The survey of 1,000 K-12 teachers found, among other things, that high school teachers on average assign about 3.5 hours of homework each week. For high school students who typically have five classes with different teachers, that could mean as much as 17.5 hours each week. By comparison, the survey found middle school teachers assign about 3.2 hours of homework each week and kindergarten through fifth grade teachers assign about 2.9 hours each week.
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“What has changed is not necessarily the magic number of how many hours they’re doing per night, but it’s the quality of the homework,” says Ashley Norris, assistant dean of the university’s college of education. Part of that shift in recent years, she says, may come from more schools implementing the Common Core State Standards, which are intended to put more of an emphasis on critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
The pointer to Common Core standards leads to another hypothesis. Maybe, standardized testing is to blame? If teachers are evaluated by scores of their students on standardized tests, they have a strong incentive to assign a lot of homework.
One intersting article is Students Spend More Time on Homework but Teachers Say It’s Worth It:
The pointer to Common Core standards leads to another hypothesis. Maybe, standardized testing is to blame? If teachers are evaluated by scores of their students on standardized tests, they have a strong incentive to assign a lot of homework.