Abstract

Homework comes bearing baggage: myriad definitions, interpretations, applications, and outcomes, both positive and negative. Throughout the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, homework has been a “given,” a nearly nightly ritual for many students and their families, with both intended and unintended consequences. Ensuring homework effectiveness starts with teachers asking and answering the question: what’s the point? This question takes the perennial homework discussion beyond the quantitative question of “how much homework” and delves deeply into more qualitative questions. Unless we give weight to the “why,” we will continue to measure homework’s merits by comparing “apples to oranges,” and underemphasize both the effective practices to employ and the pointless practices to abandon in this recurring debate.