Students’ Study Time and Their ‘‘Homework Problem’’

Jiri Zuzanek

Accepted: 1 August 2008� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

North American parents and writers concerned with adolescents’ well-being have

repeatedly pointed to the ‘‘homework problem’’ as underlying adolescent stress, disruption

of family relationships, and questionable academic results. Publications such as Kralovec

and Buell’s (2000) ‘‘The end of homework’’, Kohn’s (2006) ‘‘The Homework Myth. Why

our kids are getting too much of a bad thing’’, and Bennett and Kalish’s (2006) ‘‘The case

against homework’’ have highlighted these concerns. These assertions are countered by

arguments that homework enhances learning and is needed for building good work habits

(see Cooper et al. 2006), often summarised ‘‘How can we compete with the Japanese and

Koreans, if our kids don’t do homework.’’

Surprisingly little of this debate has been informed by time-use research. This article

thus addresses five interrelated issues:

(1) How homework loads of Canadian and U.S. students compare with the workloads

of students in other countries?

(2) How have these workloads changed over the past 10–20 years?

(3) In what way do greater homework loads affect the rest of teens’ time use?

(4) What are longer homework’s academic implications?

(5) How do longer hours of homework affect teens’ sense of time pressure, feelings

of stress, and emotional well-being?

1 Data Sources and Method

Data come from national time-use surveys conducted in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s

by statistical agencies in Canada, United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany,

Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Finland. Data from these surveys were examined as

part of the Comparative Study of Adolescent Time Use (CATUS), coordinated by the

Research Group on Leisure and Cultural Development of the University of Waterloo

J. Zuzanek (&)University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canadae-mail: Zuzanek@healthy.uwaterloo.ca

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Soc Indic ResDOI 10.1007/s11205-008-9411-8

(Canada). Data were also taken from the Ontario Survey of Adolescent Time Use and Well-Being (OATUS/ESM) administered by this research group in 2001/2003.

The OATUS/ESM combined: time diaries with ‘‘beeper self-reports’’, the Experience

Sampling Method (ESM). Time diaries for the day preceding were filled out in class in 13

schools representative of the Ontario population, accompanied by questions about ado-

lescents’ academic performance, life-style preferences and the like. Some 219 of these

teens, and one of their parents, took part in the ESM survey, in which they were signalled

by a pre-programmed wrist-watch eight times a day across a week. At the time of the beep,

they reported their main activity at the time, their location, who they were with, a number

of affective states, feelings of time pressure, desire to engage in something else, as well as

their interest in and importance of that activity.

2 Findings

2.1 School Time and Homework from a Comparative and Historical Perspective

Table 1 shows that the workloads of American high school students (55 min of homework

on school days) do not appear particularly heavy. Canadian homework loads in 1998 were

higher, but they did not differ substantially from homework loads reported by students in

the seven other CATUS countries.

Table 1 School related time of adolescents aged 15–19 across countries and across time (In hours andminutes per school day)

Australia(1997)

Belgium(1999)

Canada(1998)

Finland(1999/2000)

Germany(2001/2002)

NDL(2000)

Norway(2000)

UK(2000)

USA(2003)

N 862 291 343 267 582 99 175 403 512

School relatedtime

8.0 8.8 8.4 7.2 7.4 7.5 7.3 7.8 7.9

Attendingclasses / timeat school

5.5 6.0 6.5 5.6 5.2 4.9 5.5 5.7 6.5

Homework onschool days

1.4 1.7 1.2 0.8 1.1 1.5 0.9 1.0 0.9

Traveling to /from school

1.1 1.0 0.8 0.9 1.1 1.2 0.9 1.1 0.5

Hours and minutes per day averaged across the 7-day week

Canada Finland Norway

1986 1992 1998 2005 1987/1988 1999/2000 1980 1990 2000

N 506 456 414 600 717 658 285 238 260

School related time 6.1 5.6 5.2 5.6 4.7 4.4 5.0 5.3 5.5

Attending classes/time at school 3.9 3.5 3.2 3.8 3.4 3.2 3.4 3.8 3.9

Homework 1.6 1.6 1.5 1.1 0.8 0.7 1.0 0.9 1.0

Traveling to/from school 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.6 0.7

J. Zuzanek

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The amount of homework in the surveyed countries has either changed little or declined

over the past 15 years. Canadian students in 2005 spent 3.5 h less time doing homework

than in the early 1990s. Similar declines were observed in Finland and other countries,

possibly because part of homework was moved to class time.

2.2 Homework Time, Academic Performance and Emotional Well-Being

Although the Table 1 data suggest that North American students are not overburdened, the

‘‘homework problem’’ continues to worry parents and educators concerned with teens’

high levels of time pressure, obesity, and emotional and behavioural problems. Tables 2

and 3 address this question and suggest that longer hours of homework do take time away

from virtually all other daily activities—but mostly from watching television, computer

and video games, and socialising with friends, followed by physically active leisure, paid

work and domestic work. Reading books, use of the Internet, and contacts with parents are

affected to a lesser degree. The losses are thus mostly among less structured and arguably

developmentally less beneficial activities.

Contrary to the claims that longer hours of ‘‘homework’’ are of limited academic value,

findings reported in Table 2 suggest that additional homework on school days and par-

ticularly on Sundays correlates positively with teens’ grade averages (correlations .21 and

.37, respectively). This relationship holds after controls for gender and age, and is also

sustained when homework is operationalised as percent of homework episodes reported by

teens in ESM self-reports (r = .20; not in Table 2).

Subjectively, Canadian and OATUS time-diary data in Tables 2 and 3 show that more

homework time correlates positively with teens’ perceived time pressure and stress both in

Table 2 Effects of school day and Sunday homework on teens’ well-being: OATUS 2003(Bi-variatecorrelations and regressions controlling for teens’ gender and age)

Canadian 2005 All days

Pearson ‘‘r’’ Beta

Time pressure .16 .14

Perceived stress .07 .14

School is the source of stress .16 .13

Feeling happy .14 .07

Satisfied with time use -.06 -.06

OATUS 2003 School days Sundays

Pearson ‘‘r’’ Beta Pearson ‘‘r’’ Beta

Time pressure .26 .23 .34 .30

Grade average .21 .19 .37 .33

Importance of doing well at school .21 .20 .18 .18

Expectations of a bright future .07 .06 ns ns

Often feel bored -.10 -.10 -.16 -.16

Composite of lonely and depressed* .07 ns .14 .09

* Alpha = .71

All relationships are significant at .005 level, unless italicised (significant at .05 level)

Students’ Study Time and Their ‘‘Homework Problem’’

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diaries and beepers. These emotional and health effects of teens’ longer hours of home-

work reported in Tables 2 and 3 are not entirely clear or consistent. Heavier homework

loads do not seem to make teens unhappy and are associated with less boredom, but they

also correlate with higher levels of anxiety and higher levels of loneliness and depression.

Unlike free time, homework generates little interest (r = -.06) and is associated with a

strong desire to do something else (r = .17). In contrast, free time activities are associated

with greater interest (r = .31) and little desire to do something else (r = -.27). However,

while enjoying free time activities much more, teens perceive these activities as less

challenging (r = -.05) and less important (r = -.10) than homework. In short, homework

may be developmentally useful, but is perceived by adolescents as stressful and

emotionally unattractive.

What surprises more are the subjective differences between doing homework and time

spent in class. Homework is perceived by students as more challenging, more important

and, surprisingly, even less boring than time spent in class (excepting tests). Although

homework is associated with higher levels of time pressure, it generates less desire to do

something else than time spent in class. Thus, the ‘‘class time problem’’ seems to have

greater urgency than the ‘‘homework problem.’’

3 Conclusions

Tables 1, 2, 3 do not suggest that homework per se is the only, or perhaps the main source

of teens’ life strains. Diary data reported in Zuzanek (2005) show that students often go to

bed late on school days (by 11:30 p.m., over 26% of Ontario teens are still not in bed, and

14% go to bed on school days after midnight). They leave for school early in the morning,

often skipping breakfast and staying late in school. Almost 30% finish classes at or past 3

p.m., in part due to parents’ employment. Classes are not always challenging, and teachers

transfer part of their workload to after-school hours. Parents are expected to help out with

homework, but they are often tired after work.

Under these conditions homework may be perceived as excessive, but it is hardly at the

root of emotional strains. Pressures experienced by teens do not stem from homework

alone but from the way society structures its employment, educational and temporal

Table 3 Experiential correlates of homework, time in class, and free time: ESM self-reports 2003(Bi-variate correlations; Pearson ‘‘r’’)

Episodes of homework Episodes in class Episodes of free time

Feeling pressed for time .14 ns -.18

Feeling stressed .10 .04 -.10

Affect (feel good, happy, cheerful) -.07 ns .11

Anxiety (feel worried, upset, tense) .10 ns -.09

Feeling bored .03 .18 -.09

Activity perceived as challenging .25 .14 -.05

Activity perceived as important .09 -.05 -.10

Activity perceived as interesting -.06 -.14 .31

Wish to be doing something else .17 .25 -.27

All relationships are significant at .005 level

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environment and opportunities. In other words, we face not so much a ‘‘homework

problem’’ but rather, in a broader sense, a societal time use problem.

References

Bennett, S., & Kalish, N. (2006). The case against homework. Bethel: Crown Publishers.Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A

synthesis of research, 1987–2003. Review of Educational Research, 76, 1–62.Kohn, A. (2006). The homework myth. Why our kids are getting too much of a bad thing. Cambridge, MA:

De Capo Press.Kralovec, E., & Buell, J. (2000). The end of homework. How homework overburdens children, and limits

learning. Boston: Beacon Press.Zuzanek, J. (2005). Adolescent time use and well-being from a comparative perspective. Loisir & Societe/

Society and Leisure, 28, 5–42.

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