Is there such a thing as too much homework?

(ThinkStock Photos)At one New York school, it took a neuroscientist to convince teachers of something students have believed for decades: too much homework is bad.

According to Harris Cooper, a Duke University of professor of neuroscience and psychology, an extra hour of homework doesn't necessarily help kids learn better. "At five hours a night, they likely won't do any worse if they only bring home four [hours of work]," said Cooper, who was brought in to help asses homework planning for one of the city's top private schools.

According to The New York Times, several top-ranked private and public schools are easing up on their after-school requirements, in reaction to a homework backlash.
One school has created home-work free holidays-a few days out of the school year when students don't have to hit the books after school. Another is better staggering their assignments so the workloads don't pile up to impossibly high levels, especially around vacation time.

The concern is that too much homework isn't just unproductive, it's damaging. In Cooper's research, high school students who work for more than two hours a night on homework tested lower than kids who's study time was slightly more moderate.

One reason may have to do with sleep. According to several national studies, kids get at least an hour less sleep a night than they did 30 years ago. At the same time, the amount of time spent on homework has increased over 50 percent since the early '80s.

Losing sleep over work, or even the stress of not finishing work, can potentially affect brain development. "Because children's brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn't have on adults," writes Po Bronson in a New York Magazine article about sleep and brain development. "A few scientists theorize that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child's brain structure: damage that one can't sleep off like a hangover. It's even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tween and teen-moodiness, depression, and even binge eating-are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation."

Sleep isn't the only thing that suffers from too much work. Q.T. with the family is at risk. So is school spirit. Over-working kids at home can turn some students off education, even if they actually like going to school. And when somebody resents what they're doing, they don't do that thing very well.

"If slogging through worksheets dampens one's desire to read or think, surely that wouldn't be worth an incremental improvement in skills," writes education expert and anti-homework activist Artie Kohn. "And when an activity feels like drudgery, the quality of learning tends to suffer, too."

But for some parents and educators, several hours a night of homework has its benefits. For one, it's training students for an increasingly sleep-deprived, overworked job market. Depressing, I know.
Another pro-homework argument: it forces kids to enjoy things they may feel is a waste of time in today's technological world. "When do students have time to read a book other than when it is assigned as homework?" NYU professor Diane Ravitch asks on The Huffington Post.

But is reading Jane Eyre into the wee hours any better for kids than say, hanging out with parents, tooling around with a craft project, listening to music, watching a good, relaxing, relatively well-made movie, or, simply, dreaming?

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