grade homework

What’s the Right Amount of Homework?

Decades of research show that homework has some benefits, especially for students in middle and high school—but there are risks to assigning too much.

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Many teachers and parents believe that homework helps students build study skills and review concepts learned in class. Others see homework as disruptive and unnecessary, leading to burnout and turning kids off to school. Decades of research show that the issue is more nuanced and complex than most people think: Homework is beneficial, but only to a degree. Students in high school gain the most, while younger kids benefit much less.

The National PTA and the National Education Association support the “ 10-minute homework guideline ”—a nightly 10 minutes of homework per grade level. But many teachers and parents are quick to point out that what matters is the quality of the homework assigned and how well it meets students’ needs, not the amount of time spent on it.

The guideline doesn’t account for students who may need to spend more—or less—time on assignments. In class, teachers can make adjustments to support struggling students, but at home, an assignment that takes one student 30 minutes to complete may take another twice as much time—often for reasons beyond their control. And homework can widen the achievement gap, putting students from low-income households and students with learning disabilities at a disadvantage.

However, the 10-minute guideline is useful in setting a limit: When kids spend too much time on homework, there are real consequences to consider.

Small Benefits for Elementary Students

As young children begin school, the focus should be on cultivating a love of learning, and assigning too much homework can undermine that goal. And young students often don’t have the study skills to benefit fully from homework, so it may be a poor use of time (Cooper, 1989 ; Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). A more effective activity may be nightly reading, especially if parents are involved. The benefits of reading are clear: If students aren’t proficient readers by the end of third grade, they’re less likely to succeed academically and graduate from high school (Fiester, 2013 ).

For second-grade teacher Jacqueline Fiorentino, the minor benefits of homework did not outweigh the potential drawback of turning young children against school at an early age, so she experimented with dropping mandatory homework. “Something surprising happened: They started doing more work at home,” Fiorentino writes . “This inspiring group of 8-year-olds used their newfound free time to explore subjects and topics of interest to them.” She encouraged her students to read at home and offered optional homework to extend classroom lessons and help them review material.

Moderate Benefits for Middle School Students

As students mature and develop the study skills necessary to delve deeply into a topic—and to retain what they learn—they also benefit more from homework. Nightly assignments can help prepare them for scholarly work, and research shows that homework can have moderate benefits for middle school students (Cooper et al., 2006 ). Recent research also shows that online math homework, which can be designed to adapt to students’ levels of understanding, can significantly boost test scores (Roschelle et al., 2016 ).

There are risks to assigning too much, however: A 2015 study found that when middle school students were assigned more than 90 to 100 minutes of daily homework, their math and science test scores began to decline (Fernández-Alonso, Suárez-Álvarez, & Muñiz, 2015 ). Crossing that upper limit can drain student motivation and focus. The researchers recommend that “homework should present a certain level of challenge or difficulty, without being so challenging that it discourages effort.” Teachers should avoid low-effort, repetitive assignments, and assign homework “with the aim of instilling work habits and promoting autonomous, self-directed learning.”

In other words, it’s the quality of homework that matters, not the quantity. Brian Sztabnik, a veteran middle and high school English teacher, suggests that teachers take a step back and ask themselves these five questions :

• How long will it take to complete?
• Have all learners been considered?
• Will an assignment encourage future success?
• Will an assignment place material in a context the classroom cannot?
• Does an assignment offer support when a teacher is not there?

More Benefits for High School Students, but Risks as Well

By the time they reach high school, students should be well on their way to becoming independent learners, so homework does provide a boost to learning at this age, as long as it isn’t overwhelming (Cooper et al., 2006 ; Marzano & Pickering, 2007 ). When students spend too much time on homework—more than two hours each night—it takes up valuable time to rest and spend time with family and friends. A 2013 study found that high school students can experience serious mental and physical health problems, from higher stress levels to sleep deprivation, when assigned too much homework (Galloway, Conner, & Pope, 2013 ).

Homework in high school should always relate to the lesson and be doable without any assistance, and feedback should be clear and explicit.

Teachers should also keep in mind that not all students have equal opportunities to finish their homework at home, so incomplete homework may not be a true reflection of their learning—it may be more a result of issues they face outside of school. They may be hindered by issues such as lack of a quiet space at home, resources such as a computer or broadband connectivity, or parental support (OECD, 2014 ). In such cases, giving low homework scores may be unfair.

Since the quantities of time discussed here are totals, teachers in middle and high school should be aware of how much homework other teachers are assigning. It may seem reasonable to assign 30 minutes of daily homework, but across six subjects, that’s three hours—far above a reasonable amount even for a high school senior. Psychologist Maurice Elias sees this as a common mistake: Individual teachers create homework policies that in aggregate can overwhelm students. He suggests that teachers work together to develop a school-wide homework policy and make it a key topic of back-to-school night and the first parent-teacher conferences of the school year.

Parents Play a Key Role

Homework can be a powerful tool to help parents become more involved in their child’s learning (Walker et al., 2004 ). It can provide insights into a child’s strengths and interests, and can also encourage conversations about a child’s life at school. If a parent has positive attitudes toward homework, their children are more likely to share those same values, promoting academic success.

But it’s also possible for parents to be overbearing, putting too much emphasis on test scores or grades, which can be disruptive for children (Madjar, Shklar, & Moshe, 2015 ). Parents should avoid being overly intrusive or controlling—students report feeling less motivated to learn when they don’t have enough space and autonomy to do their homework (Orkin, May, & Wolf, 2017 ; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008 ; Silinskas & Kikas, 2017 ). So while homework can encourage parents to be more involved with their kids, it’s important to not make it a source of conflict.

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Uncategorized   |   Oct 5, 2011

Grading Made Simple

By Angela Watson

Founder and Writer

If you’re looking for a more efficient method of grading papers and assessing student progress, you’ve come to the right place. On this page (which has been adapted from  The Cornerstone book ), you’ll learn tips and tricks to help you gauge student progress quickly and easily.

Using simple and consistent markings

Choose your color for grading and use it exclusively.  I use red because it stands out well and makes it clear to parents and kids what I have written vs. what they have written (my kids often correct their own papers using blue pens). Red is the traditional teacher color, and I think that some of us as adults are kind of scarred from seeing red marks on our papers as kids.  However, a young child hasn’t had those types of experiences and therefore there are no negative connotations. I also use red ink for all of my stamps, so my kids associate red with positive messages, too.

I think seeing numerous corrections can be intimidating in any color, so it’s more important to focus on what types of marks you are making on the paper.  Be sure to use simple, quick markings, and be consistent with them.  For example, I don’t make big Xs by or circle wrong answers, I just draw a slash through the problem numbers.

Try not to make more work for yourself.  I once knew a teacher who wrote the correct answers next to wrong ones on EVERY student paper. That’s great for the kid and parent (assuming they actually read each paper) but it took her a half an hour just to grade a set of spelling tests!  Another teacher I know circles the correct answers and leaves the incorrect ones alone.  This helps build student confidence and makes marks from the teacher a good thing (the more, the better!) rather than a bad thing.  I love this concept, but again, I wouldn’t do it for the whole class because it is too time-consuming.

Keep papers from piling up

Try not to let students’ ungraded work sit out on your desk: until you’re ready to grade, leave it in the file trays where kids turned it in.  Messy piles accumulate so quickly!  If you have a good filing system, it should take less than ten seconds to find any stack of ungraded student work in your filing trays.  Use the ideas in Chapter 4 of  The Cornerstone  book (which is about  Avoiding the Paper Trap ), so there will be no more confusion about what’s already been entered into the computer grade book, what’s has been graded and what hasn’t, etc.

Don’t let papers go ungraded for more than a week, tops.  This is easier said than done!  However, more than once I have been in the middle of grading a tedious math worksheet when I realized I had already tested the kids on the material.  What’s the point of grading the practice class work at that point?  It was too late for me to assess whether or not the kids were getting it, and because I never provided them feedback on how they did, it’s possible that a number of them had used the assignment to practice incorrect strategies.  It was a waste of time for me and them.

Finding time to grade

In the past, I’ve set aside certain times of the day to grade papers, such as during students’ Morning Work, while the kids used math centers or completed cooperative projects (and therefore were being pretty independent), or right after dismissal.  Every day during the predetermined time, I tackled whatever papers the kids had created since the day before.  This was a very effective way to make sure that papers never piled up, and was manageable because my students completed most of their written work in workbooks and journals which are not graded.

I know other teachers who stay after school one day per week to catch up on their grading, and that works well for them. However, when I stay late to work on tedious tasks, I find that I have less enthusiasm and energy the next day in the classroom. For my own sanity, I get my grading done during the school day.

Taking papers home to grade

Although I’ve never regularly taken papers home, I do have an organized file folder system for transporting and keeping track of papers that I prefer to grade at my house.  Sometimes I’ve used  three folders for each subject (class work, homework, and tests); other years I just had one folder for each subject.  Additional folders can also be useful:

• Already graded—to be entered in computer: I kept my grades electronically and put papers in this folder until the grades were entered.
• Already in computer—to be filed: I would empty this folder into the basket of papers for students to take home.
• To review/redo with class: When there were a lot of errors I wanted to go over, I placed the papers in this folder.
• Incomplete: These would be stapled to weekly evaluations on Friday as weekend homework.
• Make-up work: I normally graded make-up work every two weeks and kept it in this folder until I was ready to correct them.
• No names: I filled this file if I was going to try to find the papers’ owners later or give kids a chance to claim them.

Tips for grading student writing quickly

I realize it can be difficult (and time consuming) to think of original, carefully-worded, and encouraging comments for students, so I created this 21 page PDF of  Feedback Comments for Student Writing . It contains hundreds of comment suggestions you can use for written feedback. The comments can also be used to guide your conversations during writing workshop and writing conferences, and to describe student writing for portfolio assessments, progress reports, report cards, or in parent conferences.

Often, you can also simplify the grading process for students’ writing. I use one trait (or single trait) rubrics to help refine my writing instruction, help students better understand characteristics of effective writing and how their work is assessed, and simplify the scoring process.

The idea is simple: since we teach traits of effective writing individually, why not assess traits individually sometimes, too? Not every piece of writing needs a full assessment, and one trait rubrics make it easy for teachers to give meaningful feedback quickly without spending hours grading essays.  Additionally, assessing student writing is a subjective process that is often a mystery to students and parents: using a straightforward rubric with only 3 or 4 criteria makes it clear why an assignment earned the grade it did. It also prevents you from downgrading a paper by weighting one aspect of good writing too heavily. Concentrating on only one trait makes it easier for the teacher to fairly assess a student’s skills in a particular trait.

The system is beneficial for students, too. It can be overwhelming (especially for younger children, reluctant writers, and English language learners) to try to concentrate on all aspects of great writing at one time. Knowing that they’ll only be assessed on a single trait helps students narrows their focus and makes the task more manageable.

You can read more ideas in my blog post,  10 time-saving tips for grading student writing .

Tips for quickly assigning formal grades

Use a slide chart grading aid (easy grader)..

This little device allows you to have any number of problems or questions in an assignment and calculates the grade.  The easy grader prevents you from having to choose a basic number of questions for an assignment, such as 20, in order to make each question worth 5 points each.  With a grading aid, having 27 or 34 questions is no problem.  You can buy these for about $5 at teacher supply stores, or  download a free one  from my site.  The quickgra.de website  will calculate the same way for free online.

Grade an assignment on criteria for multiple subject areas.

If you assign a reading passage with questions about living organisms, you can take reading AND science grades from the same assignment.  A population graph activity may provide you with social studies AND math grades.  At the top of students’ papers, write the subject area and grade for each, e.g., ‘Rdng- B, Sci- A’.

Collect grades from several workbook pages at a time.

This is a useful strategy for grading assignments in workbooks when children aren’t supposed to rip the pages out.  It works best when you need the grades for documentation purposes and don’t need them for information on student progress.  Collect the workbooks and record grades all at once for several assignments by flipping to the page numbers that students completed.  You can even have students fold down the page corners to help you find them more easily.  This process is much more efficient than collecting workbooks or journals after every single assignment.  If for some reason you must do it that way, have students stack their workbooks while they’re still open to the right page so you don’t have to flip through them.

When grading multi-page assignments, grade the first page for each student, the second page for each student, and so on, rather than grading the entire test for one student at a time.

This is an invaluable tip that I learned years back, and it has saved me countless hours.  When grading one page at a time, you tend to memorize the answers, making it easier to spot errors.  If there are a lot of problems on each page, write the number the student got wrong at the bottom of the page, such as –0 or –3, and then after you have graded the whole stack, go back through and count up how many each student got wrong by looking at the minus-however-many that you wrote at the bottom of the pages.

Use accurate student papers instead of making answer keys.

After the first quarter of the school year, you’ll have a pretty good idea about which students will have the right answers on their papers.  If you don’t have an answer key for an assignment, check two or three of those students’ papers against each other first, and find one that is basically correct.  Mark corrections for any mistakes on the paper, then use it to check all other students’ work against.  This is much quicker than making an answer key, and if you photocopy the child’s paper, you can save it and use it for the key again the following year.

Make an answer key transparency.

For lengthy assignments or those you plan to use for several years, make photocopies of bubble sheets (like those used on standardized tests—check the back of your teacher’s guides) and have your students fill in the bubbles instead of writing answers on the test or blank paper.  Make an answer key on a blank transparency using a permanent marker.  When you are ready to grade, place the transparency over a student’s paper and count how many bubbles don’t match up between the student’s sheet and the answer transparency.  I grade my students’ Scholastic Reading Inventory tests this way and can get through an entire class set (45 questions each) in less than 10 minutes.

Tips for keeping a grade book and averaging grades

Give letter grades instead of percentages..

Not every school district allows this, and not all teachers like the idea, but this will save you so much time!  Essentially, instead of having to calculate the exact percentage a child earned, such as 84%, you just write “B” in your grade book.  This makes it much easier to glance over your grades and see how a child is doing and also how well the class as a whole scored on a particular assignment.  At the end of the marking period, average the letters out mentally, or if the grade isn’t immediately clear, assign each letter a point and average it that way (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1).  If your report cards don’t allow for plusses and minuses to be given, this makes even more sense.  Grading isn’t rocket science in elementary school—don’t make your job unnecessarily difficult.

Only use weighted grades if your district mandates that you do so.

Have every assignment count equally, instead of weighting tests to be equal to 50% of students’ overall grades, homework as 25%, and so on.  This will save you massive amounts of time at the end of the quarter.

Simplify the way you calculate homework grades.

At the end of the quarter, I simple go through and count up how many assignments were missing.  If there were 42 homework assignments given in a marking period and a child did not turn in 3, she gets a 39/42 and the computer automatically translates that into a letter grade and percentage out of 100.  If your district requires you to assess homework separately for report cards, then that’s your grade.  If your district expects homework to be included in each subject area’s average, you may be able to use the same homework grade for every subject, rather than differentiate with a reading homework grade, math homework grade, etc.  After all, children are either doing homework or they’re not, and that choice will usually impact their grades in all subjects equally.  Also, if you rarely give social studies, science, or health homework, combining all the homework assignments ensures you will have a homework grade in every subject.

Use a digital  grade book.

I was hesitant to start this method because I thought it would be a pain to have to record grades and then enter them in the computer, but if you back up your files, you don’t have to keep a paper grade book at all!  A computerized grade book allows you to pull up a child’s average at any point (such as when a parent calls), and at the end of the quarter, all you have to do is print out the grades.

Angela Watson

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About bubble sheet grading, we have lengthy reading and math benchmark tests three times a year. We used a laminated bubble sheet (before we started using Scantrons) and then hole punched the correct answers. All you had to do to score the test was place your key on top of a student’s answer sheet then mark a slash in any answers that didn’t match up. It was so fast and easy!!

This is a great tip, Jill! I’ve done something similar with transparencies as the answer key (you make a transparency of the answer key and then lay the transparency over the child’s answer sheet and slash to the left of the problem where the bubbles don’t line up). I like the hole punch idea better because you can mark the correct answer for the student through the hole. Cool!

This article has been so helpful. I am a first year teacher and I have been caught in the paper trap. I refuse to have this continue to happen to me year after year. Everything you described has happened to me. I especially want to return graded papers back to my students in a timely manner. None of my colleagues had a CLEAR suggestion on how to MANAGE GRADES and NOT let the grades MANAGE ME! Thank you again , I will strive for the upcoming school year to be more efficient. Sincerely, Yvette

Hi, Yvette! I, too, found that teachers would tell me not to get stressed out about grading, but never clearly explained how to do that! It’s difficult to find a process that works and even more difficult to explain it. But once I figured it out, I knew I had to write it down so other teachers could benefit!

There are lots more ideas for grading in The Cornerstone book. The ‘paper trap’ chapter would probably be very helpful for you, too, because it explains step by step how to create a place for EVERY paper you come across. 🙂

• Pingback: Grading Strategies | School Outfitters Blog

I’m returning to teaching after being gone for 16 years. Your tips have helped alleviate some of my anxiety. I intend to use several tips. Thanks so much.

I appreciate your kind words. Welcome back!

Thank you very much Iam a new teacher ,your grading is very helpful . Venessa

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