Heavy homework can harm

Many nights during the school year, Deborah Brown races home from a demanding job to face another kind of overload: her kids' homework.

As a sixth-grader, her son wrestled with up to six hours of homework a night, says Brown, a partner at a New York strategic-communications firm. Though she and her husband provided encouragement, he was exhausted and was neglecting his passion, basketball.

Around 10 p.m. one night, she cracked. "You have to get up at 6:30, I have to get up at 5:30. I can't do this any more," she told her son. She gave him the answers to the remaining problems. But she didn't feel good about it. Looking back, she wishes she'd intervened with teachers to ease her son's workload.

If your child's homework load is off the charts, this may be the year to step in. Harris Cooper, a professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who studies homework, believes that a long trend upward in the amount of homework assigned to U.S. students is ready to reverse. "In the past year or so, there has been growing concern" about homework loads, Dr. Cooper says. Based on homework's history of 30-year cycles dating back to the 1800s, "it may very well be that the length of homework assignments is topping out."

Homework is linked to academic achievement. Middle- and high-school children, in particular, tend to perform better academically when they get more homework.

Up to a point. Homework becomes counterproductive for middle schoolers after about 90 minutes a night, based on a review of more than 100 studies, Dr. Cooper says. For high-school kids, up to two hours of homework daily aids performance — but not more. Thus arose the "10-minute rule," the maxim that a child should receive no more than 10 minutes of homework per night for each grade level reached.

Two years ago, school officials in Piscataway, N.J., took the unusual step of capping homework based on the 10-minute rule. The district has seen no effects, positive or negative, says Robert Copeland, superintendent of schools in Piscataway. But few districts have followed suit.

The boom is fueled by accountability pressures from community leaders, forcing administrators to focus on improving standardized-test performance.