Do Your Homework!

Most parents remember doing homework when they were children.

Many think of homework as a student's job, or as a rite of passage that keeps them out of trouble. Or as a certainty of life, like death and taxes. Homework is a big part of the educational experience.

Homework as practice

The main idea behind most homework is to spur students to practice.

Learning anything takes time, and students only spend about six hours per day at school. Each year of school, students spend about 1,000 hours under the supervision of school staff. Some of those hours are instructional, and some aren't. Homework offers a way to expand the time students spend learning.

In the Ed100 blog
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Mastering any skill requires practice, practice, practice. Deliberate practice — the kind that gets you to Carnegie Hall — is active and focused. It's what enables basketball players to sink free throws reliably, or musicians to perform in public. It is the alphabet song, sung over and over with joy. (And without the threat of whipping included in the 1834 original.)

In early elementary grades, practice is essential for students to learn to read and write. Practice is essential to commit basic math facts to memory.

Of course, it helps a lot for students to want to practice. Just going through the motions can hurt more than it helps, especially if it sours students' motivation to learn. Ineffective, repetitive practice is often given a less-than-kind name: "drill and kill."

Good homework assignments give students just the right challenges so they can practice skills and absorb more learning. It's difficult and time-consuming work to design good homework, which is why most teachers don't do it. Instead, they usually rely on professionally-written course material, usually selected in consultation with administrators and other teachers.

Homework as work experience

Some kinds of homework help prepare students for the expectations of the working world. The teacher, in the role of the supervisor, assigns work and judges its value and timeliness. This model applies most directly to longer-term projects such as essays or lab reports.

To prepare students for even more complex, real-world work, teachers sometimes design group homework projects. Such assignments offer significant opportunities to develop interpersonal communication and organizational skills, quite apart from the academic content of a class. There are many approaches to grading group homework projects, and teachers must select among them thoughtfully.

How much time should students spend on homework?

Obviously, students will learn more if they spend more time learning, all other things being equal.

But not all homework time is of equal value, and there's such a thing as too much. In some schools — especially high schools where students aim to compete for admission to elite schools — homework expectations can be downright unhealthy. If you are looking for ways to have a conversation about reducing the academic pressure in your school, you may find inspiration in presentations available on ChallengeSuccess.org.

It's reasonable for parents and students to ask "how long is homework supposed to take?" Schools and parents tend to want guidelines.

The "ten-minute rule" is endorsed by both the National PTA and the National Education Association. It states that "the maximum amount of homework (all subjects combined) should not exceed 10 minutes per grade level per night."

The 10-minute rule evolved from a synthesis of many research studies about homework, especially work conducted by Harris Cooper of Duke University in the 1980s. Why is it called a "rule?" Because many school boards have literally codified it as policy. In California, you might be able to find your school district’s policy by searching for Board Policy 6154.

If enforced literally, the "ten minute rule" implies that sixth graders should spend no more than an hour per day on homework. Of course, the actual findings of research about homework warrant no such precision. From the start, the "rule" has been better imagined as an encouragement for teachers to be thoughtful about what they ask of students. In higher grades, particularly, it is easy for teachers to collectively bury students in homework without knowing that they are doing it.

Reality check: Few students bust the 10-minute 'rule'

A reality check is in order here. Policies to limit homework are irrelevant in most American schools because few students do much of it. In China, by contrast, excessive homework is so widespread that the country has taken steps to restrict it.

While we’re on the subject of reality checks, it’s worth acknowledging that research about homework has been pretty imprecise.

Virtually all of the “statistics” available about homework originate with surveys of parent or teacher opinion — not actual observation of students or feedback from them. For example, in 2024 the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released findings from a survey of parents. Four out of five said the amount of homework was “about right,” which isn’t very illuminating. NCES surveys in earlier years had asked parents to estimate how often their kids did homework, and for how long. The findings in 2019 showed some patterns, especially at the extremes.

How is homework assigned?

In the old days, teachers wrote homework assignments on a blackboard or handed them out on paper. Students would copy the assignment into a notebook, bring it home, do the work, then bring it back to school, find it, and hand it in.

There were many points of potential failure in that chain of actions and few ways for parents to support success. The only way for parents to know whether homework was getting done was to get in touch with a teacher personally.

In plenty of schools, this process hasn't changed yet — but it will. Increasingly, teachers are using online tools to assign homework, track completion, and record grades. Using these student information systems, students and parents can see homework assignments and deadlines online with little or no delay. They can tell when work has been handed in, and what score they received. If your school district doesn't yet use a school information system, it may be evaluating one.

How is AI changing homework?

When AI tools like ChatGPT started to become widely available in about 2024, they changed the meaning of homework for many students. This changes everything, right? Well, maybe. Take seven minutes to watch the following video by Derek Muller, a YouTube influencer who has given a lot of thought to the connection between technology and learning.

If you skipped the video, here’s the main point: Each generation of technology since the printing press, when applied to education, has made some things easier. But no technology has fundamentally changed the fact that learning requires effort. The work of education is to challenge and inspire students to turn their brain on so they can do the work of understanding or mastering something. Can AI tools do the work of learning for them? No. Can it help inspire students to do that work? Maybe, but Dr. Muller argues that schools could be more essential than ever because they center learning as a social experience. In a future of easy answers, the inspirational value of teachers and peers may be more important than ever.

Is homework bad for family relationships?

In early grades, parents serve not only as homework enforcers, but as tutors, too. This can be a mixed blessing. Parents aren't necessarily good at teaching, and the wrong words have a way of coming out. Frustrations can boil over into emotional showdowns, bringing out the worst in kids and parents alike.

Because homework is such an important part of the education process, the California State PTA offers homework advice for parents in many languages. The National PTA has advice for teachers, too: Homework that cannot be done without help is not good homework.

An influential critic of America's education system, Alfie Kohn, takes it even further. He questions whether homework is worth assigning at all. In part, Kohn argues that homework can easily become an unhealthy center of focus in the relationship between students and their parents.

Flipping the classroom: what if homework isn't practice?

Classically, teachers introduce new ideas and skills in class, lecture-style. Homework time is for practice, not for new stuff. But there are exceptions. For example, teachers sometimes ask students to read assigned material on their own before discussing it in class. When they do this, they are turning the time-use model upside down.

In the past, this approach was mostly reserved for upper-grade-level work in English or History classes. But the increasing availability of computing power and internet connectivity is making some pretty amazing explanations available online in all kinds of subjects. For example, it might be hard for many students to slog through a written overview of the history of Japan, but if the lesson is animated, irreverent, and short, it turns out that millions will watch it just for fun. It hardly feels like homework, right?

The practice of using technology to introduce new material as homework and using class time to discuss or practice it is sometimes called flipping the classroom. One champion of this approach is Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. In 2023 a large-scale meta-analysis confirmed the obvious: if students want it to work, it can work. Or it can just be another forgettable thing to zip through at double-speed.

Mastery: take your time

If some students take longer, so what?

Khan's core idea is far more disruptive than merely flipping the classroom. He argues that in a world where online learning empowers each student to learn at their own pace, schools should fundamentally rethink their whole approach.

What's the point of giving a student a low grade, he asks? Does it really help? Any student can master any subject if they are allowed time and given support. If some students take longer, so what? Teachers should focus on getting each student to mastery before moving on, he argues, rather than piling new material onto a shaky foundation. In this model, the line between school time and homework blurs almost entirely.

Putting this approach into practice isn't easy, but there are some important examples of success. For example, Rocketship Education, an organization of charter schools, has used blended learning in its schools since 2007. The results have been impressive, but "flipping" the classroom is only part of the story. As usual, no single change, on its own, produces magical results.

Is homework fair?

The premise of this lesson so far has been that homework is mostly for practice. But this isn't quite true, is it? Homework counts.

Students who don't consistently turn in good homework may not get good grades, even if they understand the material thoroughly. That's a higher bar for some students than for others. Some have good places to study, support from family, and help when they need it. Others don't. What does "home" work mean for the more than a quarter of a million students in California who are homeless? Homework is a daily activity, so everyday challenges add up. To mitigate these inequities, some schools modify their homework policies.

As we explore in Ed100 Lesson 2.7, students with specific learning challenges (like dyslexia, dysgraphia, or ADHD) can have a particularly hard time keeping up with everyday homework.

The U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973, section 504, established that in order to ensure individual students with a disability are treated fairly in school, teachers may modify course work, including homework assignments, to better suit their learning needs. Students who qualify for "accommodations" under Section 504 may be entitled to have class and homework plans modified, in consultation with parents. Students receiving special education services defined in an Individual Education Program (IEP) may also require homework accommodations or modifications.

Your homework

Homework isn’t going away, but it will certainly change, perhaps for the better. What’s your district’s homework policy? If you sense it might be out of date, here’s your homework: look it up — in California, it’s usually called Board Policy 6154.

This post was updated July 2025