Are We Wasting Our Children's Time by Giving Them More Homework?

Ozkan Eren and Daniel Henderson ()

No 5547, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.

Keywords: first differencing; unobserved traits; instrumental variable; selection bias; homework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2011-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published - published in: Economics of Education Review , 2011, 30 (5), 950-961

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Related works:
Journal Article: Are we wasting our children's time by giving them more homework? (2011)
Working Paper: Are We Wasting Our Children’s Time by Giving them More Homework? (2009)
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