Tempus Fugit

Sara Bennett has posted a guest article that looks at how much discretionary time is available for homework in the average student’s day.

I’d like to build on this argument and look at the research behind it, because I think that it is about time that we demand that our public educational practices be based on solid research and understanding about learning and human health.

Looking at the 24 hours in each day, one begins with the need for sleep. It seems that school age children need between 8 and 10 hours of sleep, depending on age. The average of 9 hours stated in the article seems accurate. Does anyone dispute these figures?

Next, we need 2 hours for three meals. Is this too much? My own experience is 30 minutes for breakfast as well as lunch and one hour for supper, so it seems appropriate. Exercise time is one hour, which I think may be a bit low. In our case, swim practice is 1.5 hours and Tae Kwon Do is 1.5 hours. The American Heart Association recommends:

Schools should ensure that all children participate in at least 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity during the school day, with options for more activity in extracurricular and school-linked community programs.
School-based PE [physical education] programs should be evidence-based, should include moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 50% of PE class time, and should teach students the skills needed for lifelong physical activity.
PE programs should meet national standards, including 150 minutes per week for grades K through 8 and 225 minutes per week for grades 9 through 12.
Schools should promote walking and bicycling to school where possible, with routes made safe by the joint efforts of school leaders and local governments.

One hour of exercise per day, of which 30 minutes is rigorous, is the professional recommendation for cardio-vascular health. In our high school, physical education is only offered for 1/3 of the school year, so the time for exercise must be made available outside of school hours.

The research agrees with the conclusion that 12 hours per day of sleep are necessary for maintaining basic health, but this could be 13 hours for younger children and only 11 hours for older children. Research also shows that one size does not fit everyone and that perhaps we should re-think school start times for teenagers:

All students performed better in the afternoon than in the morning. Students in early morning classes reported being wearier, less alert and having to expend greater effort.Potential solutions to this problem could be solved by changing school start times and by giving standardized tests later in the day, the authors suggested.

We can now look at the time for school. In our case, school starts between 8:17 & 8:25 AM and finishes between 2:30 and 3:00 PM. This includes 30 to 60 minutes for lunch. Actual class time is 6 x 50 minutes in middle school (5 hours) and 5 x 103 minutes in high school (5.25 hours). Let’s use 5 hours instead of the six stated in the article (your mileage may vary).

Commute to school time is given as one hour. Our experience is one hour for our high school student and 30 minutes for middle school. I cannot find any data on average commute times, but each community should be able to determine a mean or a mode. After-school activities are listed as taking one hour and this seems appropriate, but I would assume that this does not include excercise, which has already been accounted for.

My calculations then show 12 hours for health maintenance, 5 hours for school, one hour each for commuting and after-school activities, for a total of 19 hours, as opposed to the article which says that there are 21 hours of non-discretionary time.

These additional five hours of time need to account for family activities and chores, personal hygiene, relaxing time and of course: homework. So what is a reasonable extra imposition of homework on those meagre five hours of discretionary time? The rule of thumb given by many educators (not based on any evidence at all) is 10 minutes per grade level, so that almost half of students’ discretionary time is taken up with homework at the senior levels.

A national survey, conducted in1989/90 showed that in Grade 10, 18% of boys and 35% of girls spent more than two hours per week night on homework. The same study showed that 23% of boys and 38% of girls in Grade 10 spent more than two hours per weekend day on homework. A 2001 Canadian study showed that, “Teens in households with Internet access spend eight hours a week doing homework – an increase of one hour over 1998”. That’s 1.6 hours per 5 day week. My estimate would be that the “average” for high school is about 1.5 hours today, but I don’t have conclusive data on this. I would conclude (for now) that about 30% of students’ discretionary time is spent on homework, though this varies widely.

Dr. Cathy Vatterott, professor of middle level education at the University of Missouri, sums up the research on homework:

Research shows there is a slight correlation between homework and achievement in middle school and high school, although we can’t prove that homework causes high achievement. In middle school, students doing between 15 minutes and one hour of homework a night do just as well as students spending one to two hours on homework. For high school students, achievement declines after more than two hours of homework a night.

There is zero correlation between the amount of homework given and achievement at the elementary level.

Youth is short-lived and time flies, so why waste it on ineffective homework? We have let homework encroach upon our daily lives, and watch it continue to increase. Spending a third or more of our discretionary time on homework may be causing us to miss out on opportunities to grow as families and communities. Because public education is a state-owned monopoly, it must be accountable for the time demands it makes. Homework doesn’t seem to be worth the time.