cause, it's not as useful as many may think, says Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist and CEO of Omega Recovery treatment center.

"The research shows that there's really limited benefit of homework for elementary age students, that really the school work should be contained in the classroom," he says.

For older students, Kang says, homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night. 

"Most students, especially at these high achieving schools, they're doing a minimum of three hours, and it's taking away time from their friends, from their families, their extracurricular activities. And these are all very important things for a person's mental and emotional health."

Catchings, who also taught third to 12th graders for 12 years, says she's seen the positive effects of a no-homework policy while working with students abroad.

"Not having homework was something that I always admired from the French students (and) the French schools, because that was helping the students to really have the time off and really disconnect from school," she says.

The answer may not be to eliminate homework completely but to be more mindful of the type of work students take home, suggests Kang, who was a high school teacher for 10 years.

"I don't think (we) should scrap homework; I think we should scrap meaningless, purposeless busy work-type homework. That's something that needs to be scrapped entirely," she says, encouraging teachers to be thoughtful and consider the amount of time it would take for students to complete assignments.

The pandemic made the conversation around homework more crucial 

Mindfulness surrounding homework is especially important in the context of the past two years. Many students will be struggling with mental health issues that were brought on or worsened by the pandemic , making heavy workloads even harder to balance.

"COVID was just a disaster in terms of the lack of structure. Everything just deteriorated," Kardaras says, pointing to an increase in cognitive issues and decrease in attention spans among students. "School acts as an anchor for a lot of children, as a stabilizing force, and that disappeared."

But even if students transition back to the structure of in-person classes, Kardaras suspects students may still struggle after two school years of shifted schedules and disrupted sleeping habits.

"We've seen adults struggling to go back to in-person work environments from remote work environments. That effect is amplified with children because children have less resources to be able to cope with those transitions than adults do," he explains.

'Get organized' ahead of back-to-school

In order to make the transition back to in-person school easier, Kang encourages students to "get good sleep, exercise regularly (and) eat a healthy diet."

To help manage workloads, she suggests students "get organized."

"There's so much mental clutter up there when you're disorganized. ... Sitting down and planning out their study schedules can really help manage their time," she says.

Breaking up assignments can also make things easier to tackle.

"I know that heavy workloads can be stressful, but if you sit down and you break down that studying into smaller chunks, they're much more manageable."

If workloads are still too much, Kang encourages students to advocate for themselves.

"They should tell their teachers when a homework assignment just took too much time or if it was too difficult for them to do on their own," she says. "It's good to speak up and ask those questions. Respectfully, of course, because these are your teachers. But still, I think sometimes teachers themselves need this feedback from their students."

More: Some teachers let their students sleep in class. Here's what mental health experts say.

More: Some parents are slipping young kids in for the COVID-19 vaccine, but doctors discourage the move as 'risky'

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Credit: August de Richelieu

Does homework still have value? A Johns Hopkins education expert weighs in

Joyce epstein, co-director of the center on school, family, and community partnerships, discusses why homework is essential, how to maximize its benefit to learners, and what the 'no-homework' approach gets wrong.

By Vicky Hallett

The necessity of homework has been a subject of debate since at least as far back as the 1890s, according to Joyce L. Epstein , co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. "It's always been the case that parents, kids—and sometimes teachers, too—wonder if this is just busy work," Epstein says.

But after decades of researching how to improve schools, the professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education remains certain that homework is essential—as long as the teachers have done their homework, too. The National Network of Partnership Schools , which she founded in 1995 to advise schools and districts on ways to improve comprehensive programs of family engagement, has developed hundreds of improved homework ideas through its Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program. For an English class, a student might interview a parent on popular hairstyles from their youth and write about the differences between then and now. Or for science class, a family could identify forms of matter over the dinner table, labeling foods as liquids or solids. These innovative and interactive assignments not only reinforce concepts from the classroom but also foster creativity, spark discussions, and boost student motivation.

"We're not trying to eliminate homework procedures, but expand and enrich them," says Epstein, who is packing this research into a forthcoming book on the purposes and designs of homework. In the meantime, the Hub couldn't wait to ask her some questions:

What kind of homework training do teachers typically get?

Future teachers and administrators really have little formal training on how to design homework before they assign it. This means that most just repeat what their teachers did, or they follow textbook suggestions at the end of units. For example, future teachers are well prepared to teach reading and literacy skills at each grade level, and they continue to learn to improve their teaching of reading in ongoing in-service education. By contrast, most receive little or no training on the purposes and designs of homework in reading or other subjects. It is really important for future teachers to receive systematic training to understand that they have the power, opportunity, and obligation to design homework with a purpose.

Why do students need more interactive homework?

If homework assignments are always the same—10 math problems, six sentences with spelling words—homework can get boring and some kids just stop doing their assignments, especially in the middle and high school years. When we've asked teachers what's the best homework you've ever had or designed, invariably we hear examples of talking with a parent or grandparent or peer to share ideas. To be clear, parents should never be asked to "teach" seventh grade science or any other subject. Rather, teachers set up the homework assignments so that the student is in charge. It's always the student's homework. But a good activity can engage parents in a fun, collaborative way. Our data show that with "good" assignments, more kids finish their work, more kids interact with a family partner, and more parents say, "I learned what's happening in the curriculum." It all works around what the youngsters are learning.

Is family engagement really that important?

At Hopkins, I am part of the Center for Social Organization of Schools , a research center that studies how to improve many aspects of education to help all students do their best in school. One thing my colleagues and I realized was that we needed to look deeply into family and community engagement. There were so few references to this topic when we started that we had to build the field of study. When children go to school, their families "attend" with them whether a teacher can "see" the parents or not. So, family engagement is ever-present in the life of a school.

My daughter's elementary school doesn't assign homework until third grade. What's your take on "no homework" policies?

There are some parents, writers, and commentators who have argued against homework, especially for very young children. They suggest that children should have time to play after school. This, of course is true, but many kindergarten kids are excited to have homework like their older siblings. If they give homework, most teachers of young children make assignments very short—often following an informal rule of 10 minutes per grade level. "No homework" does not guarantee that all students will spend their free time in productive and imaginative play.

Some researchers and critics have consistently misinterpreted research findings. They have argued that homework should be assigned only at the high school level where data point to a strong connection of doing assignments with higher student achievement . However, as we discussed, some students stop doing homework. This leads, statistically, to results showing that doing homework or spending more minutes on homework is linked to higher student achievement. If slow or struggling students are not doing their assignments, they contribute to—or cause—this "result."

Teachers need to design homework that even struggling students want to do because it is interesting. Just about all students at any age level react positively to good assignments and will tell you so.

Did COVID change how schools and parents view homework?

Within 24 hours of the day school doors closed in March 2020, just about every school and district in the country figured out that teachers had to talk to and work with students' parents. This was not the same as homeschooling—teachers were still working hard to provide daily lessons. But if a child was learning at home in the living room, parents were more aware of what they were doing in school. One of the silver linings of COVID was that teachers reported that they gained a better understanding of their students' families. We collected wonderfully creative examples of activities from members of the National Network of Partnership Schools. I'm thinking of one art activity where every child talked with a parent about something that made their family unique. Then they drew their finding on a snowflake and returned it to share in class. In math, students talked with a parent about something the family liked so much that they could represent it 100 times. Conversations about schoolwork at home was the point.

How did you create so many homework activities via the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program?

We had several projects with educators to help them design interactive assignments, not just "do the next three examples on page 38." Teachers worked in teams to create TIPS activities, and then we turned their work into a standard TIPS format in math, reading/language arts, and science for grades K-8. Any teacher can use or adapt our prototypes to match their curricula.

Overall, we know that if future teachers and practicing educators were prepared to design homework assignments to meet specific purposes—including but not limited to interactive activities—more students would benefit from the important experience of doing their homework. And more parents would, indeed, be partners in education.

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

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

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

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Jay Caspian Kang

The movement to end homework is wrong.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Opinion Writer

Do students really need to do their homework?

As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?”

I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.”

The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Put a bit more simply: The quality of students’ homework production is linked to their socioeconomic status. This alone doesn’t seem particularly controversial. As I’ve discussed in this newsletter, many measures of academic achievement wind up being linked to wealth. The authors go on to argue that since this is the case, teachers should “interpret differences in students’ homework production through a structural inequalities frame.” What they have found, however, is that teachers don’t think of homework this way. Instead, they tend to rely on the “myth of meritocracy” to explain “homework inequalities.”

Calarco, Horn and Chen are all respected scholars at top-tier universities. Their paper was published in Educational Researcher, a journal of the American Educational Research Association, one of the pre-eminent research organizations in the education space. Homework reduction, or abolition, is part of an emerging educational movement. And while the authors acknowledge that eliminating homework would be difficult in the short term, given how rooted it is in American pedagogy, I imagine that many public schools over the next decade or so will start to de-emphasize homework as these ideas start to make their way to school boards and curriculum writers.

Trying to assess the value of homework, reduce it or at least make less of it busywork might very well be a useful endeavor. But Calarco, Horn and Chen are questioning something much more fundamental to the American educational system than homework. Whether they intend to or not, they are, in effect, reframing the purpose of schooling itself. Is school a place where a select group of children can distinguish themselves from their peers through diligence, talent and the pursuit of upward mobility? Is it a place where everyone should have equal access to learning and opportunity, whatever that might mean? And are these two ideals mutually exclusive?

The authors of “You Need to Be More Responsible” are part of a movement that argues, sometimes convincingly, that a meritocratic vision impedes true equal opportunity. In regards to homework, what they are saying, in effect, is that the idea of responsibility itself — requiring students to be accountable for completing assignments — exacerbates inequality. And that rather than trying to run all students through a hierarchical educational system in the hopes that they will end up in the same place, it appears that the authors would rather de-emphasize anything that reinforces the idea that one student is better than another.

According to the authors, then, teachers should factor in students’ socioeconomic status when evaluating their homework. Teachers should acknowledge that, even with completed assignments, structural inequalities may be why students with access to fewer resources got more questions wrong than their better-resourced peers did. And if they want to help these hypothetical poor students, they shouldn’t appeal to messages of personal responsibility and individual agency because those concepts reinforce the myth of meritocracy.

This all sounds a bit abstract. Having taught at a variety of schools, I agree that students’ socioeconomic status will likely be a better predictor of how they do on their homework than any personal traits, but I still can’t quite imagine how a structural inequalities frame would operate in the classroom. How would you even talk to your students?

Teacher: Hey there. You got half the questions wrong on your homework.

Student: I’m sorry about that. What do you think I could do to improve my performance?

Teacher: Well, you could boost your socioeconomic status. Otherwise, the deck’s extremely stacked against you getting any of these questions right.

To help combat the myth of meritocracy, the authors suggest that teachers not assign overly challenging homework and stop rewarding or punishing students based on the quality of the homework they produce. They also suggest that some teachers, if so inclined, could go “a step further in attempting to reduce homework’s harm” and just get rid of it altogether. They write:

More research is needed to understand the consequences of these more “progressive” homework policies. Yet, we suspect that while optional and ungraded homework may reduce inequalities in homework-related rewards and punishments, it may not prevent teachers from judging those students (and their parents) who do not complete the optional or ungraded work. No-homework policies have greater potential for alleviating the kinds of unequal practices we observed in the schools in our study.

In short, teachers can’t even be trusted to give out optional homework because they’re too meritocracy-brained and will still judge the students based on the results. The easiest solution is to just stop giving homework altogether, so the wrong-thinking teachers don’t have as much of a platform upon which to prop up their meritocratic myths.

I want to be fair to the authors and acknowledge that even if I’m a bit skeptical about how their prescriptions could operate in a classroom, there might be other good reasons for doing away with homework.

Evidence about the effectiveness of homework is pretty scattered. There are studies and articles saying that homework helps students learn and that kids aren’t overly burdened with it. There are also studies and articles that say excessive homework shows diminishing returns and can be harmful to students’ mental health . Having read some of these studies, I think the fairest assessment right now would be to say that the evidence about the benefits of homework is pretty inconclusive because of the inherent difficulties in isolating one part of a student’s academic life and drawing huge conclusions about how it affects everything else.

From a theoretical standpoint, I mostly agree with Calarco, Horn and Chen’s diagnosis of the American educational system. It does largely function as a way to sort and stratify children into different socioeconomic bands, which, again, in theory, means that it would be helpful for teachers to approach their work with that in mind. Many richer kids go to private schools that feed into elite colleges that will more or less ensure their alumni will be on the glide path to staying rich. Many poorer kids go to poorer schools that provide them, in many cases, with fewer opportunities that might help them advance socioeconomically. Some portion of middle-class and working-class people, including a lot of immigrants and children of immigrants, pragmatically use the school system to achieve class mobility.

When you break it all down, the amount of class mobility our education system can grind out each year falls well short of what most people expect. The spoils of academic meritocracy, then, aren’t particularly widespread, which does bring up the question: If we all agree that everyone should go to school and if the class mobility part is working only for some families and not at all for others, why do we structure it in such a competitive way?

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility.

A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

Jay Caspian Kang ( @jaycaspiankang ), a writer for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Loneliest Americans.”

Have feedback? Send a note to [email protected] .

‘There’s only so far I can take them’ – why teachers give up on struggling students who don’t do their homework

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Indiana University

Professor of Mathematics Education, Vanderbilt University

Disclosure statement

Jessica Calarco has received funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305C050041-05 to the University of Pennsylvania and from the Networks, Complex Systems & Health Project Development Team within the ICTSI NIH/NCRR Grant Number UL1TR001108. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Contemporary Families.

Ilana Horn currently receives funding from the National Science Foundation. In the past, her work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Mindset Scholars Network, and the American Educational Research Association.

Vanderbilt University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

Indiana University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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Whenever “Gina,” a fifth grader at a suburban public school on the East Coast, did her math homework, she never had to worry about whether she could get help from her mom.

“I help her a lot with homework,” Gina’s mother, a married, mid-level manager for a health care company, explained to us during an interview for a study we did about how teachers view students who complete their homework versus those who do not.

“I try to maybe re-explain things, like, things she might not understand,” Gina’s mom continued. “Like, if she’s struggling, I try to teach her a different way. I understand that Gina is a very visual child but also needs to hear things, too. I know that when I’m reading it, and I’m writing it, and I’m saying it to her, she comprehends it better.”

One of us is a sociologist who looks at how schools favor middle-class families . The other is a math education professor who examines how math teachers perceive their students based on their work.

We were curious about how teachers reward students who complete their homework and penalize and criticize those who don’t – and whether there was any link between those things and family income.

By analyzing student report cards and interviewing teachers, students and parents, we found that teachers gave good grades for homework effort and other rewards to students from middle-class families like Gina, who happen to have college-educated parents who take an active role in helping their children complete their homework.

But when it comes to students such as “Jesse,” who attends the same school as Gina and is the child of a poor, single mother of two, we found that teachers had a more bleak outlook.

The names “Jesse” and “Gina” are pseudonyms to protect the children’s identities. Jesse can’t count on his mom to help with his homework because she struggled in school herself.

“I had many difficulties in school,” Jesse’s mom told us for the same study. “I had behavior issues, attention-deficit. And so after seventh grade, they sent me to an alternative high school, which I thought was the worst thing in the world. We literally did, like, first and second grade work. So my education was horrible.”

Jesse’s mother admitted she still can’t figure out division to this day.

“[My son will] ask me a question, and I’ll go look at it and it’s like algebra, in fifth grade. And I’m like: ‘What’s this?’” Jesse’s mom said. “So it’s really hard. Sometimes you just feel stupid. Because he’s in fifth grade. And I’m like, I should be able to help my son with his homework in fifth grade.”

Unlike Gina’s parents, who are married and own their own home in a middle-class neighborhood, Jesse’s mom isn’t married and rents a place in a mobile home community. She had Jesse when she was a teenager and was raising Jesse and his brother mostly on her own, though with some help from her parents. Her son is eligible for free lunch.

An issue of equity

As a matter of fairness, we think teachers should take these kinds of economic and social disparities into account in how they teach and grade students. But what we found in the schools we observed is that they usually don’t, and instead they seemed to accept inequality as destiny. Consider, for instance, what a fourth grade teacher – one of 22 teachers we interviewed and observed during the study – told us about students and homework.

“I feel like there’s a pocket here – a lower income pocket,” one teacher said. “And that trickles down to less support at home, homework not being done, stuff not being returned and signed. It should be almost 50-50 between home and school. If they don’t have the support at home, there’s only so far I can take them. If they’re not going to go home and do their homework, there’s just not much I can do.”

While educators recognize the different levels of resources that students have at home, they continue to assign homework that is too difficult for students to complete independently, and reward students who complete the homework anyway.

Consider, for example, how one seventh grade teacher described his approach to homework: “I post the answers to the homework for every course online. The kids do the homework, and they’re supposed to check it and figure out if they need extra help. The kids who do that, there is an amazing correlation between that and positive grades. The kids who don’t do that are bombing.

"I need to drill that to parents that they need to check homework with their student, get it checked to see if it’s right or wrong and then ask me questions. I don’t want to use class time to go over homework.”

The problem is that the benefits of homework are not uniformly distributed. Rather, research shows that students from high-income families make bigger achievement gains through homework than students from low-income families.

This relationship has been found in both U.S. and Dutch schools , and it suggests that homework may contribute to disparities in students’ performance in school.

Tougher struggles

On top of uneven academic benefits, research also reveals that making sense of the math homework assigned in U.S schools is often more difficult for parents who have limited educational attainment , parents who feel anxious over mathematical content . It is also difficult for parents who learned math using different approaches than those currently taught in the U.S. .

Meanwhile, students from more-privileged families are disproportionately more likely to have a parent or a tutor available after school to help with homework, as well as parents who encourage them to seek help from their teachers if they have questions . And they are also more likely to have parents who feel entitled to intervene at school on their behalf.

False ideas about merit

In the schools we observed, teachers interpreted homework inequalities through what social scientists call the myth of meritocracy . The myth suggests that all students in the U.S. have the same opportunities to succeed in school and that any differences in students’ outcomes are the result of different levels of effort. Teachers in our study said things that are in line with this belief.

For instance, one third grade teacher told us: “We’re dealing with some really struggling kids. There are parents that I’ve never even met. They don’t come to conferences. There’s been no communication whatsoever. … I’ll write notes home or emails; they never respond. There are kids who never do their homework, and clearly the parents are OK with that.

"When you don’t have that support from home, what can you do? They can’t study by themselves. So if they don’t have parents that are going to help them out with that, then that’s tough on them, and it shows.”

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Homework Struggles May Not Be a Behavior Problem

Exploring some options to understand and help..

Posted August 2, 2022 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Mental health challenges and neurodevelopmental differences directly affect children's ability to do homework.
• Understanding what difficulties are getting in the way—beyond the usual explanation of a behavior problem—is key.
• Sleep and mental health needs can take priority over homework completion.

Chelsea was in 10th grade the first time I told her directly to stop doing her homework and get some sleep. I had been working with her since she was in middle school, treating her anxiety disorder. She deeply feared disappointing anyone—especially her teachers—and spent hours trying to finish homework perfectly. The more tired and anxious she got, the harder it got for her to finish the assignments.

One night Chelsea called me in despair, feeling hopeless. She was exhausted and couldn’t think straight. She felt like a failure and that she was a burden to everyone because she couldn’t finish her homework.

She was shocked when I told her that my prescription for her was to go to sleep now—not to figure out how to finish her work. I told her to leave her homework incomplete and go to sleep. We briefly discussed how we would figure it out the next day, with her mom and her teachers. At that moment, it clicked for her that it was futile to keep working—because nothing was getting done.

This was an inflection point for her awareness of when she was emotionally over-cooked and when she needed to stop and take a break or get some sleep. We repeated versions of this phone call several times over the course of her high school and college years, but she got much better at being able to do this for herself most of the time.

When Mental Health Symptoms Interfere with Homework

Kids with mental health or neurodevelopmental challenges often struggle mightily with homework. Challenges can come up in every step of the homework process, including, but not limited to:

• Remembering and tracking assignments and materials
• Getting the mental energy/organization to start homework
• Filtering distractions enough to persist with assignments
• Understanding unspoken or implied parts of the homework
• Remembering to bring finished homework to class
• Being in class long enough to know the material
• Tolerating the fear of not knowing or failing
• Not giving up the assignment because of a panic attack
• Tolerating frustration—such as not understanding—without emotional dysregulation
• Being able to ask for help—from a peer or a teacher and not being afraid to reach out

This list is hardly comprehensive. ADHD , autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety , generalized anxiety, panic disorder, depression , dysregulation, and a range of other neurodevelopmental and mental health challenges cause numerous learning differences and symptoms that can specifically and frequently interfere with getting homework done.

The Usual Diagnosis for Homework Problems is "Not Trying Hard Enough"

Unfortunately, when kids frequently struggle to meet homework demands, teachers and parents typically default to one explanation of the problem: The child is making a choice not to do their homework. That is the default “diagnosis” in classrooms and living rooms. And once this framework is drawn, the student is often seen as not trying hard enough, disrespectful, manipulative, or just plain lazy.

The fundamental disconnect here is that the diagnosis of homework struggles as a behavioral choice is, in fact, only one explanation, while there are so many other diagnoses and differences that impair children's ability to consistently do their homework. If we are trying to create solutions based on only one understanding of the problem, the solutions will not work. More devastatingly, the wrong solutions can worsen the child’s mental health and their long-term engagement with school and learning.

To be clear, we aren’t talking about children who sometimes struggle with or skip homework—kids who can change and adapt their behaviors and patterns in response to the outcomes of that struggle. For this discussion, we are talking about children with mental health and/or neurodevelopmental symptoms and challenges that create chronic difficulties with meeting homework demands.

How Can You Help a Child Who Struggles with Homework?

How can you help your child who is struggling to meet homework demands because of their ADHD, depression, anxiety, OCD , school avoidance, or any other neurodevelopmental or mental health differences? Let’s break this down into two broad areas—things you can do at home, and things you can do in communication with the school.

Helping at Home

The following suggestions for managing school demands at home can feel counterintuitive to parents—because we usually focus on helping our kids to complete their tasks. But mental health needs jump the line ahead of task completion. And starting at home will be key to developing an idea of what needs to change at school.

• Set an end time in the evening after which no more homework will be attempted. Kids need time to decompress and they need sleep—and pushing homework too close to or past bedtime doesn’t serve their educational needs. Even if your child hasn’t been able to approach the homework at all, even if they have avoided and argued the whole evening, it is still important for everyone to have a predictable time to shut down the whole process.
• If there are arguments almost every night about homework, if your child isn’t starting homework or finishing it, reframe it from failure into information. It’s data to put into problem-solving. We need to consider other possible explanations besides “behavioral choice” when trying to understand the problem and create effective solutions. What problems are getting in the way of our child’s meeting homework demands that their peers are meeting most of the time?
• Try not to argue about homework. If you can check your own anxiety and frustration, it can be more productive to ally with your child and be curious with them. Kids usually can’t tell you a clear “why” but maybe they can tell you how they are feeling and what they are thinking. And if your child can’t talk about it or just keeps saying “I don't know,” try not to push. Come back another time. Rushing, forcing, yelling, and threatening will predictably not help kids do homework.

Helping at School

The second area to explore when your neurodiverse child struggles frequently with homework is building communication and connections with school and teachers. Some places to focus on include the following.

• Label your child’s diagnoses and break down specific symptoms for the teachers and school team. Nonjudgmental, but specific language is essential for teachers to understand your child’s struggles. Breaking their challenges down into the problems specific to homework can help with building solutions. As your child gets older, help them identify their difficulties and communicate them to teachers.
• Let teachers and the school team know that your child’s mental health needs—including sleep—take priority over finishing homework. If your child is always struggling to complete homework and get enough sleep, or if completing homework is leading to emotional meltdowns every night, adjusting their homework demands will be more successful than continuing to push them into sleep deprivation or meltdowns.
• Request a child study team evaluation to determine if your child qualifies for services under special education law such as an IEP, or accommodations through section 504—and be sure that homework adjustments are included in any plan. Or if such a plan is already in place, be clear that modification of homework expectations needs to be part of it.

The Long-Term Story

I still work with Chelsea and she recently mentioned how those conversations so many years ago are still part of how she approaches work tasks or other demands that are spiking her anxiety when she finds herself in a vortex of distress. She stops what she is doing and prioritizes reducing her anxiety—whether it’s a break during her day or an ending to the task for the evening. She sees that this is crucial to managing her anxiety in her life and still succeeding at what she is doing.

Task completion at all costs is not a solution for kids with emotional needs. Her story (and the story of many of my patients) make this crystal clear.

Candida Fink, M.D. , is board certified in child/adolescent and general psychiatry. She practices in New York and has co-authored two books— The Ups and Downs of Raising a Bipolar Child and Bipolar Disorder for Dummies.

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The ‘Homework Gap’ Persists. Tech Equity Is One Big Reason Why

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Nearly a third of U.S. teenagers report facing at least one academic challenge related to lack of access to technology at home, the so-called “homework gap,” according to new survey from the Pew Research Center.

And that is the case even though nearly all K-12 students were back to in-person learning this school year, according to the Pew Research Center survey , conducted April 14 to May 4. The survey examines teens’ and parents’ views on virtual learning and the pandemic’s impact on academic achievement.

“More than two years after the COVID-19 outbreak forced school officials to shift classes and assignments online, teens continue to navigate the pandemic’s impact on their education and relationships, even while they experience glimpses of normalcy as they return to the classroom,” the report’s authors noted.

The survey found that 22 percent of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 said they often or sometimes have to do their homework on a cellphone, 12 percent said they “at least sometimes” are not able to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection, and 6 percent said they have to use public Wi-Fi to do their homework “at least sometimes” because they don’t have an internet connection at home.

The “ homework gap ” is a term used to describe the difficulty students have in getting online at home to complete school assignments. It disproportionately impacts students in low-income households, students of color, and students in rural areas.

The Pew Research Center’s report found the homework gap remains a persistent problem. About 24 percent of teens who live in a household making less than $30,000 a year said they “at least sometimes” are not able to complete their homework because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection, compared with 14 percent of those in a household making $30,000 to $74,999, and 8 percent of those in a household making $75,000 or more, the report found.

Teens whose parents report an annual income of less than $30,000 are also more likely to say they often or sometimes have to do homework on a cellphone or use public Wi-Fi for homework, compared with those living in higher-earning households, according to the survey.

Sixteen percent of Hispanic teens reported they “at least sometimes” aren’t able to complete homework because they lack reliable computer or internet access, compared with 7 percent of Black teens and 10 percent of white teens. Hispanic teens are also four times more likely than white teens to say the same about having to do their homework on a cellphone or using public Wi-Fi for homework, the report found.

When it comes to access to a computer, 20 percent of teens living in a household with an annual income of less than $30,000 reported not having access to a desktop or laptop at home.

Teens prefer learning in person

Eighty percent of teens said they attended school completely in person over the month prior to when the survey was administered, according to the report. Eleven percent said they attended school through a mix of online and in-person instruction, and 8 percent said they attended school completely online.

A majority of teens prefer in-person over virtual or hybrid learning. Sixty-five percent said they would prefer school to be completely in person after the COVID-19 outbreak is over, while 9 percent said they would prefer a completely online learning environment. Eighteen percent said they would prefer a mix of online and in-person instruction, according to the report.

While a majority of teens prefer in-person learning, there are some differences that emerge by race and ethnicity and household income. Seventy percent of white teens and 64 percent of Hispanic teens said they would prefer completely in-person learning after the COVID-19 outbreak, but that share drops to 51 percent among Black teens, according to the report.

Seventy-one percent of teens living in households earning $75,000 or more a year said they prefer for school to be completely in person after the pandemic is over. That share drops to 60 percent or less among those whose annual family income is less than $75,000.

Some teens worry about falling behind

When asked about COVID-19’s effect on their schooling, a majority of teens expressed little to no concern about falling behind in school due to disruptions caused by the outbreak. But Hispanic teens and teens from families with lower incomes were more likely to say they are “extremely” or “very” worried about falling behind in school due to COVID-19 disruptions.

Overall, 16 percent of teens said they are “extremely” or “very” worried they may have fallen behind in school because of COVID-19-related disturbances. Twenty-eight percent of Hispanic teens said they are “extremely” or “very” worried that they may have fallen behind, compared with 19 percent of Black teens, and 11 percent of white teens. And 46 percent of teens from households making less than $75,000 annually reported concerns about falling behind in school, compared with 13 percent of teens from households making more than $75,000 annually.

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Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?

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Educators should be thrilled by these numbers. Pleasing a majority of parents regarding homework and having equal numbers of dissenters shouting "too much!" and "too little!" is about as good as they can hope for.

But opinions cannot tell us whether homework works; only research can, which is why my colleagues and I have conducted a combined analysis of dozens of homework studies to examine whether homework is beneficial and what amount of homework is appropriate for our children.

The homework question is best answered by comparing students who are assigned homework with students assigned no homework but who are similar in other ways. The results of such studies suggest that homework can improve students' scores on the class tests that come at the end of a topic. Students assigned homework in 2nd grade did better on math, 3rd and 4th graders did better on English skills and vocabulary, 5th graders on social studies, 9th through 12th graders on American history, and 12th graders on Shakespeare.

Less authoritative are 12 studies that link the amount of homework to achievement, but control for lots of other factors that might influence this connection. These types of studies, often based on national samples of students, also find a positive link between time on homework and achievement.

Yet other studies simply correlate homework and achievement with no attempt to control for student differences. In 35 such studies, about 77 percent find the link between homework and achievement is positive. Most interesting, though, is these results suggest little or no relationship between homework and achievement for elementary school students.

Why might that be? Younger children have less developed study habits and are less able to tune out distractions at home. Studies also suggest that young students who are struggling in school take more time to complete homework assignments simply because these assignments are more difficult for them.

These recommendations are consistent with the conclusions reached by our analysis. Practice assignments do improve scores on class tests at all grade levels. A little amount of homework may help elementary school students build study habits. Homework for junior high students appears to reach the point of diminishing returns after about 90 minutes a night. For high school students, the positive line continues to climb until between 90 minutes and 2½ hours of homework a night, after which returns diminish.

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.

Opponents of homework counter that it can also have negative effects. They argue it can lead to boredom with schoolwork, since all activities remain interesting only for so long. Homework can deny students access to leisure activities that also teach important life skills. Parents can get too involved in homework -- pressuring their child and confusing him by using different instructional techniques than the teacher.

My feeling is that homework policies should prescribe amounts of homework consistent with the research evidence, but which also give individual schools and teachers some flexibility to take into account the unique needs and circumstances of their students and families. In general, teachers should avoid either extreme.

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Nobody knows what the point of homework is

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As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework. But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

Luis Torres, the principal of PS 55, a predominantly low-income community elementary school in the south Bronx, told me that his school secured Chromebooks for students early in the pandemic only to learn that some lived in shelters that blocked wifi for security reasons. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.

According to a 2021 Pew survey , 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent.

The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered.

Over the past three years, in response to concerns about equity, schools across the country, including in Sacramento, Los Angeles , San Diego , and Clark County, Nevada , made permanent changes to their homework policies that restricted how much homework could be given and how it could be graded after in-person learning resumed.

Three years into the pandemic, as districts and teachers reckon with Covid-era overhauls of teaching and learning, schools are still reconsidering the purpose and place of homework. Whether relaxing homework expectations helps level the playing field between students or harms them by decreasing rigor is a divisive issue without conclusive evidence on either side, echoing other debates in education like the elimination of standardized test scores from some colleges’ admissions processes.

I first began to wonder if the homework abolition movement made sense after speaking with teachers in some Massachusetts public schools, who argued that rather than help disadvantaged kids, stringent homework restrictions communicated an attitude of low expectations. One, an English teacher, said she felt the school had “just given up” on trying to get the students to do work; another argued that restrictions that prohibit teachers from assigning take-home work that doesn’t begin in class made it difficult to get through the foreign-language curriculum. Teachers in other districts have raised formal concerns about homework abolition’s ability to close gaps among students rather than widening them.

Many education experts share this view. Harris Cooper, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke who has studied homework efficacy, likened homework abolition to “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

But as I learned after talking to a variety of stakeholders — from homework researchers to policymakers to parents of schoolchildren — whether to abolish homework probably isn’t the right question. More important is what kind of work students are sent home with and where they can complete it. Chances are, if schools think more deeply about giving constructive work, time spent on homework will come down regardless.

There’s no consensus on whether homework works

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Researchers disagree even on how much research exists on the value of homework. Kathleen Budge, the co-author of Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools and a professor at Boise State, told me that homework “has been greatly researched.” Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer and leader of the education nonprofit Challenge Success, said, “It’s not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems.”

Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.) Homework proponents argue that while it is difficult to design randomized control studies to test homework’s effectiveness, the vast majority of existing studies show a strong positive correlation between homework and high academic achievement for middle and high school students. Prominent critics of homework argue that these correlational studies are unreliable and point to studies that suggest a neutral or negative effect on student performance. Both agree there is little to no evidence for homework’s effectiveness at an elementary school level, though proponents often argue that it builds constructive habits for the future.

For anyone who remembers homework assignments from both good and bad teachers, this fundamental disagreement might not be surprising. Some homework is pointless and frustrating to complete. Every week during my senior year of high school, I had to analyze a poem for English and decorate it with images found on Google; my most distinct memory from that class is receiving a demoralizing 25-point deduction because I failed to present my analysis on a poster board. Other assignments really do help students learn: After making an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for a ninth grade history project, I was inspired to check out from the library and read a biography of the Chinese ruler.

For homework opponents, the first example is more likely to resonate. “We’re all familiar with the negative effects of homework: stress, exhaustion, family conflict, less time for other activities, diminished interest in learning,” Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, which challenges common justifications for homework, told me in an email. “And these effects may be most pronounced among low-income students.” Kohn believes that schools should make permanent any moratoria implemented during the pandemic, arguing that there are no positives at all to outweigh homework’s downsides. Recent studies , he argues , show the benefits may not even materialize during high school.

In the Marlborough Public Schools, a suburban district 45 minutes west of Boston, school policy committee chair Katherine Hennessy described getting kids to complete their homework during remote education as “a challenge, to say the least.” Teachers found that students who spent all day on their computers didn’t want to spend more time online when the day was over. So, for a few months, the school relaxed the usual practice and teachers slashed the quantity of nightly homework.

Online learning made the preexisting divides between students more apparent, she said. Many students, even during normal circumstances, lacked resources to keep them on track and focused on completing take-home assignments. Though Marlborough Schools is more affluent than PS 55, Hennessy said many students had parents whose work schedules left them unable to provide homework help in the evenings. The experience tracked with a common divide in the country between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

So in October 2021, months after the homework reduction began, the Marlborough committee made a change to the district’s policy. While teachers could still give homework, the assignments had to begin as classwork. And though teachers could acknowledge homework completion in a student’s participation grade, they couldn’t count homework as its own grading category. “Rigorous learning in the classroom does not mean that that classwork must be assigned every night,” the policy stated . “Extensions of class work is not to be used to teach new content or as a form of punishment.”

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

The critiques of homework are valid as far as they go, but at a certain point, arguments against homework can defy the commonsense idea that to retain what they’re learning, students need to practice it.

“Doesn’t a kid become a better reader if he reads more? Doesn’t a kid learn his math facts better if he practices them?” said Cathy Vatterott, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After decades of research, she said it’s still hard to isolate the value of homework, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned.

Blanket vilification of homework can also conflate the unique challenges facing disadvantaged students as compared to affluent ones, which could have different solutions. “The kids in the low-income schools are being hurt because they’re being graded, unfairly, on time they just don’t have to do this stuff,” Pope told me. “And they’re still being held accountable for turning in assignments, whether they’re meaningful or not.” On the other side, “Palo Alto kids” — students in Silicon Valley’s stereotypically pressure-cooker public schools — “are just bombarded and overloaded and trying to stay above water.”

Merely getting rid of homework doesn’t solve either problem. The United States already has the second-highest disparity among OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations between time spent on homework by students of high and low socioeconomic status — a difference of more than three hours, said Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University and author of No More Mindless Homework .

When she interviewed teachers in Boston-area schools that had cut homework before the pandemic, Bempechat told me, “What they saw immediately was parents who could afford it immediately enrolled their children in the Russian School of Mathematics,” a math-enrichment program whose tuition ranges from $140 to about $400 a month. Getting rid of homework “does nothing for equity; it increases the opportunity gap between wealthier and less wealthy families,” she said. “That solution troubles me because it’s no solution at all.”

A group of teachers at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, made the same point after the school district proposed an overhaul of its homework policies, including removing penalties for missing homework deadlines, allowing unlimited retakes, and prohibiting grading of homework.

“Given the emphasis on equity in today’s education systems,” they wrote in a letter to the school board, “we believe that some of the proposed changes will actually have a detrimental impact towards achieving this goal. Families that have means could still provide challenging and engaging academic experiences for their children and will continue to do so, especially if their children are not experiencing expected rigor in the classroom.” At a school where more than a third of students are low-income, the teachers argued, the policies would prompt students “to expect the least of themselves in terms of effort, results, and responsibility.”

Not all homework is created equal

Despite their opposing sides in the homework wars, most of the researchers I spoke to made a lot of the same points. Both Bempechat and Pope were quick to bring up how parents and schools confuse rigor with workload, treating the volume of assignments as a proxy for quality of learning. Bempechat, who is known for defending homework, has written extensively about how plenty of it lacks clear purpose, requires the purchasing of unnecessary supplies, and takes longer than it needs to. Likewise, when Pope instructs graduate-level classes on curriculum, she asks her students to think about the larger purpose they’re trying to achieve with homework: If they can get the job done in the classroom, there’s no point in sending home more work.

At its best, pandemic-era teaching facilitated that last approach. Honolulu-based teacher Christina Torres Cawdery told me that, early in the pandemic, she often had a cohort of kids in her classroom for four hours straight, as her school tried to avoid too much commingling. She couldn’t lecture for four hours, so she gave the students plenty of time to complete independent and project-based work. At the end of most school days, she didn’t feel the need to send them home with more to do.

A similar limited-homework philosophy worked at a public middle school in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A couple of teachers there turned as much class as possible into an opportunity for small-group practice, allowing kids to work on problems that traditionally would be assigned for homework, Jessica Flick, a math coach who leads department meetings at the school, told me. It was inspired by a philosophy pioneered by Simon Fraser University professor Peter Liljedahl, whose influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics reframes homework as “check-your-understanding questions” rather than as compulsory work. Last year, Flick found that the two eighth grade classes whose teachers adopted this strategy performed the best on state tests, and this year, she has encouraged other teachers to implement it.

Teachers know that plenty of homework is tedious and unproductive. Jeannemarie Dawson De Quiroz, who has taught for more than 20 years in low-income Boston and Los Angeles pilot and charter schools, says that in her first years on the job she frequently assigned “drill and kill” tasks and questions that she now feels unfairly stumped students. She said designing good homework wasn’t part of her teaching programs, nor was it meaningfully discussed in professional development. With more experience, she turned as much class time as she could into practice time and limited what she sent home.

“The thing about homework that’s sticky is that not all homework is created equal,” says Jill Harrison Berg, a former teacher and the author of Uprooting Instructional Inequity . “Some homework is a genuine waste of time and requires lots of resources for no good reason. And other homework is really useful.”

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

The takeaways are clear: Schools can make cuts to homework, but those cuts should be part of a strategy to improve the quality of education for all students. If the point of homework was to provide more practice, districts should think about how students can make it up during class — or offer time during or after school for students to seek help from teachers. If it was to move the curriculum along, it’s worth considering whether strategies like Liljedahl’s can get more done in less time.

Some of the best thinking around effective assignments comes from those most critical of the current practice. Denise Pope proposes that, before assigning homework, teachers should consider whether students understand the purpose of the work and whether they can do it without help. If teachers think it’s something that can’t be done in class, they should be mindful of how much time it should take and the feedback they should provide. It’s questions like these that De Quiroz considered before reducing the volume of work she sent home.

More than a year after the new homework policy began in Marlborough, Hennessy still hears from parents who incorrectly “think homework isn’t happening” despite repeated assurances that kids still can receive work. She thinks part of the reason is that education has changed over the years. “I think what we’re trying to do is establish that homework may be an element of educating students,” she told me. “But it may not be what parents think of as what they grew up with. ... It’s going to need to adapt, per the teaching and the curriculum, and how it’s being delivered in each classroom.”

For the policy to work, faculty, parents, and students will all have to buy into a shared vision of what school ought to look like. The district is working on it — in November, it hosted and uploaded to YouTube a round-table discussion on homework between district administrators — but considering the sustained confusion, the path ahead seems difficult.

When I asked Luis Torres about whether he thought homework serves a useful part in PS 55’s curriculum, he said yes, of course it was — despite the effort and money it takes to keep the school open after hours to help them do it. “The children need the opportunity to practice,” he said. “If you don’t give them opportunities to practice what they learn, they’re going to forget.” But Torres doesn’t care if the work is done at home. The school stays open until around 6 pm on weekdays, even during breaks. Tutors through New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development programs help kids with work after school so they don’t need to take it with them.

As schools weigh the purpose of homework in an unequal world, it’s tempting to dispose of a practice that presents real, practical problems to students across the country. But getting rid of homework is unlikely to do much good on its own. Before cutting it, it’s worth thinking about what good assignments are meant to do in the first place. It’s crucial that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds tackle complex quantitative problems and hone their reading and writing skills. It’s less important that the work comes home with them.

Jacob Sweet is a freelance writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, among other publications.

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Expression "A holiday at school"

Test No. [color=blue]incompl/elem-7 “Modals”, question 7

They … do their homework today because it is a holiday at the school.

(a) must not (b) don’t have (c) don’t have to

Test No. [color=blue]incompl/elem-7 “Modals”, answer 7

They don’t have to do their homework today because it is a holiday at the school.

Correct answer: (c) don’t have to

Your answer was: [color=green]correct [size=200]_________________________[/size]

Is it right to say at school?

Yes, a holiday at school is the correct expression.[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, photographs: Happy scholars [YSaerTTEW443543]

why it’s not use “must not”?

“You must not do your homework” means you are not allowed to do your homework or that you don’t have permission to do your homework.[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, photographs: A private airplane [YSaerTTEW443543]

ooo I see. Thank you torsten

Dear Sir, Yameen is here again. I want to speak english Fluently, Can you please help me. How can I improve? Regards

I don’t know well how to use ‘ought to’. My first question is to know if ought to is the verb? Is it possible to say in infinitif form “to ought to” ?

Thanks for more explanations.

Dear sir, am actually new to this place so couldn’t get american english,am poor at english. its very difficult to me. can you please tell me how can i improve my english so fast and fluently . regards lilly

Welcome to the forums, Hemalath, There is no easy answer to improving English. You have to work at it regularly. When you have a specific question about English, please post it. We’ll be happy to try to help. Meanwhile take a look at the lessons and exercises for general advice.

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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Part 7: The First Week of School

What is the ideal amount of homework to assign.

A typical school day in the United States is six to six and half hours long. During this time, teachers are required to teach four to five core subjects, including math, English, science, and history. In addition, they must find time to include the fundamental supplementary subjects. These supplementary subjects include, but are not limited to, physical education, health, art, music, and foreign language. In these six hours, lunch and recess must also take place. Because of the large curriculum and the limited time, many teachers assign homework.

What is Homework?

Homework is work assigned to students, by teachers, to be completed outside of the school. “It is used as an instructional supplement to classroom teaching.” (6) Although it is not required, homework is typically counted as part of the students’ grade. “The U.S. is one of the few nations where teachers include homework scores as an element of course grades.” (2) Forms, objectives, and lengths of homework vary. A large debate surrounds the importance of homework and the time restraints it places on today’s students.

History of the Homework Debate

The debate over the importance of homework is not a new one. It has been debated since the late 1800s. Between the late 1800s and the mid 1900s some cities in the United States banned homework on the account that it was affecting the health of children; “many thought (homework) was an overemphasis on at-home drill and memorization”.(2) Children were spending so much time on schoolwork and homework that they were mentally and physically exhausted. However, in the 1950s and ’60s homework loads began to increase. The government felt that the “United States was becoming less economically competitive” (2). A major event that sparked these notions was the Russians’ launch of the Sputnik satellite (7). This increase of homework lasted until the 1970s, in which it once again made a drastic decline. In the 1980s the load once again begins to increase (2). This time it is due to the incompetence on international tests. In 2002, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act under President George W. Bush. Under this act, teachers and administrators are required to submit their school’s achievements on state standardized test to the federal government. Failure to comply or to reach the goals set forth by the state leads to a range of consequences. The most severe consequence is the replacement of staff in those failing schools. According to the NCLB Act, all students must be proficient in math and reading by 2014 (2).

Types of Homework

Homework is assigned in a multitude of varieties. Some assignments include reading specific content, problems at the end of a chapter, worksheets, research papers, and creative projects. Teachers may assign daily homework in which the assignment is to be completed and turned in on the following school day. Alternatively, teachers may assign long-term assignments; giving the students a week or more to complete the assignment. Homework assignments can be used to reinforce lessons taught in class, or elaborate on briefly introduced material (2). In addition, homework assignments may be used to prepare the students for an upcoming lesson (5).

Purpose of Homework

“Different homework assignments serve different purposes, so it is important to consider the goal of each exercise.” (5) Some valid purposes of homework assignments include knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. (5) Homework assigned to reinforce lessons gives students the opportunity to practice newly acquired skills. They also help teachers assess the students’ understanding and comprehension of the lessons. Homework assigned to elaborate on newly introduced material requires students to take initiative and learn independently. This type of assignments also allows teachers to introduce more material throughout the school year. Homework assignments designed as preparation for upcoming lessons introduces the lesson to the students beforehand and therefore increases their ability to comprehend it. All of these reasons are intended to have a direct effect on students’ learning and academic performances. In addition to these academic lessons, homework results in positive non-academic lessons. Homework teaches the values of responsibility, good work-study habits, time management, initiative, and motivation. “Perhaps the most important advantage of homework is that it can enhance achievement by extending learning beyond the school day.” (8)

The Effects of Homework

Does the amount of homework assigned have an impact on the academic success of students? Unfortunately, there is no straightforward concrete answer. Research shows that homework affects students differently depending on their age and grade level. The effect of homework on academic success increases as age and grade levels increase. The National Education Association and the National Teacher Association endorse a 10 minute per grade rule of thumb (2). This rule of thumb suggests that first graders should be assigned approximately ten minutes of homework, second graders about twenty, and twelfth graders about two hours.

Elementary School

Although homework has the least effect on elementary aged students, research shows that the homework loads have increased in the elementary schools over the last decade (2). “Research shows little evidence that homework improves learning or school achievement for children in the early grades.” (2) Students at this age have a limited attention span and grasp of study skills. A vast amount of homework may actually inhibit their academic achievement; “it can be counter productive, children will show signs of fatigue and frustration”. (7) Homework, in moderation, is more important at this age level to foster good work-study habits and teach self-motivation and responsibility.

Middle School

Research is inconclusive on regards to the effects of homework on middle school students. However, research does show that middle school is the stage of school that our students began falling behind on an international level; “by middle school U.S. scores begin to fall (on international achievement tests)” (2).

High School

Homework has the most effect on the academic success of high school students. There is a correlation between homework and scores on achievement tests and overall grades. (6) Following the ten-minute rule of thumb, the optimal amount of homework for high school students is approximately two hours. The more the better does not apply after two hours. Each added hour doing homework shows a smaller pay off in achievement (6).

Too Much or Too Little

A major debate surrounds the effect and time restriction that homework has on school-aged children. Should homework be required? How much is too much? Critics against required homework argue that if students are assigned too much homework it leaves no time for family, extra curricular activities, and play. “Research shows (these activities) are more highly correlated with cognitive development and achievement than is homework.”(2) Too much homework can lead to stress, sleep deprivation and even depression. An unreasonable amount of homework dims children’s love of learning and too much may “diminish its effectiveness or become counter productive”. (2) On the other side, critics that are for required homework argue that the schools are not assigning enough homework. “Mastering a subject or skill takes practice, and homework can provide that practice.” (5) Students have the weekends, holidays, and summer to play. The amount of time spent on academics, to include the length of school days and school years as well as time spent on homework, does not compare with other industrialized countries, such as Asia and Europe. (2) Supporters of homework argue that homework adds to study time, and study time is the chief determinant of how much students learn. (2)

Importance of the Type of Homework Assigned

The type of homework that a teacher assigns can have a lot to do with its effectiveness. “Even more important than how much homework is what kind.” (2) If students are required to complete repetitive, long, ill thought out assignments, the knowledge they gain by doing so is minimal (8). For example, if there are 40 math problems assigned focusing on the same material, a student that knows the material may feel that it is repetitive and pointless. On the other hand, a student that is having a hard time with the material may get frustrated and disengaged. An approach taken by many teachers to avoid these issues is to use the five-problem rule recommended by the U.S. Department of Education (2). This rule suggests that teachers should not assign more than five problems of any given content. Five problems are enough to assess weather a student comprehends the material or not. Furthermore, “if a child who did not get the right idea in class slogs through thirty problems, she is just cementing the wrong method in her brain” (2).

Teachers must carefully plan and assign homework in a way that maximizes the potential for student success (2). Not all students learn the same way. Students may be visual, verbal, or logical learners. Teachers need to be aware of the different learning strengths of their students and vary the types of homework they assign to include all types of learning styles. In addition, assignments must be realistic in length and difficulty (8). First graders should not be expected to learn twenty-five seven-letter words for a spelling test. Teachers need to take in to account their students logical and mental capabilities. Teachers should limit assignments to important and thoughtful ones (2). They should not assign homework just because it is expected by the parents and/or students. Generally, students complete their assignments because of expectations, as opposed to the educational gain they will receive by doing so. Keeping this in mind, teachers should assign homework that will keep the students interested while expanding their knowledge.

Homework is a hot-button topic in education. Some view homework as a needless waste of time and effort, and source of tremendous stress for students; while, others view it as an excellent study and review tool. As a middle school teacher, I see it as a way for my students to hone the information they learned in class and also continually spiral back to retain information learned previously. Also, it can be used as a way to introduce new topics and peak interest in a student. It is a valuable resource one can use to their advantage. However, it should not be a determining factor in a student’s grade point or average, as it is merely a tool and not a fundamental aspect of any course; the heart of the material should be assessed and covered in class. In fact, many teachers refuse to even assign homework as it is understood that students rarely complete it or put great effort into it. Whatever one’s feeling regarding homework, there is a definite ‘best’ method one can employ to reap the full benefits of homework. As pointed out by the National Education Association, “ensuring students’ success is a shared responsibility” (NEA, 2006, p. 2). That is, as parents and educators, we should be utilizing every avenue available to us to assist our students in their journey for academic success. As the achievement gap becomes a gorge the world grows ever more competitive and unforgiving. So, what can we do to make homework work? First, we can be prepared. Secondly, be on the same page as the instructor or teacher—understand their policy. Thirdly, be accessible and willing to model your expectations. Also, utilize all of your resources and stay in touch. Finally, foster learning even outside of school. (NEA, 2006, p. 1-3).

Multiple Choice Questions

Click to reveal the answer.

Homework has the greatest positive effects on…

C. High school students

Which of the following is not a valid purpose of assigning homework?

B. Punishment

The effectiveness of homework depends on the type assigned.

Which of the following is a value that homework teaches?

D. All of the above

Ms. Jackson is a 6th grade teacher. She often gives her students brief assignments for homework that pique their interest and goes back to information in the beginning if the year. This is an example of someone using homework to

B. Be a valuable review resource.

With homework, it is important to

D. Be accessible and willing to model your expectations.

Mr. Anderson is a third grade teacher. For homework he gives each child an old magazine. The students are to circle at least ten proper nouns they come across. They started proper nouns one day earlier. What is one thing we can say about Mr. Anderson’s choice of homework?

C. The assignment is good practice for the students, but should not be graded because it is such a new concept.

Essay Question

Click to reveal sample responses.

In having the opportunity to teach high school students, I have also had the chance to develop homework policies for my students. Homework is considered a tool to reinforce new and existing material that has been learned within the classroom. My class used computers for 90% of their class assignments. Homework consists of work that can be completed outside of class, without using a computer. By completing the assignments this allows students to become independent learners, as they work on self discipline and prepare themselves for higher academia. Students receive points for completing homework; however, they do not receive a grade for homework. The points that the students receive are incentive points and are translated into extra credit points for taking time to complete assignments outside of class. Students are assigned long-term projects. The long-term projects can be completed outside of class; however, students have enough time within class to complete the assigned project. The purpose for allowing students to complete long-term projects in class is to be able to support the student’s questions, concerns and or ideas.

Students who do not take the opportunity to complete assignments outside of class do not receive any points. The points are not averaged into grades; but, by completing homework assignments students will have additional points to add to their original grade. The points that are added to the original grade can make a difference between a B or an A, or a D or a C. Students do not have any other opportunities to receive extra credit; therefore, all students make an effort to complete the homework assignments that are assigned to them.

I plan to teach Kindergarten and I don’t think that I will be giving them homework unless it is something that isn’t too time consuming such as reading a story to a parent. I feel that students work hard enough at school and they need time to relax and be kids. Students are in school for six or six and a half hours five days a week. That’s a lot of time to be learning new things. I think that homework should be different at different grade levels. For example if I was teaching sixth grade then they would definitely have to have homework. Subjects such as math require homework because you need to make sure you understand the material. Some teachers take the homework overboard though, because some teachers forget that the students have other classes and want to give them tons of work to do. When this happens the students are doing homework all night and don’t get much of a break; especially if they are involved in extra-curricular activates. That is why I think that homework should only be given if necessary. —Katherine Owen

If I was a teacher for school I would give my students homework but I would not collect it. A lot of teachers give out homework and then they collect it for part of the student’s grade. Homework should always be offered but it should not be graded because homework is suppose to help students learn the information better so if a student does not do their homework and gets a bad grade on the test then that would be their fault. Students would then realize that even though homework is not collected you should still do it so you will be able to do well on your test. Another reason why I would not collect it for a grade is so the student can have more time studying for a class that he needs help in, because if a student knows the information and gets homework on that information then its a waste of time and that would take time from him studying for a class maybe he is struggling on. When I was a teacher I hated teachers that gave out a lot of homework and collected it for a grade because it takes all of your time. I feel like a student has been in school for 8 hours of the day, so they should get some free time and enjoy being a kid, not going straight home and cracking down on the books for another couple hours. —Kurt Johnson

I believe that homework is a crucial part of the learning process. It gives children a chance to attempt problems on their own. This allows them to discover their weaknesses and strengths before a test is given. It will also helps the children to learn valuable study skills. In addition, assigning homework gives parents a chance to become involved in what their children are learning. Parents’ support is crucial to the education of younger children. When I become a teacher, I definitely plan on assigning homework. However, I will do it in moderation. I believe that the 10 minutes per grade level rule is an excellent amount. Younger children should not be expected to spend as much time as older children on homework.

I would not assign homework over the weekends or during holiday breaks. Everyone needs a break now and then so that they do not become “burned out”. Also, with this break and rest from school work, the children will return feeling refreshed and ready to start learning again. I also think that long term assignments are a great learning tool. Children can begin these assignments and work on them little by little as they learn new skills. This would help the children see the progress of their knowledge and help them to realize how their lessons are related. —Kristy Currin

As a future fourth grade teacher, I plan to assign a minimal amount of homework. I intend to allow class time to complete assignments. If the student does not use his or her time wisely, then the work will have to be completed as homework. However, I realize that there will be occasions when assignments will have to be completed at home due to disruptions in the school day, such as assemblies. Also, due to extracurricular activities, many students have to rush to complete homework in order to get to participate in the activity or parents do the work for them just to get it done. If students have to rush through their work, they will not learn the necessary material, which will create problems for the student later. When students do their homework during class, I know whose work I will be grading. Another reason I plan to assign a minimal amount of homework is because I believe children need time to be children. If they have to go home and complete two hour’s worth of homework, when will they have time to play? In addition to getting their exercise, children learn when they are able to play and explore outdoors, which creates a happy, healthy child and a successful student. —Amanda Hughes

I plan on teaching 3rd grade and I think homework is a great opportunity to do some work on their own time. This can also teach the students good time management and how not to procrastinate. I do not plan on assigning a lot of homework but I believe it’s an important learning skill. Homework also gives the parents an idea of what their children are learning in class and what their children’s learning level is at. I also intend on giving students time in class to do their assignments and if they do not finish them in class they will have to finish at home. This also gives the students the opportunity to ask me questions if they have any. I think that homework is a good idea and I intend on giving some, but maybe not on the weekends. —Diane Berry

I plan to be a third grade teacher. At that age, I think it’s important to not give an overload of homework. Some homework is inevitable. It is a great opportunity to see how the students work without the teacher’s help, and their parents get to see how and what they are learning in school. However, I think children do enough work during the school day. When they go home at the end of the day, they should be able to play and enjoy their time away from school. Family time is also important for the development of small children. There is plenty of time in the school day for them to complete all their work and stay on track with the students from other classrooms that are given homework every night. If the student doesn’t complete the given classwork in school, then it school be completed at home, but as a teacher I would try to my best to not give homework. —Whitney Medeiros

As a future high school or middle school history and government teacher, homework will be an important part of my class. I believe that at those ages, students should be serious about their education and willing to do outside of the classroom work in order to enhance their learning. Teachers do not give homework just to give it. Homework is given to supplement the present lesson or to get students to think about the next lesson they will be going over. I believe that some homework assignments can also help students because some people learn better on their own and it also helps reinforce what they have already learned. In my class, there will most likely be a lot of essay questions, reading and paper writing. I not only want my students to learn about history and government, but also use the tools they have learned in other classes such as English. Most likely I will have my students read a section in the book before we go over it, just so they have a basic understanding of the material. After we cover the material, they will complete worksheets that correspond. Any assignments that are not finished in class will be considered homework. I will also have my students complete long term assignments, such as a term paper. I do not want to assign my class loads of homework each night because I know that there will be some students who will not complete the work, but students who do complete homework assignments will be rewarded. Homework grades will be a small portion of the final grades for students, so they need to take it seriously. —Tara Saylor

I plan to be a kindergarten teacher. I will probably not assign that much homework to them. Children are in school for a long enough period during the day that at such a young age I don’t think that it is necessary for them to be assigned work to do at home. I plan on giving them a few activities to complete at home though, but I will make sure it is all things that they would enjoy. By working with young children, I have observed that when they are in kindergarten they actually think it’s kind of “cool” to have homework. It makes them feel older and gives them a sense of accomplishment. I also feel that if they have some homework it will give the children a chance to ask their parents questions. By doing so parents (or guardians) and children can have a chance to spend time together and talk about what the child is learning in school. Although I feel that homework can be very essential to students at higher grade levels, I feel that in elementary school homework should be used to reinforce what was learned during the school day and give a chance for parents and children to spend time together at home. I do not believe that children (especially in elementary schools) should have so much work to take home that it makes going home a stressful event. —Marinda Gregory

Some people dislike the idea of homework and they say that it’s a waste of time and it is not an effective way to reinforce material. I believe that homework can be a really useful tool in the classroom and I think that it will benefit my students in the long run. I plan to become a Spanish teacher, and learning a language other than one’s own can be difficult, so I will give my students homework so they can get a grasp of the concepts presented to them. It is easy for kids to forget what they are taught, especially when a plethora of new ideas are thrown at them over the course of six hours a day, so my homework assignments will help them retain information and practice using the language outside of the classroom. I will not, however, make homework a major part of my student’s grades. Homework will only be mandatory if students fail to show mastery of a skill on tests or quizzes. If they maintain at least a “B” and aren’t showing any problems, then they do not have to do the assignment if they don’t want to. I don’t think it is a good idea to make students do homework if it doesn’t help them learn anything new. If their grades are not up to par then they will have required homework assignments until their quiz or test grades are adequate. This will keep them on task and then they will be rewarded in the end for making progress. —Lauren Spindle

First and foremost, I am not a big fan of long, drawn out homework assignments. I do not believe they enhance learning or lead to better comprehension of material (in agreement with this article). For my classrooms, I will only assign homework as needed. When we are working on math problems, which require practice, I will assign a few (no more than five) for my students to practice after school. Spelling words or simple papers will be the maximum for my language arts classes. All other topics will have assignments on an as needed basis. I hope to be able to cover all material and reach my students in class, without the need for after school work. The higher grade levels will require more homework, due to the amount of material that must be covered. For example, fifth graders are required to learn many more difficult topics than first graders, but their attention span and cognitive abilities are also greater. I had many friends who became “burnt out” from large homework loads and will make it a goal of mine to limit the amount of homework I assign. If I were to teach high school, obviously the workload would be higher. These students are preparing for college and must learn how to properly manage time and complete multiple assignments on time. The length of time we are given with our students is adequate, but reinforcement of skills will still be necessary. Therefore, it will be necessary to assign some homework, but it is still my job to teach the material and I intend to do so in class and without the need of learning skills at home. There is no way to get around studying for tests, but if the material is presented properly study time should be minimal. Homework will be solely for reinforcement of skills and practice. —April K. Smith

I would like the opportunity to teach second grade. I would assign homework to my students but only work that is manageable and acceptable. Personally, I believe homework should be a review and work that can be done. Too often homework has been work that takes hours or discourages students. I can remember doing homework in elementary school and feeling hopeless. The homework was overwhelming and took hours, when it should not have. Throughout middle and high school homework was the same. I spent way too long doing it and it became draining. Homework should be a review from that day’s lesson and not teach something new. My policy would be homework would be nightly and work from that day could help with the assignments. I know now, I would ask students to read every night but I would never ask them to read something out of the ordinary knowing they cannot read it. I believe in homework but it should be used when needed and necessary. —Meryl Cox

I am currently teaching twelfth grade honors English at Menchville High School in Newport News. This is my second year teaching this class and, with the help of the other honors English teacher, I have adopted very specific homework policies that I think are very effective. I spent last year perfecting these policies, and this year, I have found it even easier to enforce. My seniors have reading homework almost every night. It usually is not an excessive amount, but at the same time, it is difficult reading that requires a certain degree of effort and hard work. When they complain, I remind them that the point of this class is to prepare them for life after high school. Because it is an honors class, it is expected that the majority of these students will go on to college next year. Those who don’t will be entering the work force or the military, and like in college, they will have certain duties they will be expected to complete. The homework assignments are designed to make them think on their own and prepare them for life after high school. With every reading assignment, they know there is a possibility for a quiz the following class period. Failing several quizzes in a row as a result of not doing homework, will significantly lower a student’s grade. Therefore, they are much more likely to do the reading because they don’t want their grades to drop. —Erin Eudy

I am going to be a music teacher which will not require assigning homework, but I would also like to teach music theory which would. This would be a high school class. This subject is one that is very methodical and can only be learned through working out written examples. While taking music theory in high school about twenty minutes of homework was a sufficient amount for the class to master the material, generally. I would try to assign only that much, especially since I know the core classes would be assigning more and I wouldn’t want my students to get stressed out. However, if I didn’t feel enough material was covered during class, I would assign more. Homework is something to aid in the learning process, in my opinion, and it should not be assigned just for homework’s sake, so I would keep that in mind as well. Also, I would check the homework to see whether or not the students made an attempt and that would determine their grade, not how well they did it. However, I would edit them for mistakes to make sure they understand the material. Homework is a learning experience and the student should not be faulted if they don’t understand something. —Brittany Cannon

As a high school Spanish teacher, I think that it would be necessary to have homework for the students on a regular basis so that they get time to practice the language that they are learning. There is no way they will be able to learn the language if they only ever use it or think about it just in class, so I know that I would have homework for my kids every week. That said, I also think that I would be lenient in the homework that I give. It would follow the ten minute rule for the most part and be a review of the things that we learned in class that day, either some sort of grammar or vocabulary assignment. I would work with the children who were having trouble with the activity and use the homework in class as a review so that they get the opportunity to learn from each other and from me. I would also make sure that I know my kids well and know their backgrounds and stories so that I can work with children who do not have time or maybe a place at home to complete their homework, or have to work to help support their family. I think it is important to be firm in making students do homework as a review, but there will always be exceptions to that rule, there will always be students with special needs that you will have to work with so that they are able to succeed in the class and I think it is important to remember that when assigning homework especially. —Jessie Neumann

I am going to teach math at the high school level. Math is a subject that must be practiced at home to make sure the student can solve a problem on their own. I am also a mother of two children who are both in elementary school. I feel homework is very important for students no matter what the grade. Homework should be a review of what is taught in the class and just a way for students to test their understanding of the daily lessons taught. I do not feel that giving students more tougher homework will help our students to become smarter. The above article talks about how “by middle school U.S. scores begin to fall (on international achievement tests)”. I do not believe more homework will solve this problem. I think the approach to teaching needs to change so students are learning the most up to date information possible. Technology today allows for many new and entertaining ways to teach students. I feel we need to focus more on the what and how we are teaching our kids rather than the amount of homework time. In my opinion too hard of homework or overloaded homework will many times only be completed by the students who have a strong support system at home. Sadly many times students do not have a strong support system at home. Many students do not have help on the hard homework assignments and become discouraged when they are unable to complete the assignment. Many students live for today and easily become unmotivated when they are given too much homework deciding not to do any of the homework because they feel they were given an unreasonable amount. I also feel that as important as homework is, exercise is just as important. Kids need to have time to go outside for at least an hour so they keep their bodies healthy. Students go to school for about 6 hours five days a week and even though they get holidays and summers off, it is very important that students are happy with as little stress as possible because that is how the brain learns best, according to Dr. Allen’s lecture on “The Brain”. When I teach I will only use homework as practice to ensure the students understand the material taught. —Victoria Monaghan

• Bempechat, Janine. “The motivational benefits of homework: a social-cognitive perspective.” Theory Into Practice Summer 2004: 8pp. FindArticles. 8 Sept. 2007. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NQM/is_3_43/ai_n6361599/print
• Clemmitt, Marcia. “Students Under Stress.” CQ Researcher 17 (2007): 577-600. CQ Researcher Online. 2 Sept. 2007. http://library.cqpress.com.ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/cqresearcher/cqresrre2007071300
• Coutts, Pamela. “Meanings of homework and implications for practice.” Theory Into Practice Summer 2004: 7pp. FindArticles. 15 Sept. 2007. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NQM/is_3_43/ai_n7069035/print
• “Do Students Have Too Much Homework?” A Report by The Brown Center on Education Policy. Oct. 2003. The Brookings Institution. 3 Sept. 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20040427043131/http://www.brookings.edu/gs/brown/20031001homework.htm
• Junior Science Support Service. Department of Education and Science. 6 Sept. 2007 http://juniorscience.ie/jsss/Files/se_homework.pdf
• Keith, Timothy, Christine Diamond-Hallam, and Jodene Fine. “Longitudinal Effects of In-School and Out-of-School Homework on High School Grades.” School Psychology Quarterly 19.3 (2004): 187-211.
• Marshall, Patrick. “Homework Debate.” CQ Researcher 12 (2002): 993-1012. CQ Researcher Online. 2 Sept. 2007 < http://library.cqpress.com.ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/cqresearcher/cqresrre2002120600 >.
• Marzano, Robert, and Debra Pickering. “The Case For and Against Homework.” Educational Leadership 64.6 (2007): 74-79.
• Van Voorhis, Frances L., (2004), Reflecting on the Homework Ritual: Assignments and Designs, Theory Into Practice; Vol. 43 Issue 3.
• The Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University Retrieved November 11, 2007 from www.csos.jhu.edu/P2000/tips/index.htm
• National Education Association. (2006). Bridging the Great Homework Divide: A Solutions Guide for Parents of Middle School Students. http://www.nea.com . Retrieved November 8, 2007 from ERIC database.
• Strauss, Valerie. “As Homework Grows, So Do Arguments Against It.” The Washington Post Online (2006), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/11/AR2006091100908.html
• Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education: A Student-Authored Textbook. Authored by : Dwight W. Allen, Patrick O'Shea, and Peter Baker. Provided by : Old Dominion University. Located at : https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Social_and_Cultural_Foundations_of_American_Education . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Nearly one-in-five teens can’t always finish their homework because of the digital divide

Some 15% of U.S. households with school-age children do not have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data. New survey findings from the Center also show that some teens are more likely to face digital hurdles when trying to complete their homework.

School-age children in lower-income households are especially likely to lack broadband access. Roughly one-third of households with children ages 6 to 17 and whose annual income falls below $30,000 a year do not have a high-speed internet connection at home, compared with just 6% of such households earning $75,000 or more a year. These broadband disparities are particularly pronounced for black and Hispanic households with school-age children – especially those with low household incomes. (The overall share of households with school-age children lacking a high-speed internet connection in 2015 is comparable to what the Center found in an analysis of 2013 Census data.)

This aspect of the digital divide – often referred to as the “homework gap” – can be an academic burden for teens who lack access to digital technologies at home. Black teens, as well as those from lower-income households, are especially likely to face these school-related challenges as a result, according to the new Center survey of 743 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted March 7–April 10, 2018.

At its most extreme, the homework gap can mean that teens have trouble even finishing their homework. Overall, 17% of teens say they are often or sometimes unable to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection.

This is even more common among black teens. One-quarter of black teens say they are at least sometimes unable to complete their homework due to a lack of digital access, including 13% who say this happens to them often. Just 4% of white teens and 6% of Hispanic teens say this often happens to them. (There were not enough Asian respondents in this survey sample to be broken out into a separate analysis.)

Teens also differ by income level when it comes to completing assignments: 24% of teens whose annual family income is less than $30,000 say the lack of a dependable computer or internet connection often or sometimes prohibits them from finishing their homework, but that share drops to 9% among teens who live in households earning $75,000 or more a year.

Other times, teens who lack reliable internet service at home say they seek out other locations to complete their schoolwork: 12% of teens say they at least sometimes use public Wi-Fi to complete assignments because they do not have an internet connection at home. Again, this problem is more prevalent for black or less affluent teens. Roughly one-in-five black teens (21%) report having to at least sometimes use public Wi-Fi for this reason, including 10% who say they often do so. And teens whose family income is below $30,000 a year are far more likely than those whose annual household income is $30,000 or higher to say that they do this (21% vs. 9%).

Lastly, 35% of teens say they often or sometimes have to do their homework on their cellphone. Although it is not uncommon for young people in all circumstances to complete assignments in this way, it is especially prevalent among lower-income teens. Indeed, 45% of teens who live in households earning less than $30,000 a year say they at least sometimes rely on their cellphone to finish their homework.

These findings reflect a broader discussion about the digital divide’s impact on America’s youth. Numerous policymakers and advocates have expressed concern that students with less access to certain technologies may fall behind their more digitally connected peers. There is some evidence that teens who have access to a home computer are more likely to graduate from high school when compared with those who don’t.

The Center’s survey of teens does show stark differences in teens’ computer access based on their household income. A quarter of teens whose family income is less than $30,000 a year do not have access to a home computer, compared with 4% of those whose annual family income is $75,000 or more.

Note: See full topline results and methodology here (PDF). 

• Age & Generations
• Digital Divide
• Economic Inequality
• Education & Learning Online
• Teens & Tech
• Teens & Youth

Monica Anderson is a director of research at Pew Research Center .

Andrew Perrin is a former research analyst focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center .

As Biden and Trump seek reelection, who are the oldest – and youngest – current world leaders?

How teens and parents approach screen time, who are you the art and science of measuring identity, u.s. centenarian population is projected to quadruple over the next 30 years, older workers are growing in number and earning higher wages, most popular.

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Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, how to do homework: 15 expert tips and tricks.

Coursework/GPA

Everyone struggles with homework sometimes, but if getting your homework done has become a chronic issue for you, then you may need a little extra help. That’s why we’ve written this article all about how to do homework. Once you’re finished reading it, you’ll know how to do homework (and have tons of new ways to motivate yourself to do homework)!

We’ve broken this article down into a few major sections. You’ll find:

• A diagnostic test to help you figure out why you’re struggling with homework
• A discussion of the four major homework problems students face, along with expert tips for addressing them
• A bonus section with tips for how to do homework fast

By the end of this article, you’ll be prepared to tackle whatever homework assignments your teachers throw at you .

So let’s get started!

How to Do Homework: Figure Out Your Struggles 

Sometimes it feels like everything is standing between you and getting your homework done. But the truth is, most people only have one or two major roadblocks that are keeping them from getting their homework done well and on time. 

The best way to figure out how to get motivated to do homework starts with pinpointing the issues that are affecting your ability to get your assignments done. That’s why we’ve developed a short quiz to help you identify the areas where you’re struggling. 

Take the quiz below and record your answers on your phone or on a scrap piece of paper. Keep in mind there are no wrong answers! 

1. You’ve just been assigned an essay in your English class that’s due at the end of the week. What’s the first thing you do?

A. Keep it in mind, even though you won’t start it until the day before it’s due  B. Open up your planner. You’ve got to figure out when you’ll write your paper since you have band practice, a speech tournament, and your little sister’s dance recital this week, too.  C. Groan out loud. Another essay? You could barely get yourself to write the last one!  D. Start thinking about your essay topic, which makes you think about your art project that’s due the same day, which reminds you that your favorite artist might have just posted to Instagram...so you better check your feed right now. 

2. Your mom asked you to pick up your room before she gets home from work. You’ve just gotten home from school. You decide you’ll tackle your chores: 

A. Five minutes before your mom walks through the front door. As long as it gets done, who cares when you start?  B. As soon as you get home from your shift at the local grocery store.  C. After you give yourself a 15-minute pep talk about how you need to get to work.  D. You won’t get it done. Between texts from your friends, trying to watch your favorite Netflix show, and playing with your dog, you just lost track of time! 

3. You’ve signed up to wash dogs at the Humane Society to help earn money for your senior class trip. You: 

A. Show up ten minutes late. You put off leaving your house until the last minute, then got stuck in unexpected traffic on the way to the shelter.  B. Have to call and cancel at the last minute. You forgot you’d already agreed to babysit your cousin and bake cupcakes for tomorrow’s bake sale.  C. Actually arrive fifteen minutes early with extra brushes and bandanas you picked up at the store. You’re passionate about animals, so you’re excited to help out! D. Show up on time, but only get three dogs washed. You couldn’t help it: you just kept getting distracted by how cute they were!

4. You have an hour of downtime, so you decide you’re going to watch an episode of The Great British Baking Show. You: 

A. Scroll through your social media feeds for twenty minutes before hitting play, which means you’re not able to finish the whole episode. Ugh! You really wanted to see who was sent home!  B. Watch fifteen minutes until you remember you’re supposed to pick up your sister from band practice before heading to your part-time job. No GBBO for you!  C. You finish one episode, then decide to watch another even though you’ve got SAT studying to do. It’s just more fun to watch people make scones.  D. Start the episode, but only catch bits and pieces of it because you’re reading Twitter, cleaning out your backpack, and eating a snack at the same time.

5. Your teacher asks you to stay after class because you’ve missed turning in two homework assignments in a row. When she asks you what’s wrong, you say: 

A. You planned to do your assignments during lunch, but you ran out of time. You decided it would be better to turn in nothing at all than submit unfinished work.  B. You really wanted to get the assignments done, but between your extracurriculars, family commitments, and your part-time job, your homework fell through the cracks.  C. You have a hard time psyching yourself to tackle the assignments. You just can’t seem to find the motivation to work on them once you get home.  D. You tried to do them, but you had a hard time focusing. By the time you realized you hadn’t gotten anything done, it was already time to turn them in. 

Like we said earlier, there are no right or wrong answers to this quiz (though your results will be better if you answered as honestly as possible). Here’s how your answers break down: 

• If your answers were mostly As, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is procrastination. 
• If your answers were mostly Bs, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is time management. 
• If your answers were mostly Cs, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is motivation. 
• If your answers were mostly Ds, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is getting distracted. 

Now that you’ve identified why you’re having a hard time getting your homework done, we can help you figure out how to fix it! Scroll down to find your core problem area to learn more about how you can start to address it. 

And one more thing: you’re really struggling with homework, it’s a good idea to read through every section below. You may find some additional tips that will help make homework less intimidating. 

How to Do Homework When You’re a Procrastinator  

Merriam Webster defines “procrastinate” as “to put off intentionally and habitually.” In other words, procrastination is when you choose to do something at the last minute on a regular basis. If you’ve ever found yourself pulling an all-nighter, trying to finish an assignment between periods, or sprinting to turn in a paper minutes before a deadline, you’ve experienced the effects of procrastination. 

If you’re a chronic procrastinator, you’re in good company. In fact, one study found that 70% to 95% of undergraduate students procrastinate when it comes to doing their homework. Unfortunately, procrastination can negatively impact your grades. Researchers have found that procrastination can lower your grade on an assignment by as much as five points ...which might not sound serious until you realize that can mean the difference between a B- and a C+. 

Procrastination can also negatively affect your health by increasing your stress levels , which can lead to other health conditions like insomnia, a weakened immune system, and even heart conditions. Getting a handle on procrastination can not only improve your grades, it can make you feel better, too! 

The big thing to understand about procrastination is that it’s not the result of laziness. Laziness is defined as being “disinclined to activity or exertion.” In other words, being lazy is all about doing nothing. But a s this Psychology Today article explains , procrastinators don’t put things off because they don’t want to work. Instead, procrastinators tend to postpone tasks they don’t want to do in favor of tasks that they perceive as either more important or more fun. Put another way, procrastinators want to do things...as long as it’s not their homework! 

3 Tips f or Conquering Procrastination 

Because putting off doing homework is a common problem, there are lots of good tactics for addressing procrastination. Keep reading for our three expert tips that will get your homework habits back on track in no time. 

#1: Create a Reward System

Like we mentioned earlier, procrastination happens when you prioritize other activities over getting your homework done. Many times, this happens because homework...well, just isn’t enjoyable. But you can add some fun back into the process by rewarding yourself for getting your work done. 

Here’s what we mean: let’s say you decide that every time you get your homework done before the day it’s due, you’ll give yourself a point. For every five points you earn, you’ll treat yourself to your favorite dessert: a chocolate cupcake! Now you have an extra (delicious!) incentive to motivate you to leave procrastination in the dust. 

If you’re not into cupcakes, don’t worry. Your reward can be anything that motivates you . Maybe it’s hanging out with your best friend or an extra ten minutes of video game time. As long as you’re choosing something that makes homework worth doing, you’ll be successful. 

#2: Have a Homework Accountability Partner 

If you’re having trouble getting yourself to start your homework ahead of time, it may be a good idea to call in reinforcements . Find a friend or classmate you can trust and explain to them that you’re trying to change your homework habits. Ask them if they’d be willing to text you to make sure you’re doing your homework and check in with you once a week to see if you’re meeting your anti-procrastination goals. 

Sharing your goals can make them feel more real, and an accountability partner can help hold you responsible for your decisions. For example, let’s say you’re tempted to put off your science lab write-up until the morning before it’s due. But you know that your accountability partner is going to text you about it tomorrow...and you don’t want to fess up that you haven’t started your assignment. A homework accountability partner can give you the extra support and incentive you need to keep your homework habits on track. 

#3: Create Your Own Due Dates 

If you’re a life-long procrastinator, you might find that changing the habit is harder than you expected. In that case, you might try using procrastination to your advantage! If you just can’t seem to stop doing your work at the last minute, try setting your own due dates for assignments that range from a day to a week before the assignment is actually due. 

Here’s what we mean. Let’s say you have a math worksheet that’s been assigned on Tuesday and is due on Friday. In your planner, you can write down the due date as Thursday instead. You may still put off your homework assignment until the last minute...but in this case, the “last minute” is a day before the assignment’s real due date . This little hack can trick your procrastination-addicted brain into planning ahead! 

If you feel like Kevin Hart in this meme, then our tips for doing homework when you're busy are for you. 

How to Do Homework When You’re too Busy

If you’re aiming to go to a top-tier college , you’re going to have a full plate. Because college admissions is getting more competitive, it’s important that you’re maintaining your grades , studying hard for your standardized tests , and participating in extracurriculars so your application stands out. A packed schedule can get even more hectic once you add family obligations or a part-time job to the mix. 

If you feel like you’re being pulled in a million directions at once, you’re not alone. Recent research has found that stress—and more severe stress-related conditions like anxiety and depression— are a major problem for high school students . In fact, one study from the American Psychological Association found that during the school year, students’ stress levels are higher than those of the adults around them. 

For students, homework is a major contributor to their overall stress levels . Many high schoolers have multiple hours of homework every night , and figuring out how to fit it into an already-packed schedule can seem impossible. 

3 Tips for Fitting Homework Into Your Busy Schedule

While it might feel like you have literally no time left in your schedule, there are still ways to make sure you’re able to get your homework done and meet your other commitments. Here are our expert homework tips for even the busiest of students. 

#1: Make a Prioritized To-Do List 

You probably already have a to-do list to keep yourself on track. The next step is to prioritize the items on your to-do list so you can see what items need your attention right away. 

Here’s how it works: at the beginning of each day, sit down and make a list of all the items you need to get done before you go to bed. This includes your homework, but it should also take into account any practices, chores, events, or job shifts you may have. Once you get everything listed out, it’s time to prioritize them using the labels A, B, and C. Here’s what those labels mean:

• A Tasks : tasks that have to get done—like showing up at work or turning in an assignment—get an A. 
• B Tasks : these are tasks that you would like to get done by the end of the day but aren’t as time sensitive. For example, studying for a test you have next week could be a B-level task. It’s still important, but it doesn’t have to be done right away.
• C Tasks: these are tasks that aren’t very important and/or have no real consequences if you don’t get them done immediately. For instance, if you’re hoping to clean out your closet but it’s not an assigned chore from your parents, you could label that to-do item with a C.

Prioritizing your to-do list helps you visualize which items need your immediate attention, and which items you can leave for later. A prioritized to-do list ensures that you’re spending your time efficiently and effectively, which helps you make room in your schedule for homework. So even though you might really want to start making decorations for Homecoming (a B task), you’ll know that finishing your reading log (an A task) is more important. 

#2: Use a Planner With Time Labels

Your planner is probably packed with notes, events, and assignments already. (And if you’re not using a planner, it’s time to start!) But planners can do more for you than just remind you when an assignment is due. If you’re using a planner with time labels, it can help you visualize how you need to spend your day.

A planner with time labels breaks your day down into chunks, and you assign tasks to each chunk of time. For example, you can make a note of your class schedule with assignments, block out time to study, and make sure you know when you need to be at practice. Once you know which tasks take priority, you can add them to any empty spaces in your day. 

Planning out how you spend your time not only helps you use it wisely, it can help you feel less overwhelmed, too . We’re big fans of planners that include a task list ( like this one ) or have room for notes ( like this one ). 

#3: Set Reminders on Your Phone 

If you need a little extra nudge to make sure you’re getting your homework done on time, it’s a good idea to set some reminders on your phone. You don’t need a fancy app, either. You can use your alarm app to have it go off at specific times throughout the day to remind you to do your homework. This works especially well if you have a set homework time scheduled. So if you’ve decided you’re doing homework at 6:00 pm, you can set an alarm to remind you to bust out your books and get to work. 

If you use your phone as your planner, you may have the option to add alerts, emails, or notifications to scheduled events . Many calendar apps, including the one that comes with your phone, have built-in reminders that you can customize to meet your needs. So if you block off time to do your homework from 4:30 to 6:00 pm, you can set a reminder that will pop up on your phone when it’s time to get started. 

This dog isn't judging your lack of motivation...but your teacher might. Keep reading for tips to help you motivate yourself to do your homework.

How to Do Homework When You’re Unmotivated 

At first glance, it may seem like procrastination and being unmotivated are the same thing. After all, both of these issues usually result in you putting off your homework until the very last minute. 

But there’s one key difference: many procrastinators are working, they’re just prioritizing work differently. They know they’re going to start their homework...they’re just going to do it later. 

Conversely, people who are unmotivated to do homework just can’t find the willpower to tackle their assignments. Procrastinators know they’ll at least attempt the homework at the last minute, whereas people who are unmotivated struggle with convincing themselves to do it at a ll. For procrastinators, the stress comes from the inevitable time crunch. For unmotivated people, the stress comes from trying to convince themselves to do something they don’t want to do in the first place. 

Here are some common reasons students are unmotivated in doing homework : 

• Assignments are too easy, too hard, or seemingly pointless 
• Students aren’t interested in (or passionate about) the subject matter
• Students are intimidated by the work and/or feels like they don’t understand the assignment 
• Homework isn’t fun, and students would rather spend their time on things that they enjoy 

To sum it up: people who lack motivation to do their homework are more likely to not do it at all, or to spend more time worrying about doing their homework than...well, actually doing it.

3 Tips for How to Get Motivated to Do Homework

The key to getting homework done when you’re unmotivated is to figure out what does motivate you, then apply those things to homework. It sounds tricky...but it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it! Here are our three expert tips for motivating yourself to do your homework. 

#1: Use Incremental Incentives

When you’re not motivated, it’s important to give yourself small rewards to stay focused on finishing the task at hand. The trick is to keep the incentives small and to reward yourself often. For example, maybe you’re reading a good book in your free time. For every ten minutes you spend on your homework, you get to read five pages of your book. Like we mentioned earlier, make sure you’re choosing a reward that works for you! 

So why does this technique work? Using small rewards more often allows you to experience small wins for getting your work done. Every time you make it to one of your tiny reward points, you get to celebrate your success, which gives your brain a boost of dopamine . Dopamine helps you stay motivated and also creates a feeling of satisfaction when you complete your homework !  

#2: Form a Homework Group 

If you’re having trouble motivating yourself, it’s okay to turn to others for support. Creating a homework group can help with this. Bring together a group of your friends or classmates, and pick one time a week where you meet and work on homework together. You don’t have to be in the same class, or even taking the same subjects— the goal is to encourage one another to start (and finish!) your assignments. 

Another added benefit of a homework group is that you can help one another if you’re struggling to understand the material covered in your classes. This is especially helpful if your lack of motivation comes from being intimidated by your assignments. Asking your friends for help may feel less scary than talking to your teacher...and once you get a handle on the material, your homework may become less frightening, too. 

#3: Change Up Your Environment 

If you find that you’re totally unmotivated, it may help if you find a new place to do your homework. For example, if you’ve been struggling to get your homework done at home, try spending an extra hour in the library after school instead. The change of scenery can limit your distractions and give you the energy you need to get your work done. 

If you’re stuck doing homework at home, you can still use this tip. For instance, maybe you’ve always done your homework sitting on your bed. Try relocating somewhere else, like your kitchen table, for a few weeks. You may find that setting up a new “homework spot” in your house gives you a motivational lift and helps you get your work done. 

Social media can be a huge problem when it comes to doing homework. We have advice for helping you unplug and regain focus.

How to Do Homework When You’re Easily Distracted

We live in an always-on world, and there are tons of things clamoring for our attention. From friends and family to pop culture and social media, it seems like there’s always something (or someone!) distracting us from the things we need to do.

The 24/7 world we live in has affected our ability to focus on tasks for prolonged periods of time. Research has shown that over the past decade, an average person’s attention span has gone from 12 seconds to eight seconds . And when we do lose focus, i t takes people a long time to get back on task . One study found that it can take as long as 23 minutes to get back to work once we’ve been distracte d. No wonder it can take hours to get your homework done! 

3 Tips to Improve Your Focus

If you have a hard time focusing when you’re doing your homework, it’s a good idea to try and eliminate as many distractions as possible. Here are three expert tips for blocking out the noise so you can focus on getting your homework done. 

#1: Create a Distraction-Free Environment

Pick a place where you’ll do your homework every day, and make it as distraction-free as possible. Try to find a location where there won’t be tons of noise, and limit your access to screens while you’re doing your homework. Put together a focus-oriented playlist (or choose one on your favorite streaming service), and put your headphones on while you work. 

You may find that other people, like your friends and family, are your biggest distraction. If that’s the case, try setting up some homework boundaries. Let them know when you’ll be working on homework every day, and ask them if they’ll help you keep a quiet environment. They’ll be happy to lend a hand! 

#2: Limit Your Access to Technology 

We know, we know...this tip isn’t fun, but it does work. For homework that doesn’t require a computer, like handouts or worksheets, it’s best to put all your technology away . Turn off your television, put your phone and laptop in your backpack, and silence notifications on any wearable tech you may be sporting. If you listen to music while you work, that’s fine...but make sure you have a playlist set up so you’re not shuffling through songs once you get started on your homework. 

If your homework requires your laptop or tablet, it can be harder to limit your access to distractions. But it’s not impossible! T here are apps you can download that will block certain websites while you’re working so that you’re not tempted to scroll through Twitter or check your Facebook feed. Silence notifications and text messages on your computer, and don’t open your email account unless you absolutely have to. And if you don’t need access to the internet to complete your assignments, turn off your WiFi. Cutting out the online chatter is a great way to make sure you’re getting your homework done. 

#3: Set a Timer (the Pomodoro Technique)

Have you ever heard of the Pomodoro technique ? It’s a productivity hack that uses a timer to help you focus!

Here’s how it works: first, set a timer for 25 minutes. This is going to be your work time. During this 25 minutes, all you can do is work on whatever homework assignment you have in front of you. No email, no text messaging, no phone calls—just homework. When that timer goes off, you get to take a 5 minute break. Every time you go through one of these cycles, it’s called a “pomodoro.” For every four pomodoros you complete, you can take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.

The pomodoro technique works through a combination of boundary setting and rewards. First, it gives you a finite amount of time to focus, so you know that you only have to work really hard for 25 minutes. Once you’ve done that, you’re rewarded with a short break where you can do whatever you want. Additionally, tracking how many pomodoros you complete can help you see how long you’re really working on your homework. (Once you start using our focus tips, you may find it doesn’t take as long as you thought!)

Two Bonus Tips for How to Do Homework Fast

Even if you’re doing everything right, there will be times when you just need to get your homework done as fast as possible. (Why do teachers always have projects due in the same week? The world may never know.)

The problem with speeding through homework is that it’s easy to make mistakes. While turning in an assignment is always better than not submitting anything at all, you want to make sure that you’re not compromising quality for speed. Simply put, the goal is to get your homework done quickly and still make a good grade on the assignment! 

Here are our two bonus tips for getting a decent grade on your homework assignments , even when you’re in a time crunch. 

#1: Do the Easy Parts First 

This is especially true if you’re working on a handout with multiple questions. Before you start working on the assignment, read through all the questions and problems. As you do, make a mark beside the questions you think are “easy” to answer . 

Once you’ve finished going through the whole assignment, you can answer these questions first. Getting the easy questions out of the way as quickly as possible lets you spend more time on the trickier portions of your homework, which will maximize your assignment grade. 

(Quick note: this is also a good strategy to use on timed assignments and tests, like the SAT and the ACT !) 

#2: Pay Attention in Class 

Homework gets a lot easier when you’re actively learning the material. Teachers aren’t giving you homework because they’re mean or trying to ruin your weekend... it’s because they want you to really understand the course material. Homework is designed to reinforce what you’re already learning in class so you’ll be ready to tackle harder concepts later.

When you pay attention in class, ask questions, and take good notes, you’re absorbing the information you’ll need to succeed on your homework assignments. (You’re stuck in class anyway, so you might as well make the most of it!) Not only will paying attention in class make your homework less confusing, it will also help it go much faster, too.

What’s Next?

If you’re looking to improve your productivity beyond homework, a good place to begin is with time management. After all, we only have so much time in a day...so it’s important to get the most out of it! To get you started, check out this list of the 12 best time management techniques that you can start using today.

You may have read this article because homework struggles have been affecting your GPA. Now that you’re on the path to homework success, it’s time to start being proactive about raising your grades. This article teaches you everything you need to know about raising your GPA so you can

Now you know how to get motivated to do homework...but what about your study habits? Studying is just as critical to getting good grades, and ultimately getting into a good college . We can teach you how to study bette r in high school. (We’ve also got tons of resources to help you study for your ACT and SAT exams , too!)

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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Why Millions of Teens Can't Finish Their Homework

The push toward technology-focused education overlooks the students who lack the resources needed to complete their assignments.

In decades past, students needed little more than paper, pencils, and time to get their schoolwork done. For the vast majority of students, that's no longer the case. Most schoolwork these days necessitates a computer and an internet connection, and that includes work to be done at home. One federal survey found that 70 percent of American teachers  assign homework that needs to be done online; 90 percent of high schoolers say they have to do internet-based homework at least a few times a month. Nearly half of all students say they get such assignments daily or almost daily.

Yet despite the seemingly ever-growing embrace of digital learning in schools, access to the necessary devices remains unequal, with a new report from the Pew Research Center finding that 15 percent of U.S. households with school-age children lack high-speed internet at home. The problem is particularly acute for low-income families: One in three households that make below $30,000 a year lacks internet. This is despite an emerging reality in which poorer students are attending schools that evangelize technology-based learning while their more affluent counterparts, as The New York Times reported this past weekend, are “going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.”

It’s a glaring irony that’s also a major force behind class- and race-based discrepancies in academic achievement. In what’s often referred to as the “homework gap,” the unequal access to digital devices and high-speed internet prevents 17 percent of teens from completing their homework assignments, according to the new Pew analysis, which surveyed 743 students ages 13 through 17. Black teens are especially burdened by the homework gap: One in four of them at least sometimes struggle to complete assignments because of a lack of technology at home. And close to half of teenagers in the bottom income bracket have to do their homework on a cellphone occasionally or often.

Read: The futile resistance against classroom tech

From a history-class assignment on the political debate over immigration to required participation in an online discussion board for AP Environmental Science, access to a functioning computer and high-speed internet is all but a prerequisite for success in high school. This is becoming especially true as schools gravitate toward software where students file assignments and papers virtually, as well as schools that equip each student with a laptop or tablet ; one 2017 survey found that half of U.S. teachers have one device for each of their students, up 10 percentage points from the year prior. Close to two in three teachers use technology in their classroom daily, according to a separate 2017 survey .

The homework gap can have major consequences, with some studies suggesting that teens who lack access to a computer at home are less likely to graduate from high school than their more technologically equipped peers. The “challenge to complete homework in safe, predictable, and productive environments can have lifelong impacts on their ability to achieve their full potential,” wrote John Branam, who runs an initiative to provide lacking teens with internet access, in an op-ed for The Hechinger Report last year.

Although the big telecom providers offer subsidies to low-income families, these programs are generally underused . And while disadvantaged students can resort to public libraries and other venues that offer free Wi-Fi, such alternatives are still major obstacles to finishing homework every night. “Your aunt has internet access [at home] but she lives a 40-minute bus trip across town,” Branam wrote, illustrating the roadblocks for teens without internet access. “The public library does, but it has a 30-minute computer use limit and, as a young woman, you don’t feel comfortable there late at night. McDonald’s has free Wi-Fi but it’s noisy, you have to buy food and you can’t linger there forever.”

Read: When students can’t go online

With a team of researchers, the University of Texas at Austin professor S. Craig Watkins spent a year and a half observing and interacting with high schoolers to better understand the digital divide. The researchers’ forthcoming book, The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality , chronicles the ways low-income students of color get around not having access to the internet and a computer. In what Watkins calls “social hacking,” students often “reengineer their socioeconomic circumstances in order to get access to technology that they otherwise would not have access to.” For example, the researchers observed that students without such resources at home were adept at developing relationships with teachers who could, say, give them special weekend access to laptops and software for use at home. They also tended to rely on other needy classmates to find work-arounds, sharing with one another smartphones and tablets that more affluent students often take for granted, for instance. “It was an inventive way of cultivating social capital,” Watkins says, “but it also created a kind of sharing economy.”

Watkins says the digital divide is an “institutional blind spot” for many school leaders and policy makers. “I suspect that people a pay grade or two above teachers likely don’t understand the depth at which this access- and participation-gap divide still exists,” he says.

While embedding technology into the curriculum is all the rage in some schools, “oftentimes there’s a lack of clarity and vision in terms of what learning should look like with technology,” Watkins says. “There’s this assumption that just by providing access to technology you’re somehow creating a better learning future for kids, but that is not always the case.” After all, technology in schools is going to be of limited success if kids don’t have access to the internet and a computer once the final bell rings.

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Homework or Personal Lives?

Many students get home and the first thing they do is homework. They’re pressured by their parents to do their homework while simultaneously being encouraged to spend time with family, eat, spend time with friends, go outside, participate in sports or other extracurricular activities, and sleep for 7+ hours. Rather than motivating students to master material and learn efficiently, homework negatively impacts students by taking away from personal time that is necessary for them to lead balanced lives.

In an article published by The Washington Post by Gerald K LeTendre, a professor of education in education policy studies at Penn State, states that, “Worldwide, homework is not associated with high national levels of academic achievement.” This means that there is no direct correlation between homework and test grades, and very few studies have been able to prove this, and the ones that have were more of a reach. At Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia,  16 out of 19 of the students in Fire Stream agreed that homework adds extra stress onto them or takes time away from other things that they’re encouraged to do, such as sports, extra classes, extracurricular activities, family time, etc. This means that just over 84% of students in Fire Stream have agreed that homework is added stress and takes time away from things that they’re encouraged to do outside of school. Many students participate in these activities because they’re passionate about them and it makes them happy. Sports and exercise is proven to relieve stress, homework adds stress and if time for this stress reliever is taken away that just means more stress, this can cause more problems in many aspects of their lives.

In an article written by CNN about how homework has been banned in some cities and not others, “What is clear is that parents and kids don't live in the world of academic research; they live in the real world where there are piles of homework on the kitchen table.” Meaning that students don’t have the luxury of just easily saying that homework helps their academic performance or not, and they don’t have the luxury of just not doing homework. That is especially true to highschool students who have to regularly chose between sleep and doing work, especially when they get homework from every class every night and homework can be up to 30% of their grade. Students in every grade get piles of homework and a lot of the time they don’t have resources on hand to see if they’re right or to get help, meaning they might do it wrong and not learn anything at all.  Even if students do try and do their homework it might take a while, according to Nationwide Children’s Hospital adolescents should be getting 9 to 9 ½ hours of sleep per night. Due to homework and trying to fit other after school activities in many adolescents don’t get the necessary amount of sleep. Sleep deprivation in teens has many negative effects such as mood changes, being more inclined to engage in risky behavior such as driving fast, drinking, etc, doing worse in school, and declined cognitive abilities.

In an article published by the New York Times, a mother explained how… , “The stress homework places on families starts early.” The article also talks about how homework takes away from family time and family activities. The author also says that her kids “are fighting not just over the homework, but also over their share of my coveted attention and my unique ability to download and print images.” This shows how homework adds extra pressure and can cause tension in families. It takes away from family time and causes more stress on students and parents. It’s almost as if once children start school and the homework starts that it never stops, and that more family time is taken away while more stress is added.

In a study concluded in 2003 by Dr. Harris Cooper he tries to argue that homework has a positive effect on students, but his studies also found no direct correlation between increased homework for students and improved test scores. Cooper himself said that “The analysis also showed that too much homework can be counter-productive for students at all levels.” Meaning that excessive amounts of homework can cause negative effects on students, but who is judging what excessive amounts of homework means? He talks about the “10 minute rule” meaning that every grade that a student increases they should get 10 more minutes of homework, meaning that a second grader should get 20 minutes, and a twelfth grader should get around 2 hours of homework. That would seem ideal, but in most high school settings teachers don’t interact with each other to see how much homework each of them give to equal it out to around 2 hours. This means that one class’s homework could take a student 2 hours alone and that would be what the ideal amount of homework is, so if it takes 2 hours for one class’s homework then how are students supposed to have positive benefits from doing all of their homework? Cooper’s research was also limited because very little research was done to see if student’s race, socioeconomic status, or even their ability levels has an affect on how much homework is “good” for said age range. This means that other aspects than just that they’re students in a certain grade weren’t taken into consideration. These things could cause major changes to the data that was collected.

Rather than encouraging students to master material and learn efficiently, homework negatively impacts students and families by causing more stress and taking away from family time. This is a problem not just for the overworked students, but also for students who have more complex personal lives. Many students work or have family obligations that they have to deal with, but don’t necessarily feel comfortable talking to a teacher about them. Although teachers might not think that the amount of homework that they give matters much,its influence goes beyond giving students work to do at home to how they interact in other important personal aspects of their life.

Works Cited:

LeTendre, Gerald K. “Homework Could Have an Effect on Kids’ Health. Should Schools Ban It?” The Washington Post , WP Company, 2 Sept. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/02/homework-could-have-an-effect-on-kids-health-should-schools-ban-it/?utm_term=.3ed6d0fa2c72.

Kralovec, Etta. “Should Schools Ban Homework?” CNN , Cable News Network, 5 Sept. 2014, www.cnn.com/2014/09/05/opinion/kralovec-ban-homework/index.html.

Dell'Antonia, Kj. “Homework's Emotional Toll on Students and Families.” The New York Times , The New York Times, 12 Mar. 2014, parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/homeworks-emotional-toll-on-students-and-families/.

“Duke Study: Homework Helps Students Succeed in School, As Long as There Isn't Too Much.” Duke Today , Duke Today, 7 Mar. 2006, today.duke.edu/2006/03/homework.html.

“Sleep in Adolescents (13-18 Years).” Sleep in Adolescents :: Nationwide Children's Hospital , www.nationwidechildrens.org/sleep-in-adolescents

Comments (1)

A question that I have after reading this is in what other ways can we as students improve our learning without homework?

This 2fer has changed my opinion about how much homework affects a student's life in a bad way more than a good way.

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‘There’s Only so Far I Can Take Them’ – Why Teachers Give Up on Struggling Students Who Don’t Do Their Homework

Failure to complete homework leaves students in the lurch.

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Whenever “Gina,” a fifth grader at a suburban public school on the East Coast, did her math homework, she never had to worry about whether she could get help from her mom.

“I help her a lot with homework,” Gina’s mother, a married, mid-level manager for a health care company, explained to us during an interview for a study we did about how teachers view students who complete their homework versus those who do not.

“I try to maybe re-explain things, like, things she might not understand,” Gina’s mom continued. “Like, if she’s struggling, I try to teach her a different way. I understand that Gina is a very visual child but also needs to hear things, too. I know that when I’m reading it, and I’m writing it, and I’m saying it to her, she comprehends it better.”

One of us is a sociologist who looks at how schools favor middle-class families . The other is a math education professor who examines how math teachers perceive their students based on their work.

We were curious about how teachers reward students who complete their homework and penalize and criticize those who don’t – and whether there was any link between those things and family income.

By analyzing student report cards and interviewing teachers, students and parents, we found that teachers gave good grades for homework effort and other rewards to students from middle-class families like Gina, who happen to have college-educated parents who take an active role in helping their children complete their homework.

But when it comes to students such as “Jesse,” who attends the same school as Gina and is the child of a poor, single mother of two, we found that teachers had a more bleak outlook.

The names “Jesse” and “Gina” are pseudonyms to protect the children’s identities. Jesse can’t count on his mom to help with his homework because she struggled in school herself.

“I had many difficulties in school,” Jesse’s mom told us for the same study. “I had behavior issues, attention-deficit. And so after seventh grade, they sent me to an alternative high school, which I thought was the worst thing in the world. We literally did, like, first and second grade work. So my education was horrible.”

Jesse’s mother admitted she still can’t figure out division to this day.

“[My son will] ask me a question, and I’ll go look at it and it’s like algebra, in fifth grade. And I’m like: ‘What’s this?’” Jesse’s mom said. “So it’s really hard. Sometimes you just feel stupid. Because he’s in fifth grade. And I’m like, I should be able to help my son with his homework in fifth grade.”

Unlike Gina’s parents, who are married and own their own home in a middle-class neighborhood, Jesse’s mom isn’t married and rents a place in a mobile home community. She had Jesse when she was a teenager and was raising Jesse and his brother mostly on her own, though with some help from her parents. Her son is eligible for free lunch.

An issue of equity

As a matter of fairness, we think teachers should take these kinds of economic and social disparities into account in how they teach and grade students. But what we found in the schools we observed is that they usually don’t, and instead they seemed to accept inequality as destiny. Consider, for instance, what a fourth grade teacher – one of 22 teachers we interviewed and observed during the study – told us about students and homework.

“I feel like there’s a pocket here – a lower income pocket,” one teacher said. “And that trickles down to less support at home, homework not being done, stuff not being returned and signed. It should be almost 50-50 between home and school. If they don’t have the support at home, there’s only so far I can take them. If they’re not going to go home and do their homework, there’s just not much I can do.”

While educators recognize the different levels of resources that students have at home, they continue to assign homework that is too difficult for students to complete independently, and reward students who complete the homework anyway.

Consider, for example, how one seventh grade teacher described his approach to homework: “I post the answers to the homework for every course online. The kids do the homework, and they’re supposed to check it and figure out if they need extra help. The kids who do that, there is an amazing correlation between that and positive grades. The kids who don’t do that are bombing.

“I need to drill that to parents that they need to check homework with their student, get it checked to see if it’s right or wrong and then ask me questions. I don’t want to use class time to go over homework.”

The problem is that the benefits of homework are not uniformly distributed. Rather, research shows that students from high-income families make bigger achievement gains through homework than students from low-income families.

This relationship has been found in both U.S. and Dutch schools , and it suggests that homework may contribute to disparities in students’ performance in school.

Tougher struggles

On top of uneven academic benefits, research also reveals that making sense of the math homework assigned in U.S schools is often more difficult for parents who have limited educational attainment , parents who feel anxious over mathematical content . It is also difficult for parents who learned math using different approaches than those currently taught in the U.S. .

Meanwhile, students from more-privileged families are disproportionately more likely to have a parent or a tutor available after school to help with homework, as well as parents who encourage them to seek help from their teachers if they have questions . And they are also more likely to have parents who feel entitled to intervene at school on their behalf.

False ideas about merit

In the schools we observed, teachers interpreted homework inequalities through what social scientists call the myth of meritocracy . The myth suggests that all students in the U.S. have the same opportunities to succeed in school and that any differences in students’ outcomes are the result of different levels of effort. Teachers in our study said things that are in line with this belief.

For instance, one third grade teacher told us: “We’re dealing with some really struggling kids. There are parents that I’ve never even met. They don’t come to conferences. There’s been no communication whatsoever. … I’ll write notes home or emails; they never respond. There are kids who never do their homework, and clearly the parents are OK with that.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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Why Teachers Give Up on Struggling Students Who Don’t Do Their Homework

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Is Homework Really Necessary?

Did you get all your homework done?

We’ve all heard that phrase one too many times before, and now it triggers your fight-or-flight response. Every waking thought is about an assignment you should be doing or that project you really should start but you just can’t bring yourself to face it. Is all this homework really necessary?  

Unfortunately, it just might be. Is the homework itself the problem, or is it the amount we end up with after classes are over for the day and your bed is looking really comfy? To figure all this out we have to remember why we get homework in the first place and what school would be like without it.  

In the very early 1900s, homework was actually considered unhealthy for children and was classified as child labor because it interfered with their ability to do chores around the house. The U.S. Department of Education called homework a tool for “boosting educational quality” when it was reinstated, and it became mandatory in 1986 after being rejected for so long, as recorded by the University of San Diego.  

It’s always good to look at the pros and cons of something when deciding how you feel about it. So, what does homework do for us? Quite a few things actually.  

First let’s address the elephant in the room. No one enjoys homework unless you’re a camp and outdoor adventure leadership (COAL) major. We all have something we would rather spend our time on; that’s just the way it is.  

However, when that test rolls around, most of us are glad we stayed late at the library until we understood what we were reading. According to the University of San Diego, students only absorb 50% of what they hear in a class lecture. If that’s all you had to learn from, keeping your GPA above a 3.5 would be considered a superpower.  

Whether we like it or not, homework helps us retain important information and truly grasp the concepts we are studying. Hearing about it once from your professor is great, but life as a college student is so busy that your chances of remembering everything you heard in all of your classes are next to none. Repetition is the key to retention, and other than experience training, studying the material you were given and doing your homework is how you’re going to graduate.  

Then why is it such a problem? Why is it affecting people so negatively? No degree is worth your mental health; it’s time to look at the cons of homework.  

I believe the real problem with homework is the amount of it. Yes, we need it to learn, but our brains can only handle so much at a time. Oftentimes the standard college workload demands that we push our minds past the limit or face a late penalty. This is what causes the exhaustion and resentment that we constantly push through for the sake of good grades and gold chords.  

 Studies conducted by the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Department of Health say shorter study sessions per day and more consistency over a longer period of time is the best way to retain information while not pushing yourself to your mental limit. However, there is so much to be done that studying for a mere three hours a day isn’t even practical.  

Students would actually be able to study in a healthy way and retain information long term if we were not assigned and asked to complete in one week what psychological studies say should take at least two.   

So, to answer the question: Yes, homework is definitely necessary. The real problem is how much we are required to process in such a short time.   

As finals inch closer by the day, make a point to take care of your mind and give yourself breaks not only while studying but also from other things that can cloud your brain like social media. Coping with huge workloads is a process, so make lists, take deep breaths and get to bed on time. We’re gonna make it; I promise.  

Barber is the off-campus news editor for the Liberty Champion

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Campus protests over the Gaza war

As student protesters get arrested, they risk being banned from campus too.

Rachel Treisman

Jaclyn Diaz

Dozens of tents are seen on a lawn inside the Columbia University Campus after students refused to take down the encampment by the 2 p.m. EDT deadline given to students protesting by Columbia President Minouche Shafik. Luiz C. Ribeiro/Tribune News Service/Getty Images hide caption

Dozens of tents are seen on a lawn inside the Columbia University Campus after students refused to take down the encampment by the 2 p.m. EDT deadline given to students protesting by Columbia President Minouche Shafik.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators continue to turn out at schools across the country despite the risk of detention and suspension, with nearly 300 more protesters arrested over the weekend .

At Columbia University, where a pro-Palestinian encampment has catalyzed dozens of similar demonstrations across the nation, student protesters face threats of punishment, with some students already receiving word of their suspension.

On Monday morning, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik announced that in, negotiations over the encampment, faculty leaders and student organizers were not able to reach an agreement .

The university gave students until 2 p.m. ET to disperse and abandon the encampments or else face suspension pending further investigation, according to flyers it distributed on campus .

Columbia University spokesman Ben Chang confirmed to reporters that some students taking part in the pro-Palestinian encampment who refused to leave at that deadline were suspended. It's unclear how many students will receive that punishment.

Chang said the move is required to preserve campus safety.

Hundreds of students at a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Columbia University's campus. Brian Mann hide caption

Hundreds of students at a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Columbia University's campus.

Students who voluntarily left the encampment and signed a copy of a form committing to abide by university policies will be on academic probation through June 2025, according to the flyers. Those who remained past the deadline were told they will be restricted from all Columbia campuses and property and ineligible to participate in classes and academic or extracurricular activities.

"You are not permitted to complete the Spring 2024 semester, including participate in classes or exams in-person or remotely or otherwise submit assignments or engage in any activities affiliated with Columbia University," the notice dispersed on campus reads. "You may lose the semester. If you are scheduled to graduate, you are no longer eligible."

Dozens of New York police officers gathered outside the campus gates about an hour ahead of the deadline.

Many students remained despite the threats, saying they have no plans to leave unless the university meets its demand to divest from companies they say are aiding Israel's war in Gaza. After the flyers were distributed, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine posted on X urging students not to sign anything.

Roughly 100 officers in uniform gathered at Columbia University's campus in the leadup to its 2 p.m. deadline for students to disperse from the encampment that's been up for nearly two weeks. Brian Mann/NPR hide caption

Roughly 100 officers in uniform gathered at Columbia University's campus in the leadup to its 2 p.m. deadline for students to disperse from the encampment that's been up for nearly two weeks.

"We will not be moved by these intimidation tactics. You can see the students are mobilized. There's hundreds of them here today. They will not be moved. We demand divestment, we will not be moved unless by force," Seuda Polat, a Columbia University graduate student, said during a press conference Monday.

Polat continued, "There has been no violence on this encampment. Students from diverse backgrounds have shared their religious observances together. We've celebrated Passover, we've celebrated shabbat twice. This is a place of community, of community learning, not violence."

Police continue to arrest protesters across the country

On Sunday, pro-Palestinian protesters and pro-Israeli protesters clashed at the University of California, Los Angeles, leading to what university leaders described as "physical altercations" and prompting them to increase security measures on campus.

Nearly 300 people arrested at campus protests against the war in Gaza this weekend

At Virginia Tech University, police arrested scores of protesters in the early hours of Monday morning. Virginia Tech Police confirmed early Monday evening that 82 individuals, 53 of whom are current students at the university, were arrested and all were charged with trespassing.

The school had warned of "heavy police activity around the Graduate Life Center" in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) starting just after 10 p.m. ET on Sunday, and announced around 3:30 a.m. that the incident " had stabilized ." Social media footage shows protesters chanting at police as they lead people into multiple white vans.

Elsewhere in the state, 12 protesters — including nine students — were arrested at the University of Mary Washington on Saturday evening after refusing to vacate an encampment on its Fredericksburg, Va., campus. University President Troy Paino said in a statement that health and safety concerns had emerged on Saturday after protestors invited the off-campus public to join the encampment.

A man holds up a Palestinian flag as activists and students surround piled barricades at an encampment at at George Washington University early Monday. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images hide caption

A man holds up a Palestinian flag as activists and students surround piled barricades at an encampment at at George Washington University early Monday.

Meanwhile, protests at George Washington University in D.C. are stretching into their fifth day on Monday — the last day of class for the semester — after a tense weekend, culminating in a clash between protesters and police.

Students first set up an encampment on University Yard on Thursday and later launched a second one on nearby H Street after the school put up barricades to restrict access.

The Picture Show

Photos: take a look at campus protests around the country.

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, protesters knocked down the barricades — piling them in a stack in the middle of the lawn — and flooded the lawn, with people remaining there overnight in some 85 tents, the GW Hatchet reports .

GW officials said in a statement early Monday that a group of "approximately 200 protesters from across [D.C., Maryland and Virginia], including professional organizers, activists, and university students, have joined the unauthorized encampment on our campus."

"This is an egregious violation of community trust and goes far beyond the boundaries of free expression and the right to protest," they added. "The university will use every avenue available to ensure those involved are held accountable for their actions."

Schools are alternately threatening and disavowing disciplinary action

Students arrested at Emerson College last week won't face disciplinary action from the school, its president announced. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Students arrested at Emerson College last week won't face disciplinary action from the school, its president announced.

One question on the minds of many is what, if any, disciplinary action student protesters might face from their schools, especially with finals and graduation fast approaching.

Some universities have suspended — or threatened to suspend — students who have been arrested for protesting, while others have said they will not.

Students have been suspended for protesting at George Washington University , Princeton University , Washington University in St. Louis , Pomona College and Vanderbilt University , according to reports.

Barnard College officials announced Friday that it will allow most of the 53 students who were arrested and suspended after protesting at Columbia University to return to campus. The New York Times reports that suspended students who reached agreements with the college have their access to residence halls, dining facilities and classrooms restored, while others are still working to reach agreements.

Middle East crisis — explained

Across the u.s., pro-palestinian campus protesters risk arrest and suspension.

On Sunday, Jay Bernhardt, the president of Emerson College in Boston — where more than 100 protesters were arrested at an encampment early Thursday morning — said the college will not bring disciplinary charges against protesters, and will "encourage the district attorney not to pursue charges related to encampment violations."

He said it is also taking steps to support students who were arrested, including posting bail for them and providing housing support to those who are required to stay local for court appearances after the closing of their dorms.

"The College has done its best to keep all community members safe every day during these challenging times, but we recognize that we must do more," he added.

In Texas, the Travis County district attorney has dropped misdemeanor trespassing charges against all 57 people arrested during a protest at UT-Austin last week, after a judge found insufficient evidence to proceed.

Law enforcement arrest a pro-Palestinian protestor on April 29, 2024, at the University of Texas at Austin. Michael Minasi/KUT hide caption

Law enforcement arrest a pro-Palestinian protestor on April 29, 2024, at the University of Texas at Austin.

But on Monday, around 100 protesters gathered at UT-Austin and set up a new encampment on the campus' south lawn, according to NPR member station KUT. By mid-afternoon, state, city and university police were on hand, breaking up the gathering.

Elsewhere, some schools are threatening disciplinary action for students who don't comply with directives to leave encampments that they say violate their policies.

Officials at the University of Florida, where students began protesting on Wednesday, said Friday that demonstrators could face suspension and a three-year ban from campus if they violate specific protest rules, reports member station WUFT .

They are prohibited from using bullhorns or speakers to amplify their voices, possessing weapons and protesting inside campus buildings — but also face more vague prohibitions like "no disruption," according to a list circulated late Thursday.

"They also included 'no sleeping' on a campus where students often doze in the sun between classes," per WUFT.

Mass arrests roil college campuses amid pro-Palestinian protests

At Cal Poly Humboldt, officials closed campus to the public on Saturday, several days after student protesters first occupied two academic and administrative buildings. They had previously given protesters until 5 p.m. on Friday to leave with a guarantee of no immediate arrest — but said they would still face consequences.

"This does not, however, eliminate University conduct-related sanctions or legal implications," officials said in a release. "In addition, voluntarily departing in this way will be considered as a mitigating factor in University conduct processes and may reduce the severity of sanctions imposed."

The campus will remain closed until May 10, with work and classes remote through the end of the semester. Officials say they are planning for "various scenarios" for commencement.

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, president Sally Kornbluth said in a Sunday message to students that their growing encampment violates policies around registering for campus demonstrations and creates a "potential magnet for disruptive outside protestors."

She said rules have been broken, and those who break them — "including rules around the time, place and manner of protest" — will face disciplinary action.

"We are open to further discussion about the means of ending the encampment," she added. "But this particular form of expression needs to end soon."

Northwestern reaches a deal with protesters

Signs are displayed outside a tent encampment at Northwestern University on Friday in Evanston, Illinois. Students and the university reached a deal Monday, allowing the demonstrations to continue, but that mandated the removal of all but one of these tents. Teresa Crawford/AP hide caption

Signs are displayed outside a tent encampment at Northwestern University on Friday in Evanston, Illinois. Students and the university reached a deal Monday, allowing the demonstrations to continue, but that mandated the removal of all but one of these tents.

Northwestern University reached an agreement Monday with students and faculty protesting against the war, as demonstrations continued at other campuses across the country.

The deal was struck five days after students erected an encampment on Deering Meadow, a common area on the university's Evanston campus.

The agreement allows demonstrations to continue until the end of spring quarter classes on June 1, "provided all such activity immediately and continuously complies with University policies," Northwestern officials said in a statement.

The school will allow one aid tent to remain at the encampment on Deering Meadow but is demanding all other tents and sound systems be taken down.

"This agreement also addresses our commitment to protect the safety of our entire community and to ensure the ongoing academic operations of our campus while adhering to our support for free expression," Northwestern President Michael Schill wrote in an announcement posted on the school's website. "The agreement includes support for our Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students. Some of the actions have been discussed for years and some are new. Together, they will strengthen our community."

As part of the agreement, the university has promised to fund two Palestinian faculty members per year for two years and to provide scholarships for five Palestinian undergraduates.

Some faculty are calling for amnesty

Students and faculty at some universities are calling on their administrations not to discipline protesters. Arrested protesters face uncertainty about not only their legal records but the status of campus housing, financial aid and graduation eligibility.

At the University of Pennsylvania , officials say a campus statue was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti and are calling on demonstrators — from Penn and other area schools — to disband.

A group of Penn faculty and Philadelphia-area elected officials signed a letter last week urging university leaders to "respect students' rights to engage in nonviolent protest" by refraining from calling in law enforcement to make arrests and from filing disciplinary and criminal charges against peaceful protesters at the encampment.

"Protesters nationwide face police violence and severe discipline, and the safety and wellbeing of Philadelphia students exercising their rights are among our foremost concerns," they wrote.

In Columbia University's protests of 1968 and 2024, what's similar — and different

Nearly 300 faculty members at Yale University, where 48 protesters were arrested last week, signed a letter condemning what they called "the criminalization of Yale students engaged in recent acts of peaceful protest." They demanded that the university take no further disciplinary action and called on authorities to drop all charges against them.

They said the protesters arrested face Class A misdemeanors under Connecticut law, which carry possible penalties of up to 364 days in jail.

"Threatening students with sanctions of this kind is unconscionable and should not be the means by which Yale responds to peaceful protest," they added.

In a further sign of discontent, faculty members at universities in California, Georgia and Texas have either initiated or passed largely symbolic votes of no confidence in their leadership, according to the Associated Press .

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3 bodies found in Mexican well identified as Australian, American surfers killed for truck's tires

MEXICO CITY -- Relatives have identified three bodies found in a well as those of two Australian surfers and one American who went missing last weekend, Mexican authorities said Sunday.

Baja California state prosecutors said the relatives had viewed the corpses recovered from a remote well about 50 feet (15 meters) deep and recognized them as their loved ones.

Thieves apparently killed the three, who were on a surfing trip to Mexico's Baja peninsula, to steal their truck because they wanted the tires. They then allegedly got rid of the bodies by dumping them in a well near the coast.

The well was located some 4 miles (6 kilometers) from where the foreigners were killed, and also contained a fourth cadaver that had been there much longer.

Three suspects are being held in connection with the case, which locals said was solved far more quickly than the disappearances of thousands of Mexicans.

The three men were on a camping and surfing trip along a stretch of coast south of the city of Ensenada, posting idyllic photos on social media of waves and isolated beaches, before they went missing last weekend.

Chief state prosecutor María Elena Andrade Ramírez described what likely would have been moments of terror that ended the trip for brothers Jake and Callum Robinson from Australia and American Jack Carter Rhoad.

She theorized the killers drove by and saw the foreigners' pickup truck and tents and wanted to steal their tires. But "when (the foreigners) came up and caught them, surely, they resisted."

She said that's when the killers would have shot the tourists.

The thieves then allegedly went to what she called "a site that is extremely hard to get to" and allegedly dumped the bodies into a well they apparently were familiar with. She said investigators were not ruling out the possibility the same suspects also dumped the first, earlier body in the well as part of previous crimes.

"They may have been looking for trucks in this area," Andrade Ramírez said.

The thieves allegedly covered the well with boards. "It was literally almost impossible to find it," Andrade Ramírez said, and it took two hours to winch the bodies out of the well.

Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers expressed sympathy for the Robinson family. "I think the whole country's heart goes out to all of their loved ones. It has been an absolutely horrendous, absolutely horrific ordeal and our thoughts are with all of them today," he said at a news conference Monday in the capital, Canberra.

The site where the bodies were discovered near the township of Santo Tomás was near the remote seaside area where the missing men's tents and truck were found Thursday along the coast. From their last photo posts, the trip looked perfect. But even experienced local expatriates are questioning whether it is safe to camp along the largely deserted coast anymore.

The moderator of the local Talk Baja internet forum, who has lived in the area for almost two decades, wrote in an editorial Saturday that "the reality is, the dangers of traveling to and camping in remote areas are outweighing the benefits anymore."

But in a way, adventure was key to the victims' lifestyle.

Callum Robinson's Instagram account contained the following slogan: "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room."

At the news conference, Andrade Ramírez was questioned by one reporter who expressed approval that such a massive and rapid search was mounted for the foreigners, but asked why, when local people disappear in the area, little is often done for weeks, months, or years.

"Do you have to be a foreigner in Baja California in order for there to be an investigation if something happens to you? asked the reporter, who did not identify herself by name. "Every investigation is different," Andrade Ramírez replied.

As if to underscore that point, dozens of mourners, surfers and demonstrators gathered in a main plaza in Ensenada, the nearest city, to voice their anger and sadness at the deaths.

"Ensenada is a mass grave," read one placard carried by protesters. "Australia, we are with you," one man scrawled on one of the half-dozen surf boards at the demonstration.

A woman held up a sign that read "They only wanted to surf - we demand safe beaches."

Gabriela Acosta, a surfer, attended the protest "to show love, solidarity and respect for the three lives that were lost." Acosta said that surfers in Baja are aware of the dangers.

"We are women and we would sometimes like to surf alone," Acosta said. "But we never do that, because of the situation. We always have to go accompanied."

"I think that what happened to them is just an example of the lack of safety in this state," she said.

Surfers later performed a "paddle-out" ceremony where they formed a circle on their boards in the ocean.

Baja California prosecutors had said they were questioning three people in the killings, two of them because they were caught with methamphetamines. Prosecutors said the two were being held pending drug charges but continue to be suspects in the killings.

A third man was arrested on charges of a crime equivalent to kidnapping, but that was before the bodies were found. It was unclear if he might face more charges.

The third suspect was believed to have directly participated in the killings. In keeping with Mexican law, prosecutors identified him by his first name, Jesús Gerardo, alias "el Kekas," a slang word that means "quesadillas," or cheese tortillas. Andrade Ramírez said he had a criminal record, and that more people may have been involved.

Last week, the mother of the missing Australians, Debra Robinson, posted on a local community Facebook page, appealing for help in finding her sons. Robinson said Callum and Jake had not been heard from since April 27. They had booked accommodation in the city of Rosarito, not far from Ensenada.

Robinson said Callum was diabetic. She also mentioned that the American who was with them was named Jack Carter Rhoad, but the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City did not immediately confirm that. The U.S. State Department said it was aware of reports of a U.S. citizen missing in Baja, but gave no further details.

In 2015, two Australian surfers, Adam Coleman and Dean Lucas, were killed in western Sinaloa state, across the Gulf of California - also known as the Sea of Cortez - from the Baja peninsula. Authorities said they were victims of highway bandits. Three suspects were arrested in that case.

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‘A step back in time': America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening.

The choir director, a fixture at St. Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.

So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned.

At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.

“It was like a step back in time,” said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s not just St. Maria Goretti.

Brothers Leven Barton, left, Florian Rumpza, center, and Angelus Atkinson, sing in Latin during Catholic Mass at Benedictine College, Dec. 3, 2023, in Atchison, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.

The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.

The changes are not happening everywhere. There are still plenty of liberal parishes, plenty that see themselves as middle-of-the-road. Despite their growing influence, conservative Catholics remain a minority.

Yet the changes they have brought are impossible to miss.

Generations of U.S. Catholics are giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change. It has reshaped parishes and universities across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with much of the Catholic world. (AP Video/ Jessie Wardarski)

The progressive priests who dominated the U.S. church in the years after Vatican II are now in their 70s and 80s. Many are retired. Some are dead. Younger priests, surveys show, are far more conservative.

“They say they’re trying to restore what us old guys ruined,” said the Rev. John Forliti, 87, a retired Twin Cities priest who fought for civil rights and reforms in Catholic school sex education.

Doug Koesel, an outspoken 72-year-old priest at Blessed Trinity Parish in Cleveland, was blunter: “They’re just waiting for us to die.”

At St. Maria Goretti, once steeped in the ethos of Vatican II, many parishioners saw the changes as a requiem.

“I don’t want my daughter to be Catholic,” said Christine Hammond, whose family left the parish when the new outlook spilled into the church’s school and her daughter’s classroom. “Not if this is the Roman Catholic Church that is coming.”

But this is not a simple story. Because there are many who welcome this new, old church.

They often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago. Often, at least a couple families will arrive with four, five or even more children, signaling their adherence to the church’s ban on contraception, which most American Catholics have long casually ignored.

They attend confession regularly and adhere strictly to church teachings. Many yearn for Masses that echo with medieval traditions – more Latin, more incense more Gregorian chants.

“We want this ethereal experience that is different from everything else in our lives,” said Ben Rouleau, who until recently led St. Maria Goretti’s young adult group, which saw membership skyrocket even as the parish shrank amid the turmoil.

They are, Rouleau said, happily out of touch with a liberal city like Madison.

“It’s radical in some ways,” Rouleau said. “We’re returning to the roots of the church.”

A woman and child kneel during Catholic Mass at Benedictine College, Oct. 29, 2023, in Atchison, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

If this movement emerged from anywhere, it might be a now-demolished Denver football stadium and a borrowed military helicopter carrying in Pope John Paul II .

Some 500,000 people descended on Denver in 1993 for the Catholic festival World Youth Day. When the pope’s helicopter landed just outside Mile High Stadium, the ground shook from the stomping.

The pope, whose grandfatherly appearance belied an electric charisma, and who was beloved both for his kindness and his sternness, confronted an American church shaped by three decades of progressive change.

If the church is often best known to non-Catholics for its opposition to abortion, it had grown increasingly liberal since Vatican II. Birth control was quietly accepted in many parishes, and confession barely mentioned. Catholic social teaching on poverty suffused churches. Most priests traded in their cassocks for plain black shirts with Roman collars. Incense and Latin became increasingly rare.

On some issues, John Paul II agreed with these liberal-minded Catholics. He spoke against capital punishment and pushed for workers’ rights. He preached relentlessly about forgiveness – “the oxygen that purifies the air of hatred.” He forgave his own would-be assassin.

But he was also uncompromising on dogma, warning about change and cracking down on liberal theologians. He urged a return to forgotten rituals.

Catholics “are in danger of losing their faith,” he told crowds at the final Denver Mass, decrying abortion, drug abuse, and what he called “sexual disorders,” a barely veiled reference to growing acceptance of gay rights.

Across the nation, fervent young Catholics listened.

Newman Centers, which serve Catholic university students, became increasingly popular. So did FOCUS, a traditionalist organization working on American college campuses. Conservative Catholic media grew, particularly the cable TV network EWTN, a prominent voice for increased orthodoxy.

Today, conservative Catholic America has its own constellation of online celebrities aimed at young people. There’s Sister Miriam James, an ever-smiling nun in full habit who talks openly about her hard-partying college days. There’s Jackie Francois Angel, who speaks in shockingly frank detail about sex, marriage and Catholicism. There’s Mike Schmitz, a movie-star handsome Minnesota priest who exudes kindness while insisting on doctrine.

Even today, surveys show most American Catholics are far from orthodox. Most support abortion rights. The vast majority use birth control.

But increasingly, those Catholics are not in church.

In 1970, more than half of America’s Catholics said they went to Mass at least once a week. By 2022, that had fallen to 17%, according to CARA, a research center affiliated with Georgetown University. Among millennials, the number is just 9%.

Even as the U.S. Catholic population has jumped to more than 70 million, driven in part by immigration from Latin America, ever-fewer Catholics are involved in the church’s most important rites. Infant baptisms have fallen from 1.2 million in 1965 to 440,000 in 2021, CARA says. Catholic marriages have dropped by well over two-thirds.

The shrinking numbers mean that those who remain in the church have outsized influence compared with the overall Catholic population.

On the national level, conservatives increasingly dominate the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference and the Catholic intellectual world. They include everyone from the philanthropist founder of Domino’s Pizza to six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Then there’s the priesthood.

Young priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and 70s, have “all but vanished,” said a 2023 report from The Catholic Project at Catholic University, based on a survey of more than 3,500 priests.

Today’s young priests are far more likely to believe that the church changed too much after Vatican II, tangling itself up in America’s rapidly shifting views on everything from women’s roles to LGBTQ people.

“There really aren’t very many liberals in the seminaries anymore,” said a young, recently ordained Midwestern priest. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the turmoil that engulfed his parish after he began pressing for more orthodox services. “They wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

Students leave after attending a Catholic Mass at Benedictine College, Dec. 3, 2023, in Atchison, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Sometimes, the shift toward orthodoxy happens slowly. Maybe there’s a little more Latin sprinkled into Mass, or an occasional reminder to go to confession. Maybe guitars are relegated to Saturday evening services, or dropped completely.

And sometimes the changes come like a whirlwind, dividing parishes between those thirsting for a more reverent Catholicism and those who feel their spiritual home has been taken from them.

“You’d leave Mass thinking, ‘Holy cow! What just happened?’” said another ex-parishioner at St. Maria Goretti, whose family eventually left the church, describing the 2021 promotion of a new pastor, and a sudden focus on sin and confession.

Like many former parishioners, he spoke only on condition of anonymity, worried about upsetting friends still at the church. Diocesan clergy did not respond to requests for interviews.

“I’m a lifelong Catholic. I grew up going to church every Sunday,” he said. “But I’d never seen anything like this.”

The new outlook has spilled across America.

In churches from Minnesota to California, parishioners have protested changes introduced by new conservative priests. In Cincinnati, it came when the new priest abandoned gospel music and African drumming. In small-town North Carolina, it was an intense focus on Latin. In east Texas, it was a right-wing bishop forced out by the Vatican after accusing Pope Francis of undermining church teachings.

Each can seem like one more skirmish in the cultural and political battles tearing at America.

But the movement, whether called conservative or orthodox or traditionalist or authentic, can be hard to define.

Rev. Gabriel Landis officiates a Catholic Mass at Benedictine College, Dec. 3, 2023, in Atchison, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

It ranges from Catholics who want more incense, to Latin Mass adherents who have brought back ancient prayers that mention “the perfidious Jew.” There are right-wing survivalists, celebrity exorcists, environmentalists and a handful of quasi-socialists.

There’s the Catholic news outlet railing against the Vatican’s “wicked entourage,” and the small-town Wisconsin priest who traces COVID-19 to a century-old prophecy and warns of looming dictatorship. There’s the recent “Catholic Prayer for Trump,” a $1,000-a-plate dinner at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, featuring a string of conspiracy theorists.

Yet the orthodox movement can also seem like a tangle of forgiveness and rigidity, where insistence on mercy and kindness mingle with warnings of eternity in hell.

Looming over the American divide is Pope Francis , who has pushed the global church to be more inclusive , even as he toes the line on most dogma .

The orthodox movement has watched him nervously from the first days of his papacy, angered by his more liberal views on issues like gay relationships and divorce . Some reject him entirely.

And the pope clearly worries about America.

The U.S. church has “a very strong reactionary attitude,” he told a group of Jesuits last year. “Being backward-looking is useless.”

Pope Francis waves to the crowd during a parade, Sept. 26, 2015, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, Pool, File)

You can find this new vision of Catholic America at Latin Masses in Milwaukee, the pews crowded with worshippers even at noon on a weekday. It’s in conferences held in California wine country, at reinvigorated parishes in Tennessee and prayer groups in Washington, D.C.

And it’s at a little Kansas college built high on a bluff above the Missouri River.

At first glance, nothing seems unusual about Benedictine College.

Students worry about unfinished essays and the complexities of dating. They wear cutoff shorts on warm autumn afternoons. Football is huge. The cafeteria food is mediocre.

But look deeper.

Because at Benedictine, Catholic teaching on contraception can slip into lessons on Plato, and no one is surprised if you volunteer for 3 a.m. prayers. Pornography, pre-marital sex and sunbathing in swimsuits are forbidden.

If these rules seem like precepts of a bygone age, that hasn’t stopped students from flocking to Benedictine and other conservative Catholic colleges.

At a time when U.S. college enrollment is shrinking, Benedictine’s expansion over the last 15 years has included four new residence halls, a new dining hall and an academic center. An immense new library is being built. The roar of construction equipment never seems to stop.

Enrollment, now about 2,200, has doubled in 20 years.

Students, many of whom grew up in conservative Catholic families, jokingly call it “the Benedictine bubble.” And it might be a window into the future of the Catholic Church in America.

In a deeply secular America, where an ever-churning culture provides few absolute answers, Benedictine offers the reassurance of clarity.

“We don’t all agree on everything, obviously,” said John Welte, a senior majoring in economics and philosophy. “But I would say everyone has an understanding of, like, truth.”

“There are certain things you can just know in your mind: This is right, and this is wrong.”

Sometimes, people here quietly admit, it goes too far. Like the students who loudly proclaim how often they go to Mass, or the young man who quit his classics course because he refused to read the works of ancient Greek pagans.

Very often, talk here echoes the 13th-century writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed God could be found in truth, goodness and beauty. Sometimes, they say, that means finding God in strict tenets about sexuality. Sometimes in the haunting beauty of Gregorian chants.

“It’s a renewal of, like, some really, really good things that we might have lost,” said Madeline Hays, a pensive 22-year-old senior biology major.

Benedictine College students, from left, Madeline Hays, Niki Wood, Ashley Lestone and Hannah Moore gather for evening prayers in a room which they converted to a chapel in the house they share, Dec. 3, 2023, in Atchison, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

She takes the church’s rules seriously, from pre-marital sex to confession. She can’t stand modern church architecture. She’s seriously considering becoming a nun.

But she also worries about poverty and America’s wastefulness and the way Americans –including herself – can find themselves slotted into the political divide without even knowing it.

She wrestles with her belief in an unerring Catholic doctrine that can see good people, including some of her own friends, as sinners.

Yet she doesn’t want change.

“The church wouldn’t be the church if it changed things it had set down as, ‘This is infallible doctrine and this will not change through the ages,’” she said.

They understand that in Benedictine’s small, mostly closeted gay community. Like the young man, once deeply religious, who suffers in silence as people on campus casually throw around anti-gay slurs.

He’s thought many times of leaving, but generous financial aid keeps him here. And after many years, he’s accepted his sexuality.

He’s seen the joy that people can get from Benedictine, how some will move back to Atchison after graduation, just to stay close.

But not him.

“I don’t think I’ll come back to Atchison – not ever.”

St. Maria Goretti parishoner Anna Buss, 10, pauses in front of a shrine to Pope John Paul II before Mass, April 2, 2005, in Madison, Wis. (John Maniaci/Wisconsin State Journal via AP, File)

For decades, the pews at St. Maria Goretti were filled with the families of plumbers, engineers and professors from the University of Wisconsin, just a couple miles up the road. The church is a well-kept island of Catholicism tucked into the leafy residential streets of one of America’s most liberal cities.

Like so many other parishes, it had been shaped by the ideals of the 1960s and 1970s. Poverty and social justice became tightly interwoven with sermons and parish life. Gay people felt welcome. Some of the church’s moral absolutes, like the contraception ban, became forgotten dogma.

Change arrived in 2003 with a new bishop, Robert C. Morlino, an outspoken conservative. Many liberals remember him as the man who lambasted the message of acceptance in the modern hymn, “All Are Welcome.”

His successor, Bishop Donald J. Hying, steers clear of public battles. But in many ways, he quietly carries on Morlino’s legacy, warning about “the tangled thinking of Modernism.”

In 2021, Hying named the Rev. Scott Emerson, a onetime top Morlino aide, as pastor of the Madison church.

Parishioners watched - some pleased, some uneasily - as their spiritual home was remodeled.

There was more incense, more Latin, more talk of sin and confession.

Emerson’s sermons are not all fire-and-brimstone. He speaks often about forgiveness and compassion. But his tone shocked many longtime parishioners.

Protection is needed, he said in a 2023 service, from “the spiritual corruption of worldly vices.” He has warned against critics – “the atheists, journalists, politicians, the fallen-away Catholics” – he said were undermining the church.

For some, Emerson’s changes were welcome.

A man prays during Catholic Mass at Benedictine College, Oct. 29, 2023, in Atchison, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

“A lot of us were like, ’Hey, more confession! Sweet!” said Rouleau, who ran the parish young adult group. “Better music!”

But the parish – which in mid-2023 became part of a two-church “pastorate” amid a diocese-wide restructuring - was shrinking fast.

For decades, many traditional Catholics have wondered if the church would – and perhaps should – shrink to a smaller but more faithful core.

In ways, that’s how St. Maria Goretti looks today. The 6:30 a.m. Friday Mass, Rouleau says, is increasingly popular among young people. But once-packed Sunday Masses now have empty pews. Donations are down. School enrollment plunged.

Some who left have gone to more liberal parishes. Some joined Protestant churches. Some abandoned religion entirely.

“I’m not a Catholic anymore,” said Hammond, the woman who left when the church’s school began to change. “Not even a little bit.”

But Emerson insists the Catholic Church’s critics will be proven wrong.

“How many have laughed at the church, announcing that she was passe, that her days were over and that they would bury her?” he said in a 2021 Mass.

“The church,” he said, “has buried every one of her undertakers.”

Associated Press journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed to this report.

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18 food deals for National Nurses Week

Nurses have one of the toughest professions around, and it can be a thankless job at times. A week of food deals is hardly enough to repay health care heroes for all the work they do, but National Nurses Week (May 6 — 12) is certainly a good starting point.

During the week, the more specific National Nurses Day falls on May 6, giving nurses yet another opportunity to celebrate a job well done.

Whether you’re a nurse yourself or you know one, there are plenty of deals to be found this coming week. Here are a few of the highlights.

Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza & Wing s

Nurses can save 20% on all orders at participating Anthony’s locations when they show a valid ID between May 6 — 12.

Buffalo Wild Wings

Nurses can score 20% off their order at Buffalo Wild Wings between May 6 — 12 when they show a valid ID while dining in or carrying out.

When nurses show a valid ID at participating BurgerFi locations between May 6 — 12, they’ll save 20% on their order.

Chipotle is giving away 100,000 free burrito e-cards to health care workers in honor of National Nurses Week. To enter for a chance to win, visit this website between May 6 — 10. Winners will be asked to verify their profession on ID.me.

Nurses can get a free medium hot or iced coffee on May 6 at participating Dunkin’ locations. There’s no purchase required and the deal is limited to one per guest.

The offer excludes the following products: frozen coffee, nitro cold brew and cold brew. If you add flavors, espresso shots, cold foam or dairy alternatives, there may be additional charges.

Nurses, medical providers and first responders can save 20% at Free Rein Coffee Company when they verify their profession on ID.me .

Happy Joe’s Pizza & Ice Cream

Participating Happy Joe’s locations are giving nurses 10% off their order between May 6 — 10.

Through May 8, Honeygrow customers can nominate a team of nurses to be one of five nursing units to win $250 worth of catering.

Insomnia Cookies

Insomnia Cookies  is giving nurses who show a valid ID a free classic cookie in-store between May 6 — 12. The best part? There’s no purchase required!

The cookie chain is also running a giveaway through May 12 where five lucky nurses or teachers will take home a $250 cookie catering package.

Logan’s Roadhouse

Between May 6 — 10, nurses who show a valid ID at Logan’s Roadhouse will save 20% on an entree.

McAlister’s Deli

When nurses show a valid ID at McAlister’s Deli in-store between May 6 — 12, they'll take home a free tea. The offer is valid at participating locations, is limited to one per customer and includes the following drinks: big sweet tea, unsweet tea, half-sweet and half-unsweet tea, or a cup of half-lemonade and half-tea (sweet or unsweet). Flavor shots excluded.

Moe’s Southwest Grill

To celebrate National Nurses Week, Moe’s is offering anyone who spends $300 or more on catering a $50 e-gift card in return. The single-use offer is valid at participating locations between May 6 — 12 and can be redeemed using the code THANKYOU24. It’s not valid with other offers or on third-party delivery orders.

Peter Piper Pizza

Nurses can get a free personal pizza in-store (one per day) at Peter Piper Pizza between May 6 — 10. To redeem the deal, simply show a valid ID.

Nurses can take home a free cookie or regular-size fountain drink when they buy an entree at Potbelly in-shop between May 6 — 12. Simply show a valid ID to cash in on the deal.

Smoothie King

Smoothie King rewards members can use the code THANKS2024 between May 6 — 7 to get $2 off their order. The offer can be redeemed multiple times.

Through May 10, the chain is also giving rewards members 2,000 bonus points when they spend $25 or more on gift cards online.

Sonny’s BBQ

Nurses can take advantage of a free Pork Big Deal sandwich at Sonny’s BBQ between May 6 — 7 (the offer expires at 8 p.m. EST on May 7). The offer is limited to one per person and nurses can verify their profession on ID.me to score the deal.

The Greene Turtle

On May 6, nurses and health care workers who dine in and show a valid ID can get a free meal (up to $15) at participating locations of The Greene Turtle .

Zaxby’s rewards members who purchase one Boneless Wings Meal will get another one free at participating locations on May 7 while supplies last. Simply order on the chain’s app or website to redeem.

Chrissy Callahan covers a range of topics for TODAY.com, including fashion, beauty, pop culture and food. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, watching bad reality TV and consuming copious amounts of cookie dough.

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