Transcript
TOM LOVELESS: The section poses a question, Do students have too much homework? Let me tell you what motivated me to conduct the study. It had to do with a number of popular press accounts--Newsweek: "Homework Doesn't Help." Newsweek had as the lead-off in their article a story, I believe it was of a third-grader with just an awful amount of homework crying at home, really a terrible scene. People magazine: "Overbooked" was the title of their homework story about this horrible crushing burden on American students. Time magazine cover story says it all: "Too Much Homework!"--and if you look at the subtitle, "The homework ate my family." Kids are dazed, parents are stressed.
So there is this view in the popular media that there has been a terrible burden on American children in terms of homework and that this homework burden is increasing. And those are the two questions that I wanted to gather social science and look at: What does the homework burden look like for the typical student? and Has it been increasing or decreasing?
Now, the first data I looked at--you will definitely not be able to see this, but hopefully you can see in your hard copy. You can follow along. It's the first table, 2-1.
There was a study that was released in 1999 conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. And this study, quite frankly, was misreported in the press. This was a study of how families use their time. And families filled out time diaries, and from that the researchers were able to compile estimates of the amount of time devoted to various activities.
Now, if you look down there at the bottom, the one in red--you look down the left-hand column, the various activities--this one here, the next-to-the-last one, is Studying. And that includes homework. And what the researchers found was there had been an increase in homework. If you go clear to the last column, the amount of time devoted to studying, in the last column you'll see that the average amount of time for this sample, in 1981, was 1 hour 53 minutes. And it rose by 23 minutes--this is weekly amounts of homework, expressed in hours and minutes. 1 hour 53 minutes in 1981; in 1997, the second time the study was conducted, that number had gone up to 2 hours 16 minutes.
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