P.S. 116 Principal Jane Hsu wrote a letter to parents last month detailing the decision, explaining that after more than a year of analyzing¹ studies, the school had concluded that students' after-school time would be better spent on activities like reading at their own pace and playing rather than working on class assignments.

 

Hsu's letter says that many studies indicate that there is no connection between homework and academic success. Indeed, there are some studies that show that the link between homework and success is dubious² at the primary school level.

 

A seminal³ 1989 study on homework by Harris Cooper, a social psychologist who researches education, found that doing homework led students to perform better in school as they grew older. In later grades, students who did homework performed increasingly better than students who did not. In 2006, Cooper published a study that analyzed⁴ 15 years' worth of data on the effectiveness of homework. He found that homework had a more positive impact on students as they aged⁵, and identified stronger correlations⁷ between homework and achievement for students in grades seven through 12 than for students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

 

A 2012 study from the Indiana University School of Education on 10th-graders found little correlation⁶ between time spent on homework and better course grades, although it did find a positive correlation between homework time and standardized⁸ test performance.

 

Some parents of P.S. 116 students are not happy with the decision to eliminate homework.

 

"I think they should have homework -- some of it is about discipline. I want [my daughter] to have fun, but I also want her to be working towards a goal," Daniel Tasman, the father of a second-grader at the school, told DNAinfo.

 

"You have to do homework in order to gain; you have to do homework because they may not be able to comprehend everything in school," Sharon Blake, a grandmother of a P.S. 116 student, told ABC news.

点击收听单词发音