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ABSTRACT
Although previous research has shown that homework improves students’ academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students’ homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which may be less accurate than time-diary data. We use data from the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the effects of time spent on homework while attending high school on two measures of academic achievement: high school grade point averages and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time has positive effects on academic achievement for boys.
Acknowledgements
All views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The authors thank Andrew Bibler, Debanik Das, Xiuming Jin, and Xi Mao for research assistance and Jeffrey Groen, Elizabeth Handwerker, Jennifer Imazeki, Daniel Rees, Jay Stewart, and participants at the ‘Using Time Diary Data in Education Research’ conference at American University in March 2015 for comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Cooper, Robinson, and Patall (Citation2006) provide a nice overview of the effects of homework on academic achievement in the education, psychology, and sociology literatures. In general, small positive effects have been found. More recently, using 1990 data from NELS and 2002 data from the Education Longitudinal Study, Maltese, Tai, and Fan (Citation2012) found no effect of math and science homework on final course grades, but a significant positive association between homework time and the SAT-Mathematics subscore.
2. Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (Citation2008) is the exception that uses time-diary data to examine outcomes. However, their sample is a small, non-representative one. They sample students from one college only.
3. Our measure of family income comes from the main PSID interviews. It is constructed to be the average of yearly family income reported in the three PSID main interviews prior to completing the CDS high school diary, in 2006 dollars. If one or more years are missing, then the remaining values are used to create the average. Family structure and parental education are obtained from 2003 and 2007 main PSID surveys.
4. High school GPA and information on college attendance are available only for high school graduates. In the PSID-CDS, 92% of high school students graduated, which is close to the graduation rate reported by Aud et al. (Citation2013) for 2011.
5. We defined winter break to be an approximately two-week period around Christmas and New Year’s Day.
6. GPA scales vary by school. Because we have only the reported GPA and the maximum possible GPA for each observation, we created this variable by dividing the reported GPA by the maximum possible and multiplying by 100.
7. In each TA, the student reported the first enrollment date for ‘current/last college attended’ and then the first enrollment date for one additional prior college attended. We compare the first reported enrollment date in months with the month that the student would have turned age 20 to determine college attendance by age 20.
8. Some years had to be combined in order to achieve convergence – specifically, 2002 was combined with 2003, 2007 was combined with 2008, and 2009 was combined with 2010.
9. We also include an indicator for missing scores and assign the average score to those missing scores.
10. Parents in two-parent families could be biological, adoptive, or step parents.
11. If a year is missing, then the average over the non-missing years is used.
12. The student–teacher ratio in each year is the total number of students in the school divided by the number of full-time-equivalent classroom teachers.
13. We also include an indicator for missing school characteristic variables. Some of these are due to a missing school-level identifier in the PSID-CDS and some are simply missing values. We assign the average of the non-missing values to those with a missing value.
14. See Eren and Henderson (Citation2011) for a review of the historical debate about the merits of assigning homework over the last century.
15. These weekly homework averages were calculated from a series of categories.
16. Results for the other marginal effects in these models are in online appendix Tables A2 and A3 (see online supplemental file at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09645292.2016.1178213). For females, the applied-problems score has a positive significant effect on GPA and living in a family arrangement other than a two-parent family has a negative significant effect on GPA. For males, having a mother with a college degree and the fraction free-or-reduced-price-lunch eligible in high school have positive significant effects on GPA. For females, being black or Hispanic, the reading score, the applied-problems score, living in a state that mandates a college-entrance exam, the number of household children, having a mother with a college degree, and household income all have positive effects on attending college by age 20. For males, the applied-problems score and living in a state that mandates a college-entrance exam have positive effects on college attendance by age 20 while the fraction free-or-reduced-price-lunch eligible in high school has a negative significant effect on attending college by age 20.
17. Note that GPA is measured on a scale of 0–100.
18. Results for the other coefficients in these models are available in online appendix Tables A4–A5.