There have been two significant pushes for school improvement during the second half of the 20th Century. One, Sputnik in 1957, and the other was the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. Both events exposed the ranking of the United States compared to other countries. How do we provide more enrichment without extending the school day? Homework.
Researchers Maltese, Tai, and Fan set out to determine if there is an association between homework and achievement in high school mathematics and science courses. Data collected by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) for the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS) and for the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS) contains data on the amount of time spent on assignments and appropriate achievement measures.
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In an attempt to produce more reliable results, researchers looked at student transcripts and eliminated student data if they were enrolled in more than one math or science course. To control for oversampling (minority groups), weights were applied during the statistical analysis that lead to unbiased estimates for the parameters. Lastly, because the study only analyzed 10th grade students in math or science courses, outcomes/results can only be applied to those groups.
Maltese, Tai, and Fan found a lack of a consistent significant relationship between the time spent on homework and the final course grades. However, they did find a relationship between time spent on homework and scores on standardized tests. The researchers noted that students who spent more than 120 minutes on math homework had similar SAT scores as students who reported spending less than 30 minutes on homework each day. The optimum SAT results were from students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes on homework each