Allie Kohn posted an article on LinkedIn about how research shows that homework has not ever been beneficial in the elementary school. In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. None) or more (vs. Less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement. If we’re making 12 year-olds, much less five-year-old, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.
In my experience, I have found that giving homework to elementary students just makes the students and the parents dislike school! In one American Embassy School in Delhi, the elementary students’ homework was to do at least an hour of their own favorite homework, such as researching something, learning something new that they want to learn, or teaching someone something they have learned in school that day! Then, at the end of each week or month, the students can report what they have learned to the rest of their class! The students loved it!
