Homework: A Cross-Sectional Study

However several critics claim that homework has some negative effects attributed to it that contradict the suggested positive effects. For instance, in 1989 Chen and Stevenson (opponents of homework) have argued in their article, Homework: A Cross-Cultural Examination “that it can have a negative influence on attitudes toward school by satiating students with academic pursuits” (). They claim any activity can remain rewarding for only so long, and children may become overexposed to academic tasks. However, these groups of critics failed to realize that during the time their article was written, the Cold War was at its very peak. Therefore, the cross-sectional study results were affected by an outlier, which could have contributed to the negative attitudes found during the psychological research. According to the documents written by the Milwaukee schools, “children saw signs marking the evacuation route from the city, heard tests of the emergency broadcast and siren systems, and practiced duck and cover drills in schools. School administrators held lengthy discussions about the quality of education

Four fifth-grade classrooms (not individual students) were exposed to conditions at random, one to a practice homework condition, one to a preparation homework condition, and two to a no-homework control condition. Clearly, assigning only one classroom to each condition, even when done at random, cannot remove confounded classroom differences from the effect of homework. For example, all four classrooms used a cooperative learning approach to teaching social studies, but one classroom (assigned to the practice homework condition) used a different cooperative learning approach from the other three classes. Also, the student, rather than the classroom, was used as the unit for statistical analysis, creating the concern that within-class dependencies among students were