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Students’ Study Time and Their ‘‘Homework Problem’’
Jiri Zuzanek
Accepted: 1 August 2008
Ó
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
North American parents and writers concerned with adolescents’ well-being haverepeatedly pointed to the ‘‘homework problem’’ as underlying adolescent stress, disruptionof family relationships, and questionable academic results. Publications such as Kralovecand Buell’s (2000) ‘‘The end of homework’’, Kohn’s (2006) ‘‘The Homework Myth. Why our kids are getting too much of a bad thing’’, and Bennett and Kalish’s (2006) ‘‘The caseagainst homework’’ have highlighted these concerns. These assertions are countered byarguments that homework enhances learning and is needed for building good work habits(see Cooper et al.2006), often summarised ‘‘How can we compete with the Japanese andKoreans, if our kids don’t do homework.’’Surprisingly little of this debate has been informed by time-use research. This articlethus addresses five interrelated issues:(1) How homework loads of Canadian and U.S. students compare with the workloadsof students in other countries?(2) How have these workloads changed over the past 10–20 years?(3) In what way do greater homework loads affect the rest of teens’ time use?(4) What are longer homework’s academic implications?(5) How do longer hours of homework affect teens’ sense of time pressure, feelingsof stress, and emotional well-being?
1 Data Sources and Method
Data come from national time-use surveys conducted in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000sby statistical agencies in Canada, United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany,Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Finland. Data from these surveys were examined aspart of the Comparative Study of Adolescent Time Use (CATUS), coordinated by theResearch Group on Leisure and Cultural Development of the University of Waterloo
J. Zuzanek (
&
)University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canadae-mail: Zuzanek@healthy.uwaterloo.ca
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Soc Indic ResDOI 10.1007/s11205-008-9411-8
 
(Canada). Data were also taken from the Ontario
Survey of Adolescent Time Use and Well- Being (OATUS/ESM)
administered by this research group in 2001/2003.The OATUS/ESM combined: time diaries with ‘‘beeper self-reports’’, the ExperienceSampling Method (ESM). Time diaries for the day preceding were filled out in class in 13schools representative of the Ontario population, accompanied by questions about ado-lescents’ academic performance, life-style preferences and the like. Some 219 of theseteens, and one of their parents, took part in the ESM survey, in which they were signalledby a pre-programmed wrist-watch eight times a day across a week. At the time of the beep,they reported their main activity at the time, their location, who they were with, a numberof affective states, feelings of time pressure, desire to engage in something else, as well astheir interest in and importance of that activity.
2 Findings
2.1 School Time and Homework from a Comparative and Historical PerspectiveTable1shows that the workloads of American high school students (55 min of homework on school days) do not appear particularly heavy. Canadian homework loads in 1998 werehigher, but they did not differ substantially from homework loads reported by students inthe seven other CATUS countries.
Table 1
School related time of adolescents aged 15–19 across countries and across time (In hours andminutes per
school day
)Australia(1997)Belgium(1999)Canada(1998)Finland(1999/ 2000)Germany(2001/ 2002)NDL(2000)Norway(2000)UK (2000)USA(2003)
 N 
862 291 343 267 582 99 175 403 512School relatedtime8.0 8.8 8.4 7.2 7.4 7.5 7.3 7.8 7.9Attendingclasses / timeat school5.5 6.0 6.5 5.6 5.2 4.9 5.5 5.7 6.5Homework onschool days1.4 1.7 1.2 0.8 1.1 1.5 0.9 1.0 0.9Traveling to / from school1.1 1.0 0.8 0.9 1.1 1.2 0.9 1.1 0.5Hours and minutes per day averaged across the 7-day week Canada Finland Norway1986 1992 1998 2005 1987/1988 1999/2000 1980 1990 2000
 N 
506 456 414 600 717 658 285 238 260School related time 6.1 5.6 5.2 5.6 4.7 4.4 5.0 5.3 5.5Attending classes/time at school 3.9 3.5 3.2 3.8 3.4 3.2 3.4 3.8 3.9Homework 1.6 1.6 1.5 1.1 0.8 0.7 1.0 0.9 1.0Traveling to/from school 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.6 0.7J. Zuzanek 
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The amount of homework in the surveyed countries has either changed little or declinedover the past 15 years. Canadian students in 2005 spent 3.5 h less time doing homework than in the early 1990s. Similar declines were observed in Finland and other countries,possibly because part of homework was moved to class time.2.2 Homework Time, Academic Performance and Emotional Well-BeingAlthough the Table1data suggest that North American students are not overburdened, the‘‘homework problem’’ continues to worry parents and educators concerned with teens’high levels of time pressure, obesity, and emotional and behavioural problems. Tables2and3address this question and suggest that longer hours of homework do take time awayfrom virtually all other daily activities—but mostly from watching television, computerand video games, and socialising with friends, followed by physically active leisure, paidwork and domestic work. Reading books, use of the Internet, and contacts with parents areaffected to a lesser degree. The losses are thus mostly among less structured and arguablydevelopmentally less beneficial activities.Contrary to the claims that longer hours of ‘‘homework’’ are of limited academic value,findings reported in Table2suggest that additional homework on school days and par-ticularly on Sundays correlates positively with teens’ grade averages (correlations .21 and.37, respectively). This relationship holds after controls for gender and age, and is alsosustained when homework is operationalised as percent of homework episodes reported byteens in ESM self-reports (
r 
=
.20; not in Table2).Subjectively, Canadian and OATUS time-diary data in Tables2and3show that more homework time correlates positively with teens’ perceived time pressure and stress both in
Table 2
Effects of school day and Sunday homework on teens’ well-being: OATUS 2003(Bi-variatecorrelations and regressions controlling for teens’ gender and age)Canadian 2005 All daysPearson ‘‘
r 
’’ BetaTime pressure .16 .14Perceived stress .07 .14School is the source of stress .16 .13Feeling happy .14 .07Satisfied with time use
-
.06
-
.06OATUS 2003 School days SundaysPearson ‘‘
r 
’’ Beta Pearson ‘‘
r 
’’ BetaTime pressure .26 .23 .34 .30Grade average .21 .19 .37 .33Importance of doing well at school .21 .20 .18 .18Expectations of a bright future
.07 .06 
ns nsOften feel bored
-
.10
-
.10
-
.16
-
.16Composite of lonely and depressed*
.07 
ns .14 .09* Alpha
=
.71All relationships are significant at .005 level, unless italicised (significant at .05 level)Students’ Study Time and Their ‘‘Homework Problem’’
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