Article on homework

Not all education experts agree entirely with Cooper’s assessment. Cathy Vatterott, an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school.

But she says this doesn't mean that endlessly increasing the amount of homework will keep delivering better results. At some point, the benefits of more homework stop. But the difficult part is that this homework saturation point is different for each individual.

On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement.

They also point out that opponents believe schools have decided homework is necessary and thus assign it simply to assign some kind of homework, not because doing the work meets specifically-identified student needs.