Does High School Homework Increase Academic Achievement?

Charlene Kalenkoski and Sabrina Pabilonia

No 8142, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Although previous research has shown that homework improves students' academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students' homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which are less accurate than time-diary data. However, most time-diary data sets do not contain outcome measures, and thus are limited in the questions they can answer. One data set that does have both time-diary and outcome information is the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Students complete time diaries as part of the CDS and then a few years later provide information on outcomes in the TA. The CDS provides us with time diaries for both weekdays and weekend days, providing a good picture of homework over the course of a week rather than on just a single day. For high school graduates, we explore the effects of time spent on homework on two measures of academic achievement: high school GPA and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time increases the probability of college attendance for boys. In addition, when we look at homework performed as a sole activity, we find that homework increases high school GPA for boys.

Keywords: homework; academic achievement; human capital; GPA; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: Education Economics, 2017, 25 (1), 45-59

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8142.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does high school homework increase academic achievement? (2017)
Working Paper: Does High School Homework Increase Academic Achievement? (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8142

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().