As the wind blows across the playground, whipping play bark from beneath the climbing frame into the green wire fence, a group of parents huddle in a sheltered corner. They have formed a circle and it is only as you get close that you can see what they are busy protecting at the centre: 27 cardboard models of the London skyline, some as big as the children who made them, have been neatly placed in rows.

The weather soon worsens. Each gentle lift of PVA-ballasted cardboard prompts twitches and gasps, and the circle moves ever tighter. Their desperation grows: “Where is the teacher?” they mumble. “We can’t hold out for much longer ...”

You recognise the signs; you’ve been there yourself: it must be homework deadline day in Year 2.

Homework has always been dogged by doubters: it is too often a pointless task unconnected to learning; it takes up valuable family time; it highlights the haves and the have-nots; it leaves children feeling distressed as they have no teacher guidance on hand; the parents just do it for them; and you get ridiculous scenes like that described above on autumn mornings for no apparent benefit.

It’s true that homework is a risky teaching strategy. There is no qualified teacher present. That means little control over who completes the tasks that have been set and little help if the child encounters problems. Potential distractions multiply with every new generation of mobile phones and digital devices - the perfect attention-grabbing machines. Homes can be frantic places with little space for quiet study.

It’s also true that the impact of homework on classroom achievement is patchy - some studies have found little or no learning gains, particularly for primary-age pupils.

Putting all this together, many schools are now banning homework, or cutting it back to simple practice-and-retrieval tasks. But we would argue that is the wrong approach. Because homework is being misrepresented: the research is not as negative as some suggest, the benefits are wider than we might imagine and there is in fact a lot of advice from academia about how to set homework that will result in a significant boost to pupil achievement.

The pendulum swings

Homework comes in and out of fashion so frequently that it can be hard to remember whether you are supposed to be for or against it. For example, it was popular in the US during the late 1950s amid growing paranoia that American students were falling behind the standards set by rival nations. Then, from the mid-1960s, as the civil rights and countercultural movements took hold, homework came to be perceived as unduly oppressive. Similar reactive patterns of support and criticism have been the norm in other countries, too.

The current situation in the UK, and in the US, is of escalating levels of homework, amid rising expectations of what schools must do to improve education standards. From our youngest students upwards, working outside school hours has become the norm.

Consequently, we are on the cusp of the pendulum swing in the other direction - the backlash has once again begun, with plenty of schools and individual teachers seeing an abandonment or curtailment of homework as a positive stance to be taking.

And yet, it is one that the research would indicate was problematic.

While, as mentioned above, some studies have found that working at home has only a minimal impact on academic outcomes, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

For our new book, What Works? Research and Evidence for Successful Teaching, we present evidence for the possible benefits of learning in the home environment.

The overarching finding of the research is that if pupils spend more time learning then they will improve. This can be through approaches like “flipped learning”, where they study new content in advance of the lesson, so work in class can focus on the most challenging aspects of a topic. Homework can also help to consolidate skills to improve fluency, such as in number facts or vocabulary in modern foreign languages (Cooper et al, 2006; Fan et al, 2019).

Homework, if managed and monitored well for secondary school students, can lead to five months’ extra progress over one academic year (Education Endowment Foundation, 2019). And most studies show that schools that give more homework perform better - though we can’t rule out the possibility that their better results could be due to something else the schools are doing rather than the homework itself.

So, why do many have a negative impression about homework? Why the negative evidence from some studies?

Homework is a classic example of the Bananarama principle (named after Bananarama and Fun Boy Three’s hit single It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It) from 1982).

Homework, poorly set, is going to have negative outcomes. But that does not mean that all homework is bad.

So, what does good homework look like in practice?

The research is clear that the most effective homework has clear aims, is short and focused, and complements classroom work. It should reinforce activities covered previously or preview topics to come. It should also have a clear focus.

There are some aims of homework that are more beneficial than others. Some teachers might want learners to get better at something they can do, so they need more practice, such as in reading. Others might want pupils to prepare for something new that they will build on in class, such as pre-learning spellings they will need, or to use flipped-learning approaches, where pupils digest information to be discussed in class. Research has shown that reviewing content can be useful.

Homework has been found to be particularly effective in mathematics and science (Fan et al, 2017).

Meanwhile, quality of homework is more important than quantity. Teachers should set activities that embrace clear goals to engage students and encourage effort.

The amount of effort, measured by how many of the tasks or questions are attempted, is a stronger prediction of future academic grades than the amount of time spent on homework (Cooper, 2015).

And finally, focused feedback is essential. One study found that homework graded or commented on by teachers had twice the impact of homework without any feedback (Canadian Council on Learning, 2009).

How much is too much?

All study has a point of diminishing academic return. Hours slumped over a desk will test even the longest of attention spans. Children can become bored, stressed and demotivated. They will turn off learning if assignments are too hard or not engaging enough.

Excessive homework can also backfire in other ways - encroaching on the time spent on sport, exercise, hobbies or relaxation and family life. When goals are unclear it can create tensions with parents.

The “10-minute rule” is a helpful rule of thumb long advocated in the US by Harris Cooper, homework guru and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in North Carolina, and supported by the US National Education Association and the National Parent-Teacher Association. They recommend a maximum increase of 10 minutes of daily homework for every successive year group. Pupils in their first year of primary school at age 5, for example, should do no more than 10 minutes of homework each night. Sixth-formers should do no more than two hours, or 120 minutes (Cooper, 2015).

This advice has held firm for decades. “A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” Cooper has advised. “If you take too little, they’ll have no effect. If you take too much, they can kill you. If you take the right amount, you’ll get better.”

Not all homework has to be directly about improving immediate performance. While recreating the skyline of London may not ensure that the child remembers facts about the capital city, it may - if set correctly - boost metacognitive skills.

Indeed, the potential for homework to be a crucial cog in the teaching of these skills is often overlooked and missed in the debate about whether homework should exist at all.

Homework can actually be very useful in facilitating the three metacognitive phases of pupils’ planning, monitoring and reviewing their own thinking about their work.

An example of planning might be talking about ideas for extended writing and simply taking in a sketch, diagram or notes that can be built on in school.

Support for monitoring might involve providing prompts for parents to ask during and after reading to promote comprehension and discussion. This can work well with non-fiction texts where the aim is to prompt a wider discussion about the theme and could lead to more research to support development of knowledge across the curriculum.

And for reviewing, you may ask pupils to practise learning spellings or number facts as homework (a familiar task), but you could then ask them to identify which ones they found easier and which they found harder. You can then ask them to try out different ways to help them remember the difficult ones (such as “look, cover, write, check” versus flash cards they look at for a few seconds then turn over and try to visualise).

This builds up strategies to help pupils succeed, but also builds their confidence that they can succeed and a repertoire of techniques that they have practised. Asking parents how they learned to remember things at school may elicit further strategies that can then be shared.

A more challenging strategy is to ask pupils to explain to their parents or carers things they have just learned in school, which may be different from what their parents learned (such as decomposition in vertical subtraction or technical language related to English (alliteration, relative clauses, etc).

When this is successful, it can really boost learners’ confidence as well as demystifying current educational jargon. You may need to prepare a briefing sheet to explain why you are doing this and suggest how parents may support their children in this discussion, as mathematics in particular can provoke anxiety. There are some useful YouTube videos explaining most aspects of the school curriculum, so you could include a link to these on your sheet (eg, bit.ly/MathsYou).

As a teacher, you may not get anything tangible immediately from these homework tasks, and thus be tempted to write them off, but in the long term you will certainly see the benefits: the EEF review of metacognition and self-regulation found consistently high levels of impact for interventions in these areas.

So, is homework is a good thing?

What is of paramount importance is that the homework is then integrated into what happens in school and is built on in class, otherwise what is the incentive for completing work out of class? It is also important to understand who has support at home and what you might do to help those who don’t get support, as well as working on strategies to improve parental engagement.

What we are calling for here is not revolutionary. Instead, it is more a sense check. Views on homework barrelling from one extreme to the other help no one. Just as unhelpful are grand proclamations that homework is a waste of time or the cornerstone of social mobility efforts.

We need a more nuanced view of the research and also a wider appreciation of the benefits that homework might bring. We need to understand what studies have indicated as impactful homework and merge that with our own context and experience. We need to recognise when, why and where homework works.

And we need to appreciate that a teacher may have set a task that looks pointless to those outside - say, building a model skyline of London - but actually it is beneficial for the pupils at that moment for reasons only she will understand.

Steve Higgins is a fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University and professor in the university’s School of Education. Lee Elliot Major is the UK’s first professor of social mobility, founding trustee of the Education Endowment Foundation and former chief executive of the Sutton Trust, where he commissioned and co-authored the popular Sutton Trust-EEF toolkit

This article originally appeared in the 25 October 2019 issue under the headline “Homework truths”