More Brain Points

Was All That Homework a Waste of Time?

We all hear about students being over-worked and lugging home backpacks full of books and homework assignments. I for one can remember the hours I spent on homework in middle school and high school; staying up until midnight to get everything done after a long day of school and ballet classes, but are all students in the US really being given more work than they can handle?

The NPR article titled “Homework: A New User’s Guide” by Cory Turner investigates some of the questions students and parents alike have regarding the topic. A study done by the National Assessment of Educational in 2012 asked a group of 9, 13, and 17 year olds, “How much time did you spend on last night?” They found that 79% of nine year olds, 65% of 13 year olds, and 53% of 17 year olds did less than one hour of homework. What?!  On first glance this made me think all these students must be lazy, but other research supports the finding that kids aren’t really over-worked. The majority of students are spending a reasonable amount of time on homework.

The disparity comes in high school when some students choose a less rigorous coursework while others take multiple honors and AP classes. There is also an element of social class at play. Children in affluent communities are more over-burdened with homework. However, overall US students get an average amount of homework when compared to other countries.

So does homework even do anything? This is what we’re all dying to know. The answer is not necessarily. For elementary school children homework leads to little or no improvement. But the point of homework at this age isn’t necessarily to improve performance, but to teach skills like time-management and self-direction. In middle school and high school there is a correlation between homework and achievement on tests, but that doesn’t mean that more homework is better.

What we should all be focusing on is the type of homework that will yield the best results. This is when we get into the brain and memory stuff! As Dr. Knowlton spoke about in her talk, interleaved practice has been shown to strengthen our ability to remember and perform on tasks. In the study she presented, participants were tested on a serial reaction time task, involving pressing corresponding buttons to dots that appeared on a screen as fast as possible. One group practiced a sequence over and over again until moving to the next; blocked practice. The other group had interleaved practice, in which they switched between the different sequences. While the reaction time was slower for the interleaved practice group they showed better performance when tested in both a random and sequential order.

In a subsequent fMRI study, participants practiced 3 sequences interleaved or blocked for two days and were tested for retention on day 5. Interleaved practice led to better retention. During practice, sensorimotor areas showed more activation in this group as well. TMS measures showed that interleaved practice also resulted in increased excitability in certain brain areas before the test on day 5. These results suggest that a desirable level of difficulty during practice appears to increase retrieval practice leading to better performance.

These results from interleaved practice relate to how students should be studying and what types of homework they should be given. Many researchers suggest that teachers give students many little quizzes in order to strengthen their ability to remember and recall information. These quizzes don’t have to be worth many points; they’re about getting students to practice steady recall and repetition. This is because the brain is better at remembering things when we repeat with consistency rather than studying one topic for a period of time, like blocked practice. It has also been suggested that students be given assignments that require them to use not just what they learned that day or week, but information from earlier in the year. This is a form of interleaved practice, which requires more work in recalling the information, but practicing this effortful recall will lead to better performance and less work when it comes time to take a test. So when you’re studying for your next test try to space out your practice and switch between different subjects in order to establish a degree of difficulty that makes you have to work to recall the information, so you won’t have to work so hard later.


Turner, C. (2015, September 23). Homework: A New User's Guide. Retrieved December 5, 2015, from    http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/19/439472033/homework-a-new-users-guide

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