The Impact of Homework Time on Academic Achievement
نویسندگان
چکیده
Several charter schools have shown great success in improving the academic performance of students from low-performing school districts. It has been argued, however, that their success may be due to student selection. This paper tests of two aspects of these charter schools’ reforms using nationally representative panel data on student behavior and academic performance. First, I examine a policy that increases the proportion of homework that students complete. Second, I examine the impact of increasing the amount of homework assigned. Previous studies have not been able to accurately estimate the impact of homework because of important omitted variables and measurement error, which strongly bias the estimated impact of homework time. This paper, however, uses an instrumental variables approach with student fixed effects to account for both time-varying and time-invariant unobserved characteristics and inputs. This approach produces estimates of the impact of homework time on academic achievement that are much higher than those of previous studies. Also, when compared to popular policy changes such as decreasing class size or increasing teachers’ wages, a policy of assigning more homework is found to be the most cost effective policy tool. Finally, these findings suggest that assigning additional homework primarily improves the achievement of low performing students and students in low performing schools. Thus, assigning more homework could help close the gap in achievement between high and low performing students. ∗ The author would like to thank Tom Mroz, David Blau, Donna Gilleskie, David Guilkey, and Helen Tauchen for their excellent assistance. Steven can be reached at [email protected] or Department of Economics, Gardner Hall CB# 3305, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3305. 2
منابع مشابه
Academic Goals, Student Homework Engagement, and Academic Achievement in Elementary School
There seems to be a general consensus in the literature that doing homework is beneficial for students. Thus, the current challenge is to examine the process of doing homework to find which variables may help students to complete the homework assigned. To address this goal, a path analysis model was fit. The model hypothesized that the way students engage in homework is explained by the type of...
متن کاملThe Janus-faced nature of time spent on homework: Using latent profile analyses to predict academic achievement over a school year
Homework time and achievement are only modestly associated, whereas homework effort has consistently been shown to positively predict later achievement. We argue that time spent on homework can be an important predictor of achievement when combined with measures of homework effort. Latent profile analyses were applied to a longitudinal data set with 1915 eighth-grade students who had been surve...
متن کاملHomework Involvement and Academic Achievement of Native and Immigrant Students
Homework is a debated issue in society and its relationship with academic achievement has been deeply studied in the last years. Nowadays, schools are multicultural stages in which students from different cultures and ethnicities work together. In this sense, the present study aims to compare homework involvement and academic achievement in a sample of native and immigrant students, as well as ...
متن کاملStudents' Achievement and Homework Assignment Strategies
The optimum time students should spend on homework has been widely researched although the results are far from unanimous. The main objective of this research is to analyze how homework assignment strategies in schools affect students' academic performance and the differences in students' time spent on homework. Participants were a representative sample of Spanish adolescents (N = 26,543) with ...
متن کامل