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Can you imagine a world where you never had to do homework ever again? (features Denise Pope)

March 31, 2015
MTV News
Stanford's Denise Pope suggests that high schools should lighten up: The benefits of homework, she maintains, decrease after two hours; kids need time off to recharge with friends and family.
By 
Danica Davidson

Raise of hands — How many of us pretty much despise homework? 

Well, good news: It looks like the future of homework as we know it is kind of up in the air. 

Recently P.S. 116, an elementary school in NYC, decided to stop giving out homework all together, based on studies that say homework isn’t very helpful for students. While the school has received both praise and criticism for this, they could be on to something. 

Dr. Denise Pope is a Senior Lecturer at Stanford and the author of “Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students” and the soon-to-be-released “Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids.” She’s been studying the results of homework for more than a decade and she says that while some appropriately crafted homework might be okay, loading up on homework is not the way to go.

“For my doctoral dissertation, I followed five high-achieving high school students at what is thought of as a very good public high school in the Bay Area,” Dr. Pope told MTV News. “I was looking for what was working and what we could learn from these schools. This is what I found: the kids who were getting very good grades and were touted by the school were doing way, way, way too many hours of homework. They were sleeping way, way, way too few hours and were completely over scheduled. In the middle of shadowing one kid, she was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer.”

Furthermore, in her study only a minority of students thought the homework they were doing was meaningful and valuable. “A lot of it felt to them like it was busywork.” 

Earlier this month, researchers from Spain’s University of Oviedo released a study that found doing homework was okay for students, as long as it wasn’t too much homework. They found an hour total for math and science was sufficient, and adding on more and more homework didn’t make students better — in fact, it made them worse.

Read the full story at MTV News

Denise Pope is a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

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