There’s an old joke about homework. A teacher says to a student, “How do you like doing your homework?” The student responds, “I like doing nothing better.”
With the novelty of the new school year now behind us, it goes without saying that kids would rather be doing just about anything other than homework. Every fall, the same debates persist: Is homework even effective? How much is best? In what ways should parents be involved? But the problem with homework does not revolve around these questions. The problem with homework is motivation, or the lack thereof, because the major challenge for making homework an effective tool for learning is that even nothing often seems better.
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Patall is an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
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