A public elementary school in New York City has stopped giving its students homework.

Public School 116 Principal Jane Hsu wrote a letter to parents last month detailing the decision, explaining that after more than a year of analyzing studies, the school had concluded that students’ after-school time would be better spent on activities like reading at their own pace and playing rather than working on class assignments.

Hsu’s letter says that many studies indicate that there is no connection between homework and academic success. Indeed, there are some studies that show that the link between homework and success is dubious at the primary school level.

A seminal 1989 study on homework by Harris Cooper, a social psychologist who researches education, found that doing homework led students to perform better in school as they grew older. In later grades, students who did homework performed increasingly better than students who did not. In 2006, Cooper published a study that analyzed 15 years’ worth of data on the effectiveness of homework. He found that homework had a more positive impact on students as they aged, and identified stronger correlations between homework and achievement for students in grades seven through 12 than for students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

A 2012 study from the Indiana University School of Education on 10th-graders found little correlation between time spent on homework and better course grades, although it did find a positive correlation between homework time and standardized test performance. Some parents of P.S. 116 students are not happy with the decision to eliminate homework.

“I think they should have homework — some of it is about discipline. I want [my daughter] to have fun, but I also want her to be working towards a goal,” said Daniel Tasman, the father of a second-grader at the school.

纽约一所公立小学日前宣布，不再给学生布置家庭作业。

公立116小学校长许简上个月在给家长们的信中阐述了这一决定，并解释说，学校在经过一年多的研究分析后得出如下结论：学生的课余时间最好用来玩耍或按照自己的节奏阅读，而不是做作业。

许简在信中写道，不少研究表

明，家庭作业与学业表现并无关联。事实上，有些研究表明，在小学阶段，家庭作业与学科成绩之间的相关性并不明显。

1989年，专门研究教育的社会心理学家哈里斯·库珀进行了一项影响深远的研究。他的研究发现，随着年龄的增长，做家庭作业能让学生的学业表现更好。与不做家庭作业的学生相比，完成家庭作业的高年级学生学习表现越来越好。2006年，库珀发表了一项研究，依据15年的有效数据分析了家庭作业的作用。研究发现，随着学生年龄的增长，家庭作业的积极作用会不断显现。对于7年级到12年级的学生来说，家庭作业与学科成绩之间的相关性要比幼儿园到6年级的学生更明显。

2012年，印第安纳大学教育学院针对10年级学生进行的一项研究发现，家庭作业时长与课业成绩之间并无关联。但研究的确发现，家庭作业时长对学生标准化考试成绩有积极影响。

公立116小学的一些学生家长对取消家庭作业表示不满。

二年级学生家长丹尼尔·塔斯曼说：“我觉得学校应该布置家庭作业— 做作业是守纪律的体现，我希望女儿玩得开心，但同时也希望她有努力的目标。”

Words to Learn 相关词汇

    【可疑的】kěyí de dubious of doubtful quality or propriety; questionable

    【开创性的】kāichuàngxìng de seminal being the first or earliest of something that is later recognized as having been of primary influence