Feb 28, 2008 1:43 PM
Are students overburdened with homework? Not according to a recent MetLife Inc.-commissioned poll, which found that 77 percent of students and more than 80 percent of teachers and parents said the homework burden was slight. Belief in the value of homework, the survey found, is even more prevalent among African-American and Hispanic parents than among white parents.
The findings are detailed in the “MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: The Homework Experience” and are based on an online survey of more than 1,000 teachers, 501 parents, and 2,101 K-12 students. Polling was done between March and June 2007.
Three-quarters of the students surveyed said they did at least 30 minutes of homework on a typical school day, and 45 percent spend an hour or more cracking the books each weeknight. Students with better grades reported spending more time on homework.
It wasn’t all skittles and beer, though, with nearly 90 percent of students reporting feeling stressed about doing homework, and about one-quarter describing their homework assignments as mostly busywork. That’s down from 2002, when nearly three-quarters of middle and high school students described their home exercises as busywork.
While most parents did not report that homework got in the way of family life, a sizable group did have concerns about the quality of their children’s homework assignments. Forty percent said a great deal of the homework their children do is busywork, and one-third rated the quality of their children’s assignments as fair or poor.
“That’s a signal to our educators that they need to do more parent education in this realm,” said Mary Brabeck, the dean of NYU’s education school. “We also need to do more to improve what’s done in these assignments.”
Just 16 percent of teachers rated the quality of the homework assignments given out at their schools as low.
Education Week, Feb. 20