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More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive, research suggests.

A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.   "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .   The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.   Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.   Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.   "The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.   Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.   Their study found that too much homework is associated with:   • Greater stress : 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.   • Reductions in health : In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.   • Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits : Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.   A balancing act   The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.   Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.   "This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," said Pope, who is also a co-founder of Challenge Success , a nonprofit organization affiliated with the GSE that conducts research and works with schools and parents to improve students' educational experiences..   Pope said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.   "Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.   High-performing paradox   In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."   Student perspectives   The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.   The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer at the Stanford News Service .

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3 Reasons Why Doing Homework is a Waste of Time

Table of Contents

Not a sign of intelligence, doesn’t make much sense, makes you miss the motivation wave, wrapping up.

Students are often burdened with doing homework assignments that get the better of them and their valuable time. However, it is also possible for these students to use this time instead for doing other productive tasks or even for intended procrastination, which may in-turn help increase productivity. Here’s a viewpoint on why doing homework is a waste of time and how to use this time to better your productivity. ~ Ed. 

Do you know people who always have tons of motivation to do homework ?

I haven’t come across such people. Though there might be a few, I guess majority want to avoid doing homework.

Me too! But it turns out that it`s okay to be a bit lazy. It’s okay not to have motivation for doing homework.

Let me bring it down real quick. It is okay to have zero desire to do homework and to procrastinate for hours instead of being all energetic and productive.

No, it doesn’t mean that you’re lazy or foolish; this phenomenon has many explanations. But the thing you’ve got to remember for sure is that it is fine if you can’t catch up with the A-students.

First and foremost, you’ve got to face reality here. How important are the grades for you?

If you want to receive a grand to get a master’s degree in another country, then, of course, grades are important. When all you need is a diploma which you will proudly hand over to your mom and never use it again, then you have the right to dedicate some time to procrastination .

Don’t you dare to think that I’m trying to lure you into the world of drop-outs and couch potatoes? I only want you to learn how to set your priorities right.

Success in life cannot be determined by the number of essays that you wrote at the university. You may not even write them at all. The simplest way to avoid all that stress is by addressing a good homework doer service.

I’m going to calm down your stressed out nervous system and conscience, and tell you why you shouldn’t be all anxious about having zero motivation to do homework.

But before we do that, please note that such an emotional state when you have little desire to do anything, not just your homework, may be a sign of such serious mental condition as clinical depression. So, please be careful with that and never hesitate to ask for professional help.

Okay, so as per my thoughts, here are the three main reasons why doing homework is a waste of time:

As I’ve mentioned above, a state of procrastination doesn’t necessarily point out to your inability to study.

A scientific study reports that people who have a higher intellectual level tend to procrastinate more . Just don’t perceive this information as an excuse for your social media addiction, it doesn’t work this way. How is that even related?

It’s believed that very smart people are thinking all the time, even without realizing it. They have very active brain activity, and they may even try to solve the world issues on the subconscious level.

The moments of procrastination are highly important for people of this type. It gives their brains a chance to cool off and relax a little bit. Because, yes, our brain does get tired from time to time, and it can switch off your concentration and attention when it feels like having a little rest so that you can go on with all the thinking processes.

No matter how much you love studying, and no matter how great your university is, still there is no way of avoiding some absurd and senseless assignments. You have no idea why you would do this or why such a huge piece of work is assessed with so few points.

Your logic isn’t as dead as you may think. It’s still somewhere in there, and it can give you a hint that you really shouldn’t do this task because it’s nothing but a complete waste of time. Of course, you lose any kind of motivation with such assignment.

Don’t worry. Just think whether this homework will have a big impact on your final score and then make a decision.

One of the biggest mistakes that you can do while feeling all down and unmotivated is looking at other people, who seem extremely productive and compare your pitiful self to those walking energizers.

We all may feel that way from time to time – mainly because our powers aren’t infinite. We get tired and worn out. So, just stop sobbing and go out for a walk. You’ll be surprised how inspirational one single stroll around the town can be. Your demotivation just a phase, and you’ve got to get over it.

And while you’re still in the moment when you can get nothing done, make a list of activities and tasks that you need to finish.

Then you have to learn how to be a surfboarder. No need to buy a ticket to Australia, you just need to learn how to catch the waves. One “wave of motivation,” to be precise.

Have you noticed that sometimes the feeling of productivity and endless energy rushes through your veins, and you just get everything done in no time?

Congrats, you`re just an average human being. You need to learn how to spot those moments of motivation and get as much work done as it’s humanly possible.

And when you have a day or two of no motivation at all, you won’t feel so frustrated because you know for sure that the productivity will eventually come back.

Doing homework is not a sign of intelligence. It’s okay to procrastinate at times if it helps you relax and solve bigger issues.

If you think your homework doesn’t make much sense or it’s not worth spending your valuable time that you can use elsewhere for more worthy tasks, then you may think of using any homework services.

Missing out on the homework may give you the opportunity not to miss the motivation wave that can help you become more productive .

Over to you –

Have you ever felt that doing homework is a waste of time? Share in the comments.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are entirely of the author.

Disclaimer: Though the views expressed are of the author’s own, this article has been checked for its authenticity of information and resource links provided for a better and deeper understanding of the subject matter. However, you're suggested to make your diligent research and consult subject experts to decide what is best for you. If you spot any factual errors, spelling, or grammatical mistakes in the article, please report at [email protected] . Thanks.

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• The Highlight

Nobody knows what the point of homework is

The homework wars are back.

by Jacob Sweet

As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework. But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

Luis Torres, the principal of PS 55, a predominantly low-income community elementary school in the south Bronx, told me that his school secured Chromebooks for students early in the pandemic only to learn that some lived in shelters that blocked wifi for security reasons. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.

According to a 2021 Pew survey , 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent.

The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered.

Over the past three years, in response to concerns about equity, schools across the country, including in Sacramento, Los Angeles , San Diego , and Clark County, Nevada , made permanent changes to their homework policies that restricted how much homework could be given and how it could be graded after in-person learning resumed.

Three years into the pandemic, as districts and teachers reckon with Covid-era overhauls of teaching and learning, schools are still reconsidering the purpose and place of homework. Whether relaxing homework expectations helps level the playing field between students or harms them by decreasing rigor is a divisive issue without conclusive evidence on either side, echoing other debates in education like the elimination of standardized test scores from some colleges’ admissions processes.

I first began to wonder if the homework abolition movement made sense after speaking with teachers in some Massachusetts public schools, who argued that rather than help disadvantaged kids, stringent homework restrictions communicated an attitude of low expectations. One, an English teacher, said she felt the school had “just given up” on trying to get the students to do work; another argued that restrictions that prohibit teachers from assigning take-home work that doesn’t begin in class made it difficult to get through the foreign-language curriculum. Teachers in other districts have raised formal concerns about homework abolition’s ability to close gaps among students rather than widening them.

Many education experts share this view. Harris Cooper, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke who has studied homework efficacy, likened homework abolition to “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

But as I learned after talking to a variety of stakeholders — from homework researchers to policymakers to parents of schoolchildren — whether to abolish homework probably isn’t the right question. More important is what kind of work students are sent home with and where they can complete it. Chances are, if schools think more deeply about giving constructive work, time spent on homework will come down regardless.

There’s no consensus on whether homework works

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Researchers disagree even on how much research exists on the value of homework. Kathleen Budge, the co-author of Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools and a professor at Boise State, told me that homework “has been greatly researched.” Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer and leader of the education nonprofit Challenge Success, said, “It’s not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems.”

Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.) Homework proponents argue that while it is difficult to design randomized control studies to test homework’s effectiveness, the vast majority of existing studies show a strong positive correlation between homework and high academic achievement for middle and high school students. Prominent critics of homework argue that these correlational studies are unreliable and point to studies that suggest a neutral or negative effect on student performance. Both agree there is little to no evidence for homework’s effectiveness at an elementary school level, though proponents often argue that it builds constructive habits for the future.

For anyone who remembers homework assignments from both good and bad teachers, this fundamental disagreement might not be surprising. Some homework is pointless and frustrating to complete. Every week during my senior year of high school, I had to analyze a poem for English and decorate it with images found on Google; my most distinct memory from that class is receiving a demoralizing 25-point deduction because I failed to present my analysis on a poster board. Other assignments really do help students learn: After making an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for a ninth grade history project, I was inspired to check out from the library and read a biography of the Chinese ruler.

For homework opponents, the first example is more likely to resonate. “We’re all familiar with the negative effects of homework: stress, exhaustion, family conflict, less time for other activities, diminished interest in learning,” Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, which challenges common justifications for homework, told me in an email. “And these effects may be most pronounced among low-income students.” Kohn believes that schools should make permanent any moratoria implemented during the pandemic, arguing that there are no positives at all to outweigh homework’s downsides. Recent studies , he argues , show the benefits may not even materialize during high school.

In the Marlborough Public Schools, a suburban district 45 minutes west of Boston, school policy committee chair Katherine Hennessy described getting kids to complete their homework during remote education as “a challenge, to say the least.” Teachers found that students who spent all day on their computers didn’t want to spend more time online when the day was over. So, for a few months, the school relaxed the usual practice and teachers slashed the quantity of nightly homework.

Online learning made the preexisting divides between students more apparent, she said. Many students, even during normal circumstances, lacked resources to keep them on track and focused on completing take-home assignments. Though Marlborough Schools is more affluent than PS 55, Hennessy said many students had parents whose work schedules left them unable to provide homework help in the evenings. The experience tracked with a common divide in the country between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

So in October 2021, months after the homework reduction began, the Marlborough committee made a change to the district’s policy. While teachers could still give homework, the assignments had to begin as classwork. And though teachers could acknowledge homework completion in a student’s participation grade, they couldn’t count homework as its own grading category. “Rigorous learning in the classroom does not mean that that classwork must be assigned every night,” the policy stated . “Extensions of class work is not to be used to teach new content or as a form of punishment.”

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

The critiques of homework are valid as far as they go, but at a certain point, arguments against homework can defy the commonsense idea that to retain what they’re learning, students need to practice it.

“Doesn’t a kid become a better reader if he reads more? Doesn’t a kid learn his math facts better if he practices them?” said Cathy Vatterott, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After decades of research, she said it’s still hard to isolate the value of homework, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned.

Blanket vilification of homework can also conflate the unique challenges facing disadvantaged students as compared to affluent ones, which could have different solutions. “The kids in the low-income schools are being hurt because they’re being graded, unfairly, on time they just don’t have to do this stuff,” Pope told me. “And they’re still being held accountable for turning in assignments, whether they’re meaningful or not.” On the other side, “Palo Alto kids” — students in Silicon Valley’s stereotypically pressure-cooker public schools — “are just bombarded and overloaded and trying to stay above water.”

Merely getting rid of homework doesn’t solve either problem. The United States already has the second-highest disparity among OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations between time spent on homework by students of high and low socioeconomic status — a difference of more than three hours, said Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University and author of No More Mindless Homework .

When she interviewed teachers in Boston-area schools that had cut homework before the pandemic, Bempechat told me, “What they saw immediately was parents who could afford it immediately enrolled their children in the Russian School of Mathematics,” a math-enrichment program whose tuition ranges from $140 to about $400 a month. Getting rid of homework “does nothing for equity; it increases the opportunity gap between wealthier and less wealthy families,” she said. “That solution troubles me because it’s no solution at all.”

A group of teachers at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, made the same point after the school district proposed an overhaul of its homework policies, including removing penalties for missing homework deadlines, allowing unlimited retakes, and prohibiting grading of homework.

“Given the emphasis on equity in today’s education systems,” they wrote in a letter to the school board, “we believe that some of the proposed changes will actually have a detrimental impact towards achieving this goal. Families that have means could still provide challenging and engaging academic experiences for their children and will continue to do so, especially if their children are not experiencing expected rigor in the classroom.” At a school where more than a third of students are low-income, the teachers argued, the policies would prompt students “to expect the least of themselves in terms of effort, results, and responsibility.”

Not all homework is created equal

Despite their opposing sides in the homework wars, most of the researchers I spoke to made a lot of the same points. Both Bempechat and Pope were quick to bring up how parents and schools confuse rigor with workload, treating the volume of assignments as a proxy for quality of learning. Bempechat, who is known for defending homework, has written extensively about how plenty of it lacks clear purpose, requires the purchasing of unnecessary supplies, and takes longer than it needs to. Likewise, when Pope instructs graduate-level classes on curriculum, she asks her students to think about the larger purpose they’re trying to achieve with homework: If they can get the job done in the classroom, there’s no point in sending home more work.

At its best, pandemic-era teaching facilitated that last approach. Honolulu-based teacher Christina Torres Cawdery told me that, early in the pandemic, she often had a cohort of kids in her classroom for four hours straight, as her school tried to avoid too much commingling. She couldn’t lecture for four hours, so she gave the students plenty of time to complete independent and project-based work. At the end of most school days, she didn’t feel the need to send them home with more to do.

A similar limited-homework philosophy worked at a public middle school in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A couple of teachers there turned as much class as possible into an opportunity for small-group practice, allowing kids to work on problems that traditionally would be assigned for homework, Jessica Flick, a math coach who leads department meetings at the school, told me. It was inspired by a philosophy pioneered by Simon Fraser University professor Peter Liljedahl, whose influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics reframes homework as “check-your-understanding questions” rather than as compulsory work. Last year, Flick found that the two eighth grade classes whose teachers adopted this strategy performed the best on state tests, and this year, she has encouraged other teachers to implement it.

Teachers know that plenty of homework is tedious and unproductive. Jeannemarie Dawson De Quiroz, who has taught for more than 20 years in low-income Boston and Los Angeles pilot and charter schools, says that in her first years on the job she frequently assigned “drill and kill” tasks and questions that she now feels unfairly stumped students. She said designing good homework wasn’t part of her teaching programs, nor was it meaningfully discussed in professional development. With more experience, she turned as much class time as she could into practice time and limited what she sent home.

“The thing about homework that’s sticky is that not all homework is created equal,” says Jill Harrison Berg, a former teacher and the author of Uprooting Instructional Inequity . “Some homework is a genuine waste of time and requires lots of resources for no good reason. And other homework is really useful.”

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

The takeaways are clear: Schools can make cuts to homework, but those cuts should be part of a strategy to improve the quality of education for all students. If the point of homework was to provide more practice, districts should think about how students can make it up during class — or offer time during or after school for students to seek help from teachers. If it was to move the curriculum along, it’s worth considering whether strategies like Liljedahl’s can get more done in less time.

Some of the best thinking around effective assignments comes from those most critical of the current practice. Denise Pope proposes that, before assigning homework, teachers should consider whether students understand the purpose of the work and whether they can do it without help. If teachers think it’s something that can’t be done in class, they should be mindful of how much time it should take and the feedback they should provide. It’s questions like these that De Quiroz considered before reducing the volume of work she sent home.

More than a year after the new homework policy began in Marlborough, Hennessy still hears from parents who incorrectly “think homework isn’t happening” despite repeated assurances that kids still can receive work. She thinks part of the reason is that education has changed over the years. “I think what we’re trying to do is establish that homework may be an element of educating students,” she told me. “But it may not be what parents think of as what they grew up with. ... It’s going to need to adapt, per the teaching and the curriculum, and how it’s being delivered in each classroom.”

For the policy to work, faculty, parents, and students will all have to buy into a shared vision of what school ought to look like. The district is working on it — in November, it hosted and uploaded to YouTube a round-table discussion on homework between district administrators — but considering the sustained confusion, the path ahead seems difficult.

When I asked Luis Torres about whether he thought homework serves a useful part in PS 55’s curriculum, he said yes, of course it was — despite the effort and money it takes to keep the school open after hours to help them do it. “The children need the opportunity to practice,” he said. “If you don’t give them opportunities to practice what they learn, they’re going to forget.” But Torres doesn’t care if the work is done at home. The school stays open until around 6 pm on weekdays, even during breaks. Tutors through New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development programs help kids with work after school so they don’t need to take it with them.

As schools weigh the purpose of homework in an unequal world, it’s tempting to dispose of a practice that presents real, practical problems to students across the country. But getting rid of homework is unlikely to do much good on its own. Before cutting it, it’s worth thinking about what good assignments are meant to do in the first place. It’s crucial that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds tackle complex quantitative problems and hone their reading and writing skills. It’s less important that the work comes home with them.

Jacob Sweet is a freelance writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, among other publications.

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Topic: Education

Too much homework can turn students off learning, Brendan Bentley says. ( www.sxc.hu: Gonzalo Silva )

Homework is not useless but its quality is far more important than quantity and schools should think very carefully about why they are setting it, an education expert at the University of South Australia says.

Key points:

• Academics agree that too much homework can harm learning

Good homework is 'purposeful, specific, and reinforces learning'

• Time spent with family after school can be more important than more study

Over the past week an anti-homework note sent to parents by a teacher in Forth Worth, Texas, has spread around the world after being posted to Facebook by a parent.

"After much research this summer, I am trying something new," the note from Mrs Brandy Young, which has been shared more than 70,000 times, says.

"Homework will only consist of work that your student did not finish during the school day. There will be no formally assigned homework this year."

The note goes on to say that research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance.

Instead, Mrs Young urges parents to spend their evenings doing things like reading together, playing outside, and getting their children to bed early, which "are proven to correlate with student success."

Not surprisingly, the note was posted to Facebook with the comment "Brooke is loving her new teacher already!"

However, "she's not quite right," says Brendan Bentley, a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Education Department of the University of South Australia.

In 2006, a review of American research conducted between 1987 and 2003 found that "there was generally consistent evidence for a positive influence of homework on achievement."

The review, led by Dr Harris Cooper of Duke University, found that evidence was stronger for students in grades seven to 12 than for kindergarten to grade six, and for when students, rather than parents, reported how much time they spent doing homework.

On the other hand, in 2013, Australian academics Richard Walker and Mike Horsley published Reforming Homework, in which they reviewed international research and found that for young primary school children, homework is of little or no value and students are regularly given too much .

The issue is that although if you do something more often you get better at it, you have to be doing the right thing in the first place.

"Homework has to be purposeful, specific, and reinforce learning. If it's just to finish work, that may not help the student at all," Mr Bentley said.

In fact, too much homework can be worse than useless: It can be detrimental.

"For students in grades three or four, more than 20 minutes of homework can exhaust them. They go into cognitive load, and their ability to learn goes into a decline," Mr Bentley said.

"They can develop a negative attitude towards learning. It's about getting the balance right."

Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used: a heavy cognitive load creates errors or interference.

That 20 minutes is not a guideline for each day: "There needs to be a good argument for having homework every single night," Mr Bentley said.

"Schools have to understand why they are giving homework. Without a good purpose and a rationale: Reconsider it."

He says that homework can be ramped up as students get older, but even in grade 10, research shows that, "if it's more than an hour, it's a waste of time."

Designing effective homework also depends upon how much the student is able to learn.

"Adults can learn about seven things at a time. For young children, that's maybe two or three," Mr Bentley said. "You only need 20 minutes to reinforce that."

However, he says the benefits of homework are not just about reinforcing learning, and that if it does not turn students off, it can teach important study habits.

He agrees that family time and relaxation can be more important than homework.

"Developing good habits and attitudes through interaction with parents can be good — every time you interact with your children, you are teaching assumptions," he said.

On the other hand, too much homework can lead to conflicts with parents.

"Parents are keen for their children to be the best, so they may ask about homework, and may do it for their children, which defeats the purpose," Mr Bentley said.

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• Stress free homework tips

Homework. How can one little word cause so much trouble? Almost all schools require homework , but should they? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of homework, plus what the research says you should really be doing after school. 

As a pupil in the UK, you will without a doubt encounter homework during your school years. Some kids love it, others… not so much! Many parents struggle to make their child complete their homework and to fit it into their family’s busy schedule, and many kids and teens find homework quite boring. But let’s put our feelings about homework to the side, and focus on a more important question – is homework really necessary?

Is homework helpful or harmful?

Well, it depends. There’s loads of debate about homework and whether or not it helps you learn. Researchers have been trying to find the answer to this question since your parents were in school!

It all comes down to the purpose of the homework and the age of the student, as well as their interest in the topic at hand. 

For secondary students, homework is useful as a "short and focused intervention .” That means something like a research project that you complete at home. 💻

For primary students, homework can help reinforce skills students are learning in school. It makes sense to practice spelling words at home or working on reading skills , for example. 

How does homework promote learning?

One way homework can promote learning is by giving older students a chance to read more content than can be covered in class. For example, a Literature student might read a couple of chapters of a novel at home and then spend the class time discussing its themes with peers. This saves classroom time for the part of learning that’s done with other students.

Research shows that the best homework is closely linked to what you’re learning in the classroom. It should expand your learning and always be something you can complete independently. ✔️

It goes without saying that homework takes time. The more homework you have, the less time you can spend outside or relax. 

Homework leaves less time for creative activities that are also very important for brain growth. 🧠

Studies show very little difference in test scores between students who spend lots of time on homework and students who do less homework. For primary school students especially, not many benefits have been found. 

So, should students have homework?

In an ideal world, primary students would not have homework. And secondary students would only have short-term homework assignments with a very specific goal, like a book report or a science project. 

Since students often do have homework, it shouldn’t take much time - the benefits are the same for a few minutes and a few hours of homework!

Stress-free homework tips 

At the end of the day, there may be very little you can do right away about your homework situation. If your teacher assigns it, it must get done – but here are a few tips to make it less stressful:

• It’s a great idea for you to be independent with planning and managing your work time rather than being hounded into starting your homework by your parents. As you get older, it’s up to you to manage yourself – maybe you’d prefer to divide the work up into manageable chunks, for example tackling one subject before dinner and another one after.
• You should have a distraction-free space to work at home. Turn off the television, and keep electronics out of sight to make it easier to stay focused.
• If you’ve had a long school day, it’s a great idea to take some free time after school before starting your homework. You may need a chance to relax and regroup before jumping right into homework. 
• If you find yourself struggling with your workload, you should have a chat with your teacher or speak to your parents about it. Homework should closely follow the in-class learning and shouldn’t take more than an hour.

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Is Homework a Waste of Students’ Time? Study Finds It’s the Biggest Cause of Teen Stress

It’s the bane of every teen’s existence. After sitting through hours at school, they leave only to get started on mountains of homework. And educators are mixed on its effectiveness . Some say the practice reinforces what students learned during the day, while others argue that it put unnecessary stress on kids and parents , who are often stuck nagging or helping.

According to a new study, conducted by the Better Sleep Council , that homework stress is the biggest source of frustration for teens, with 74 percent of those surveyed ranking it the highest, above self-esteem (51 percent) parental expectations (45 percent) and bullying (15 percent).

Homework is taking up a large chunk of their time , too — around 15-plus hours a week, with about one-third of teens reporting that it’s closer to 20-plus hours.

The stress and excessive homework adds up to lost sleep , the BSC says. According to the survey, 57 percent of teenagers said that they don’t get enough sleep, with 67 reporting that they get just five to seven hours a night — a far cry from the recommended eight to ten hours. The BSC says that their research shows that when teens feel more stressed, their sleep suffers. They go to sleep later, wake up earlier and have more trouble falling and staying asleep than less-stressed teens.

“We’re finding that teenagers are experiencing this cycle where they sacrifice their sleep to spend extra time on homework, which gives them more stress — but they don’t get better grades,” said Mary Helen Rogers, the vice president of marketing and communications for the BSC.

RELATED VIDEO: To Help Or Not To Help: Moms Talk About Whether Or Not They Help Their Children With Homework

Another interesting finding from this study: students who go to bed earlier and wake up earlier do better academically than those who stay up late, even if those night owls are spending that time doing homework.

To end this cycle of sleep deprivation and stress, the BSC recommends that students try setting a consistent time to go to sleep each night, regardless of leftover homework. And their other sleep tips are good for anyone, regardless of age — keep the temperature between 65 and 67 degrees, turn off the electronic devices before bed, make sure the mattress is comfy and reduce noise with earplugs or sound machines.

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Why Homework Is a Waste of Time

Why do we even need homework? To practice? We do that enough already.  Homework is a waste of time. It takes the enjoyment out of school and it takes up teacher time. Students need more free time for other activities such as sports, homework takes it away from spending time with family and friends.

     Is homework a waste of time ? The study of 18,000 schoolchildren finds no relationship between working hard at home and better grades. More  homework assignments  didn’t translate into better grades. Next time you hear a child complaining that their science and math homeworks are wastes of time they might have a point. Young children spend enough of their day at school. When they come home, they should be free to dump the school bag and get busy doing non academic stuff such as getting a job and starting on something to pursue their career.

        Students need more free time for other activities. Education isn’t the only important activity in everyone’s life. We all need some time to ourselves to prevent stress or blow off from some steam. It can damage family relationships and stresses parents out as well  as their children. School takes up a lot of time that children can be using to do something more productive.

Homework takes up teacher time. Teachers would have more time if they didn’t assign homework.  The teacher  needs to design the homework, explain it , mark each piece individually and tell everyone if they got it right or wrong. Teachers could as easily use the classwork to find out who knows what they are doing. We aren’t the only ones who take a lot of time on homework, our teachers do as well. Homework loses it’s value because we need to be told individually what our mistakes are.

It takes the enjoyment out of school. We would enjoy school more if we didn’t have any homework. When we only get homework occcassionally we will consider that piece more important. Especially if we get too much homework it can take the enjoyment out of learning. No matter how engaging the teacher is in class , homework will almost certainly  be stressful , boring and tiring. We know that there is no direct link between how much homework is set and grades.             

Some people believe that homework isn't a waste of time. You have to try your best to do the homework that's given to you. Millions of people work for themselves or work from home. The main aim of education is to prepare us for the rest of their lives. Homework is teaching us a key skill that we will need in the future . When we do homework we are learning on our own.                 Homework is a responsibility. We should expect to get a certain amount of homework per day. Homework aids class work by providing a space for those who haven't finished the work. Teachers will need to mark and go through work whether it's classwork or homework . Whether homework puts us off learning will always depend on what the homework we are given is.            

This paragraph presents that homework is a responsibility for high school kids and students. The importance of this argument is that homework takes away time from spending it with family and friends.  The reader should take homework away from this because it's it takes a long time to do and it's a waste of time.

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SiOWfa15: Science in Our World: Certainty and Controversy

The course website and blog for the fall 2015 instance of penn state's sc200 course.

Is Homework A Waste of Time?

You just had what seemed like the longest day of your life. You walk into your room after a rough day of classes. You took two tests that you didn’t do so hot on and you are exhausted. All you want to do is relax for a little bit, but you can’t. Why? Because tomorrow you have 40 math problems due, a paper to write for your English class, and a speech outline due for your public speaking class.

So the question is, is all the homework really worth it? Is there any evidence that homework leads to a stronger academic student? Let’s take a look.

According to  District Administration , there is a positive correlation between homework and better scores on tests. When interviewed, researcher Robert Tai said, “Homework should act as a place where students practice the skills they’ve learned in class. It shouldn’t be a situation where students spend many hours every night poring over something new.” A study was done by Harris Cooper in 2006 (director of  Duke University’s Program in Education ). He analyzed and combined the results many homework studies. He found that students who had homework performed better on class tests compared to those who did not.

On the other hand, there are many studies that suggest otherwise. Some studies conclude that homework does not impact achievement significantly. In fact, some believe it has the opposite effect.  One study from Penn State  looked data from the late 1990s. They found that in countries that give more homework, student’s performance on the international test,  Trends in Mathematics and Science Study , was lower than those with less homework. These professors and researchers do not call for no homework necessarily, but they do suggest making homework more about the quality than quantity

Homework is helpful. Practice problems do in fact improve test grades and guide students in succeeding in the classroom. However, after about 90 minutes of homework, results will start to diminish. It’s important to find the happy-medium when it comes to homework and make sure students aren’t overloaded with busy work.

So next time you walk through your door after a stressful day of class, club meetings, and work, just remember that a few minutes hitting the book will benefit you in the long run. But after 90-120 minutes it may be time to put the pencil down, close your laptop, and call it a night.

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Education scholar Denise Pope has found that too much homework has negative effects on student well-being and behavioral engagement. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

A Stanford researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.

“Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good,” wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .

The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students’ views on homework.

Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.

Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.

“The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students’ advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being,” Pope wrote.

Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.

Their study found that too much homework is associated with:

* Greater stress: 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.

* Reductions in health: In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.

* Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits: Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were “not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills,” according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.

A balancing act

The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.

Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as “pointless” or “mindless” in order to keep their grades up.

“This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points,” Pope said.

She said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.

“Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development,” wrote Pope.

High-performing paradox

In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. “Young people are spending more time alone,” they wrote, “which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities.”

Student perspectives

The researchers say that while their open-ended or “self-reporting” methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for “typical adolescent complaining” – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.

The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Media Contacts

Denise Pope, Stanford Graduate School of Education: (650) 725-7412, [email protected] Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, [email protected]

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Homework is a waste of time, new studies say

A new group of studies finds that homework in a variety of subjects has little impact on test grades, although math homework was the exception to the findings.

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Homework is a Waste of Time

Homework isn’t helping kids improve, it’s dragging them down.

Photo JC Thaxton

A canva graphic showing an example of a kids phone after a week of school.

JC Thaxton , Senior Staff Writer October 10, 2022

Sitting at the dinner table till 10 or 11 pm just doing some of your homework. Taking hours to finish some math when you still have an essay to write. That can be taxing on the brain. A lot of people don’t see how much pressure we put on kids to make them “perfect.” Extra work to compensate for the? That’s kind of a joke.

“Children who don’t do their homework are not lazy, he said, but they may be frustrated, discouraged, or anxious. And for kids with learning disabilities, homework is like ‘running with a sprained ankle. It’s doable, but painful,'” child psychologist Kenneth Barish said.

Every kid learns differently and the fact all teachers “have to” assign homework is absurd. Kids get very overwhelmed with the amount of work they get per week even per day. With the amount of work kids get, they don’t get a chance to debrief at home. Kids need to let out their stress by doing fun activities or things to get their mind off of school. When kids go from school to home, they shouldn’t be doing more school. It is too much! This leads to over working the brain.

With all this extra work to do at home, kids can’t go out and genuinely be a kid. I am still a kid and I wish I could have gone out more and not stressed about a grade in my class. They only have so much time until they’re a considered adult and now the society is giving kids a lot of work and over working them. Kid’s brains are on overload and technically working overtime since it’s not in a classroom. When I see the word “overtime”, I think of money. Since kids can’t run around and be kids, they should be paid some money to work overtime. I’m just kidding. Unless I’m not.

It is said that homework “ can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills.” What happens if you don’t do it well? What is the point if you do all this work, yet don’t understand any of it? Also, What is the point if the teacher doesn’t review it? It’s pointless. If teachers don’t walk you through the work the send home, then they shouldn’t be sending it home in the first place. You could be doing it wrong the whole time and you wouldn’t know until it is test time and then, at that point, you’re screwed. No idea where you went wrong and now too afraid to go home and ask for help. Seeing that you’re a failure and that is stressing you out some more. To the teachers, we are numbers. Some will help you and others, who knows.

• waste of time

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JC Thaxton is a senior at Robinson and a Senior Staff Writer for Knight Writers. This is her second year on staff.  Thaxton is one of the four captains...

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Can we waste less time in school.

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How can a school that only meets three days a week cover the same material as one that meets five days a week?

This has been a recurring question that I have asked parents and educators involved in hybrid homeschooling , an innovative educational model that has students attend traditional classes in a brick-and-mortar school for some portion of the week and be homeschooled for the other part of the week.

Their answers are not just helpful for those who might be interested in hybrid homeschooling. They offer lessons for traditional schools to get the most out of the limited time that they have with students.

1.      Get down to business

A recurring motif that I hear from teachers who have taught in both traditional schools and hybrid schools is just how much five-day-a-week schools waste time. As a former 9th and 10th grade teacher, this jives with my experience. Needless assemblies, intercom interruptions, kids getting pulled out of class for dubious assignments from other teachers, needless and duplicative administrative tasks, delays in the lunchroom or locker room, the list goes on and on. Schools too often do not take students’ or teachers’ time seriously. They are then surprised when students or teachers don’t take their time seriously either.

By contrast, hybrid schools recognize that they have a limited amount of face-to-face time with students and work to get the most out of it. When class starts, students and teachers get right to work. When class is in session, students are in class and working from bell to bell. The adults in the building take this time seriously and the students do too. This allows them to get more done.

2.      Homework that works

A hybrid homeschooling mom painted the following picture for me. In the traditional school model, after children have been at school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., mostly sitting and trying to soak up information, they are sent home to do homework. Some play sports or have jobs and get to their homework after those activities. Suffice it to say, they are not at their best when they sit down to reinforce what they learned that day or fill in gaps that they missed. This frequently makes homework a waste of time and source of frustration.

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In the hybrid model (in this case a school that has children attend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), children are at school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on their traditional school days as well, and often play sports or have jobs after school. But, instead of then doing homework, students are free to spend time with their family, read, play video games, or decompress in their own way. They then wake up the next morning and tackle their homework with a fresh mind. They are able to do more homework, have more practice, and backfill more missed information because they are rested and fresh. In total, more gets done, even though the school is using less time.

Schools should think about students’ growing bodies and brains and what they ask of them and when. Digging into difficult homework after a long day of class is not going to yield the same results as digging into difficult homework after a night’s rest. It just isn’t. How can schools better sync to students’ and families’ rhythms to maximize what kids can learn?

3.      Aligned incentives

The hybrid model only works if everyone is working together. Time is limited during face-to-face days, so if time is wasted, students will suffer. They need to come prepared and stay focused because it is the only time they have with their teacher and their classmates to learn new material.

On homeschool days, students will frequently only have to work for as long as they need to get their work done. Sitting at a lunchroom table with a group of middle school boys, I conducted an informal survey of how long it took them to get their homework done and was surprised by the maturity of their answers. Some mentioned that they liked to start earlier in the morning and some liked starting later. Others had to go with their parents as they dropped siblings off at school or daycare so they were limited in when they could start. But, in general, they said that they could get their work done in about half of a traditional school day, if they stayed focused and worked hard. I emphasize that last point because it shows the incentives that students have to get to work and work hard. In a traditional school, students are going to be there from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. whether they are working hard or not. In this model, as these young men had internalized, hard, focused work is rewarded.

Schools send subtle messages to the students who attend them and the adults who work in them. When schools waste teachers’ and students’ time, they tell them that what they are doing is not serious. If it was serious, they wouldn’t waste time. They would show up and get after it.

Why should students behave in a school that doesn’t take their time seriously? Why should teachers go above and beyond to craft engaging lessons? Why should anyone do their best? They’ll be there until the bell rings, good, bad, or indifferent.

School administrators and policymakers should think much harder about how time is used in schools and wasted in schools. If we want the best out of children and teachers, we have to take their time seriously.

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Is homework a total waste of time.

Recently in my school, we decided as a staff to completely get rid of homework for a month to see if it would benefit the whole teaching and learning experience. I have to say, I only saw positives from this trial.

More time during the school day was spent on teaching and learning rather than correction of work/checking if work was completed

We didn't have that allocated time to take down to take down homework or hand out worksheets/books

The children commented that without homework the teacher didn't have reason to be giving out to children and reprimanding them for not having work completed.

Point 3 then got me thinking... Each day a child could come to school without completing homework and they are greeted first thing with negativity and a reprimand. From that moment on, the child's attitude towards that day in school is negative. They may begin to act up and seek attention. Is the teacher's attitude towards the child also tainted? Will the teacher be able to involve that child as much in the learning environment than they involve a child who did complete their homework?

Any views? We have to approach the principal with an opinion next week. Whether to keep homework or rid of.

****Also, I'm currently teaching in a primary school in Ireland. I have 4th class which is 9-10year olds, and I teach the whole curriculum from English to maths to geography to the arts 😀

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Why Ghana’s “galamsey” fight has become a waste of time – Bright Simons writes

The last few weeks has witnessed another mass outcry over the menace of “galamsey” in Ghana.

Galamsey is a catchall word used to describe “illegal mining”, usually for gold. Ordinarily, it should mean “mining without a license”, but in Ghana several individuals, groups, and companies purporting to have small-scale or community (artisanal) mining licenses go about their activities so irresponsibly that their effects on the environment are no different from the so-called “unlicensed” or “illegal” miners. Even some large-scale, ostensibly modern, mining companies occasionally incur the wrath of community activists like WACAM for poor pollution avoidance practices.

The end result of the chaos in Ghana’s gold sector, and some will say the true price of Ghana’s status as “Africa’s largest gold producer”, is the rampant damage being witnessed all around. Forests denuded, farmlands despoiled, and rivers turned into slimy, slurry, stinking sludge. Of all the harms irresponsible mining is causing to Ghana, it is the latter – the frightening poisoning of Ghana’s water bodies – that has really woken up the people.

Thus, when recently I took to X (formerly, Twitter) asking people to take a more holistic view about the problems afflicting Ghana’s water management, a lot of people didn’t take too kindly to my comments. I was totally out of sync, and singing out of tune, with public sentiments. Still, I am not sorry.

Galamsey Lamentations have become an elite pastime

Apart from the rather academic slant I put on my viewpoint, I was motivated by another concern: the loud lamentations about galamsey are generally pointless. The elites occasionally rouse up to tear out their hair and gnash their teeth but they never rise up in unison to demand that specific individuals, companies, and duty bearers to face the consequences of their actions. The plaintive cries about abstract evil in the face of such concrete abuses of the land and its inhabitants naturally go nowhere.

Especially given the nature of this galamsey mess. There are believed to be more than 1 million galamseyers. In many of the rural areas and small towns in which these individuals and groups operate, they have significant community support due to strong beliefs that they are engaged in gainful employment, and that this is better than “conventional crimes” like stealing and fraud. Some of these people have become important breadwinners and with that achieved the standing of objects of admiration.

Second, they have “investors” who are for the most part prominent members of society. To complicate matters further, many galamseyers look at the so-called legal, licensed, mining companies and they observe that they are doing the environment no good. Some are owned by the highest-ranking politicians in the land. With their connections, these shadow fat cats have succeeded to acquire permits to enter the country’s most ecologically sensitive sites and strip them of all life.

A Sisyphean Fight

It is no wonder then that every attempt to use the military and similar high-handed tactics inevitably end in the soldiers compromised, the fight discredited, and then abandoned. In the Rawlings era, in the late 1980s and 1990s specifically, the military appeared to be making progress, and hence created the impression that galamsey was a purely security issue. Even after the security-alone approach ultimately floundered and the succeeding government had to confront the menace all over again, the tone remained the same. Operation Flush Out. Operation Vanguard. Galamstop. Joint Task Force. And so on and so forth. Then 50,000 Chinese miners flooded the country, changfang machines made their debut, and the problem multiplied a hundred-fold.

When however seized excavators started disappearing, some military commanders started running protection rackets, and a high-profile ministerial committee imploded with the embarrassing spectacle of senior government officials accusing each other of being galamseyers, or having been corrupted by galamsey, the whole sorry show descended into the macabre, and the government quietly and unceremoniously shelved the “military raid” approach.

A different approach: policy innovation and community engagement

Along the way, acknowledgement had slowly built that a social canker so deeply rooted in communities, to an extent where the sentiments of ordinary beneficiaries of the practice diverged so much from middle-class lamenters in the cities, and hypocritical elites were the key masterminds, had to be addressed from multiple angles.

Two key additional strategies were introduced into the fight: technology and “alternative livelihoods”. Because of the government’s “digitalisation” mantra, an idea has taken root in the present government that minimising human and manual processes can temper hard situations where corruption was a major factor.

“Alternative livelihoods”, the second strategy, was in recognition of the underlying unemployment driver. Illegal mining paid more than other jobs available to most inhabitants in the areas where the menace was more concentrated. It was either a way was found to make the mining more responsible and licenses became easier to acquire or higher-productivity agricultural value chain jobs would have to be created to absorb the hundreds of thousands engaged in the despicable galamsey practice.

One reductionist interpretation of the joint effect of these two strategies was to: a) hand over chemical-free and gravity-based concentrators to boost extraction of the gold so that small and artisanal miners wouldn’t need to use mercury and install “changfangs” on riverbeds, whilst b) monitoring all these operations using drones and remote observatories all over the country. Drones and centrifuge-concentrators, in short.

State Enchantment

In my public policy research, analysis, and activism work in Ghana, I have settled on a model for analysing how “innovative solutions” interact with “self interest” among senior policymakers and high-ranking politicians. In the current political culture, nearly every single policy has to be twisted into a profit-making gig. In fact, many policymakers start from the profit motive and then design and execute policies to feed it. To avoid scrutiny, they frame the policy context in a manner likely to excite the Ghanaian sense of nationhood.

They tap into the average Ghanaian’s sense of greatness and goodness, her desire to see true prosperity and improvement in her lifetime. The political bosses proceed to hack a certain socially enforced yearning for positivity that has filled so many churches and festival grounds for eons. Then they cook up schemes primarily geared towards making easy money, add plenty garnishing of “glory and grandeur”, and loudly trumpet the benefits so much so that anyone who looks too closely and ask hard questions will be branded negative, cynical, and unpatriotic. It is often such that the mere launch of the thing being used for the enchantment is success and achievement. I call this approach, “State Enchantment”.

Inspired by a brilliant piece of journalism by the Fourth Estate in recent times, one brimming with specificity and eschewing the abstractness of elite lamentations, I have put together a short case study for you, dear readers. Here is how state enchantment is manifesting concretely in the case of galamsey.

In 2017, the government of Ghana embarked on a drone-buying spree. The first consignment was valued at $3 million. Quizzed about the high cost, the Minister in charge touted the fantastic attributes of the devices: they would be able to fly 8.2 km above sea level. This is essentially the altitude (vertical flying distance) that the largest, most sophisticated, airplanes typically fly (for perspective, recreational drones max out at about 0.1km). In fact, 8.2km is more than half the cruising altitude of an F-16 jet-fighter.

Even more revealingly, the claimed attitude of the Ghanaian anti-galamsey drones was three times the maximum level of law-enforcement drones in the United States. The specifications provided by the Minister essentially takes us into predator-drone territory, a system not available commercially. And, yet, when talking about the spatial resolution of these high-powered contraptions, the Minister suggested a performance that will make an operator of a US E-2 Hawkeye blush.

I am sure the reader has predicted the climax of this story already. The drones have never been fully accounted for. According to the Ministerial Taskforce, the specific drones acquired and their specifications are below.

Essentially, phantom 4 pro drones that cost barely $1200 each (at retail level). Maximum speed: 45 MPH. Maximum altitude? Wait for it: 0.5 km! And even that requires special configuration. The normal, out of the box, altitude is 0.125 km and the maximum control range (farthest horizontal distance it can travel) is about 7km. Essentially paper tigers. The idea of “1 drone per district”, given these specs, making any dent on galamsey was obviously fanciful from the outset. More frightening is how the country should have paid anything more than $150,000 in a bulk purchase for these devices. Yet, here was a Minister defending the use of $3 million for two hundred units of the machine.

But it doesn’t end there. The control room equipment and surveillance software were never fully deployed. In fact, based on our discreet enquiries in the security services, we can confidently say that the drones and their supporting control room infrastructure and software were not even properly commissioned and no one can provide a detailed inventory or even an account of where they are now.

The World Bank makes an appearance

Imagine my shock then when upon recently reviewing the World Bank-funded Ghana Landscape Restoration and Small-Scale Mining Project (GLRSSMP), which was approved in 2021 but formally operationalised in 2022, in part to address the galamsey problem, I saw yet more drones! Yes, the government has taken more loans from the Bretton Woods institution to buy more monitoring drones, and another set fitted with magnetometers. This time, each drone is meant to cost about $25,000. Obviously, if any serious political economy analysis had been conducted, no new drones would have been approved until a proper public enquiry had been conducted.

Centrifuges

The problems identified in the drone program pale in comparison with what our review of the centrifuge-enabled gravity concentrators turned up. As the reader may recall, these were to be provided to small scale miners to draw them away from mercury-based and changfang-style extraction approach towards towards more environmentally sustainable methods. On top of that, the machines are designed to help small scale miners enhance their recovery of gold by 300% compared to their current crude methods. In technical terms, the “gravity recovery rate” of gold from the crushed ore when using such novel concentrators is above 90%.

There are four main brands of this system on the world market. Ghana opted for the “gold kacha” platform. The $10 million was to deliver 100 units of gold kacha machines to small scale miners. The retail price was disclosed by the Minister responsible for mining as $113,000. Given the high cost of these machines, the decision was made to provide them on a leasing or hire-purchase basis to the lucky first cohort of miners.

To crown this amazing beauty of a policy, government ministers were at pains to reveal that the machine had been invented by a Ghanaian company. Through the support of the government and the Ghanaian gold industry, the pioneering success of this initiative was assured of spreading to every corner of the globe where gold is found. Viva Ghana!

I am sorry to say, even though the reader won’t be much surprised, that none of these “facts” hold up to scrutiny.

First, the “gold kacha” technology was not invented in Ghana or by a Ghanaian company or innovator. It was invented as far back as 2005 by a South African company called Appropriate Process Technologies based out of Johannesburg.

Second, it does not cost $113,000. It does not even cost $11,300. A few years ago, it sold for $1500. It is the cheapest of the 4 main competing gravity concentrator brands. Today, APT quotes the technology at ~$2175. Chinese copycat brands can even go as low as $990.

Third, the gold kacha on its own is not enough to equip a small scale miner to shift completely away from current methods. There are auxiliary items like the shaker. APT would normally sell that to you for almost $10,000 but you can get a perfectly functional one for $5000.

How these machines were priced at $113,000 per unit and handed over to miners to “work and pay” is a total mystery that only the Egyptian god of the higher mysteries, Thoth, can crack.

Even if the governments had added shakers, smelters, and backup power to the gold kacha concentrators to create a full-blown deep field mining unit, the total cost of each such package should not have exceeded $25,000.

Obviously, due to the ridiculous pricing, and the failure to provide the full set of auxiliary equipment, many miners, according to the auditor-general, have defaulted in paying, saddling the country with millions in dollars of bad debt. The Minerals Commission that supervised this mess says the government now intends to write off the debts by providing a retrospective subsidy.

In short, GOVERNANCE is the missing piece

It has been baffling observing the pressure being mounted on the government to “fix galamsey” by elite complainants. These lamenters know as well as anyone that the factors that have made the problem intractable are the same ones that civil society activists have been campaigning about for years, in respect of so many other issues. Factors like “state enchantment” and the total lack of accountability for the performance outcomes of government initiatives.

How can the Ghanaian government somehow isolate galamsey and then using the same underlying culture, logic, and motivations within the public sector “fix it” to the satisfaction of these elites?

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