In 1901, the state of California voted to abolish homework for children under the age of 15. The ban wasn't repealed until 1929. In 1994—nearly a century later—a district just north of San Francisco entertained the same notion when a member of the school board proposed banning homework from the school curriculum. This time the proposal was rejected: the 3,700 students in the Cabrillo Unified State District still have to do their homework.

The controversy about whether to give kids homework will go on as long as there are teachers to assign it and students to complain about doing it. Even now, while many parents and educators today are demanding more homework, an equally vocal group worries that we are placing too much of a burden on kids, especially the youngest.

"We are [so] anxious to prepare our children for this uncertain future... [that we don't realize] we might be taking away their childhood in the process," one parent writes in "H Is for Homework Hysteria," an article in Chatelaine magazine,

Research hasn't resolved the controversy either. Despite numerous studies and more numerous articles on the subject, there is still little agreement about either the purpose or the effectiveness of homework. Harris Cooper of the University of Missouri, whose 1989 study offered the first large-scale synthesis of the research, found "the array of potential positive and negative effects of homework...broad and often surprising." On the positive side, Cooper found that homework results in "better retention of factual knowledge, increased understanding, improved attitude toward school, greater self-discipline." The negative effects include boredom, fatigue, and insufficient time for extracurricular activities.

Homework and Achievement

Most of the research on homework has centered on the relationship between homework and student achievement as measured by test scores and grades. Though the research is not conclusive, studies do suggest a positive correlation. Among the most careful studies done on this subject are four by Chuanshen Chen and Harold Stevenson of the University of Michigan. Chen and Stevenson found that students in Japan and China spend two to four times as much time on homework as their American counterparts, and that time spent on homework appeared to be positively related to academic success.

This is hardly a surprise, says Herbert Walberg of the University of Illinois. "The more you study, the more you learn. It's a fundamental tenet—anything else would defy common sense—that if you study something for five hours you'll learn more than if you study it for half an hour.

"Asking `why homework?' is like asking `what's the usefulness of practice?'" says Stevenson. "Why are cognitive activities any different from other activities, like sports, where you improve with practice?"

Harris Cooper gives a more qualified endorsement. According to Cooper, homework is only related positively to student achievement in the upper grades. More important than the amount of homework assigned is the proportion of homework completed. Too much homework actually may be self-defeating, says Cooper, especially for younger students.

Cooper and colleagues recently completed a study of 709 student-teacher-parent triads, which will be published in early 1998. They found that at the elementary level, more homework was associated with negative student attitudes. "It may be better to give younger kids a short assignment that can lead to success, so that they can say `I got it done,'" says Cooper. "Today there is a trend towards giving large amounts of homework to young kids, but there is no evidence that this will work."

Wherever they stand on the subject, most researchers agree that the literature on homework and achievement is deficient in many ways. "Despite the strongly held opinions about the usefulness of homework," Chen and Stevenson write, "there are few empirical studies that support or refute these opinions." Walberg and colleagues did a meta-analysis of all the research on homework for the 1994 edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education. Of the 5,000 articles they examined, "only 15 to 17 had real data," Walberg says.

There is a paucity of well-designed empirical studies; few have large samples or follow the same students and teachers over time, and about two-thirds are in math and science. Taken together, these studies make for a weak basis on which to build any conclusions about homework's relationship to achievement.

Beyond Achievement

But by far the greatest flaw of the research on homework is precisely that it has focused so narrowly on student achievement. "There is very little research on other homework outcomes, like attitude, motivation, and study habits," says Cooper. "While people first think of homework as a way to accelerate knowledge acquisition, it teaches other things as well. Any data on these potential outcomes of homework—really the outcomes that make homework unique—would be better than the evidence we have now."

"The biggest criticism of the research is that it measures only success in school, and success in school is not success in life," says Walberg. "Research on homework and achievement may be conflicting, but there is no doubt that to attain very high levels of accomplishment, brains are not enough. You have to learn how to apply them. You have to learn self-discipline, how to set your own goals. It is terribly important to look into other things homework teaches."

Indeed, when you ask teachers why they assign homework, they do not usually say "to improve student grades or test scores." Quite the contrary. "The trouble with homework designed to help kids do better on tests is that they don't really learn the material," says Alma Wright, a 32-year veteran of the Boston public school system. "For example, if I give them spelling homework, they learn to spell the words for the test, but then they can't spell the same words when they're writing a story!"

Wright's idea of homework is having kids take what they learn in school and apply it to their real lives. When she is teaching arithmetic, for example, Wright might ask her 1st-grade class to count the chairs in their homes and then write something about their favorite chair.

"Kids need a reason to learn that goes beyond test scores," says Muesi Willingham, a Boston public high school teacher who prepares juniors and seniors for the SATs. Willingham strives to tap into his students' interests when he assigns homework. "If students can take the skills they learn in school and transfer them to their own lives, to something they are interested in, they will make their own commitment to learning," he says. In one of Willingham's most successful assignments, students wrote a newsletter that advised the next year's seniors about the SATs and applying to college.

Homework can expand learning beyond the school world of tests and grades, say many teachers today. Bill Badders, an elementary and middle school teacher in Cleveland, OH, sees how his homework assignments have evolved over 26 years from "traditional" practice and reinforcement into something quite different. Now Badders prefers to give homework that taxes the imagination. A science assignment might be to write two pages about the following: "This week my teacher ate a grasshopper. What happened to him?"

Teaching for Understanding

Teachers like Wright, Willingham, and Badders believe that students learn best and will become most engaged if they can use what they've learned in school in ways that are exciting and meaningful to them.

David Perkins, codirector of Project Zero at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, calls this kind of teaching "teaching for understanding." A growing trend in educational theory, teaching for understanding is teaching that "engage[s] students more deeply and thoughtfully in subject-matter learning," Perkins says. Related approaches include teaching for transfer, teaching for thinking, and the interdisciplinary curriculum. To really learn, students need to process class material in a variety of ways and in a variety of situations, rather than simply memorizing and regurgitating it.

Marguerite Santos, who has taught elementary school for 27 years in Revere, MA, does not call her approach "teaching for understanding," but when she talks about homework, she sounds like Perkins. "I assign homework to build a connection between home and school," she says, "to help kids develop what they learn so they remember it better."

When Santos teaches her kindergartners the letter "B," she doesn't ask them to go home and write the letter 20 times on a piece of paper. She gives them a paper bag and says, "Find something in your house that starts with the B sound, and bring it to school with you tomorrow." Then the class tries to guess what B-word is in the bag.

Teaching for understanding is an outgrowth of several interrelated theories of intelligence that have emerged over the last 15 years. Rejecting the traditional theory of a single intelligence quotient, such theorists as Howard Gardener, Robert Sternberg, Stephen Ceci, and David Perkins argue that abstract, analytical intelligence (the kind measured in IQ tests) is only one kind of intelligence among many, and only one way among many ways of thinking. Furthermore, these theorists argue, intelligence does not exist in a vacuum, but in the context of a person's family, culture, and experience.

One area in which these perspectives on intelligence have had an impact is assessment. Educators increasingly question the validity of standardized and IQ tests, and many incorporate performance-based examinations and exhibitions into their curriculum. Expanding the traditional models of intelligence has also led educators to reexamine how different students learn, and to call for an approach that broadens and deepens all students' understanding of what they learn.

Homework with Meaning

How does homework fit into all this? "What underpins the idea of understanding is performance," says Perkins, "thinking with and through the knowledge you have. Understanding a topic of study is a matter of being able to perform in a variety of thought-demanding ways with the topic—to explain, muster evidence, find examples, generalize, apply concepts, analogize, represent in a new way, and so on."

Because it is done away from the classroom, without the time and space restrictions of work done in school, Perkins says, "Homework, or the time allocated to homework, is an opportunity for expanded kinds of performance."

But not just any homework. "Homework today is mostly of the `can you do this?' or `do you know X?' kind," says Robert Sternberg of Yale University. This kind of homework enhances "only one kind of ability—the memorizing fact-based kind; trivial pursuits. So students can't transfer it outside of the context, they can't apply it to other realms." Like Alma Wright's student, who could spell a word correctly on a test but could not when she used it in a story, "they don't really learn it. The problem is that it's encapsulated."

It's no surprise that, if given the choice, Wright says she "would do without worksheet homework." Bill Badders in Cleveland puts it this way: "If it were completely up to me, I wouldn't give drill and practice homework—I'd give homework with meaning."

Homework with meaning, homework "that goes beyond the material given" does several things, says Sternberg. "One, it develops students' analytical, creative and practical thinking skills. Two, it gets students to encode information in multiple ways so they process it more deeply—the more ways they process it the more likely they'll learn it. Three, it enables students to capitalize on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. If they can't do the homework one way they can approach it in another away."

Homework of this kind does more than improve test scores. It helps students gain a deeper understanding of the material, gets them involved in their learning, and strengthens their motivation. "Using knowledge or skills in your own environment makes that knowledge personal—it becomes yours," says Tina Grotzer, a research associate at Harvard University and former elementary school teacher. "And if you personalize something, you've created an inclination."

Kids who take charge of their own learning are more motivated, says Stephanie Mattson, who teaches elementary school in the Clark County School District in Nevada. "Otherwise they think `what's the minimum I can do?'" Mattson likes to have her older students come up with their own homework assignments. In the primary grades, taking charge may be no more than knowing what the assignment is, being responsible for getting it done, knowing where you put it, and bringing it back to your teacher.

"Taking responsibility for your own learning is not just a school skill, it's a life skill," says Mattson.

Homework Redefined

We tend to stereotype homework, think of it too narrowly, say educational theorists. Perhaps the real question is not "why homework?" but "what kind of homework?" Wright laughs that when she gives a homework assignment like "count the chairs in your house and write about your favorite one," parents say, "Is that homework? Why don't you give spelling homework?"

"I don't even like the word homework," says Perkins. "Home suggests that it's done at home, when in fact it can be done in lots of places—the backyard, the mall, the grocery store.... And I don't like the word work because it suggests a tedious regimen. It's also a play on school work, which suggests that it's school work you didn't have the time to do in school."

Seeing homework that way is "a huge missed opportunity," says Perkins. He suggests that educators create assignments that can't be done in school, not because of time but because they call for outside sources and data. "The conventional assignment of this sort is a term paper," says Perkins. But why not a well-documented community project, a study of local wetlands, or a collaborative enterprise that involves family members or other students?

Like Perkins, Harold Stevenson believes that we underestimate homework's potential. "We need to give students an opportunity to practice trying to understand," says Stevenson. "In East Asia meticulous care is given to the construction of homework assignments. It's a great contrast to the routine assignments given in the U.S. Here we don't recognize that changing a child's mind is as complex as open-heart surgery."

It's not easy to come up with homework that applies learning to new ideas and situations, homework that asks students to both deepen and broaden their thinking—ask any of the teachers who do. But it may make all the difference.