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The challenge of homework stress for Australian students: Statistics, risk factors and resources



Homework is an important part of keeping students engaged with the class material outside of school, even though some students may think of it as a waste of time and effort. By doing homework, students are able to think about what was taught in class in further detail and develop a mastery through practical applications of the lessons. Homework brings educational benefits for all students, and it helps establish soft skills like time management and organization that are necessary beyond high school graduation. However, sometimes the extra assignments can lead to stress for the student and the family. As homework piles up, some students may find themselves engaging less and less.


In 2013, research conducted by Stanford University demonstrated that students from high-achieving communities experience stress, physical health problems, an imbalance in their lives, and alienation from society as a result of spending too much time on homework. According to the survey data, 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress. The remaining students viewed tests and the pressure to get good grades as the primary stressors. Notably, less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.




homework stress statistics australia




Lastly, understand that homework stresses are very common and they are likely to arise for you or your student from time to time. If this happens, keep calm and keep going. Sometimes a moment of comfort is all you or your student needs to settle down and get back on track.


Work out how to handle stressful thingsYou could start by helping your child prioritise. For example, if your child is feeling stressed by homework, you might help them plan their week to spread out the work.


Australian Psychological Society (APS). (2015). Stress & wellbeing: How Australians are coping with life. APS. Retrieved 7 September 2022 from -source/default-document-library/stress-and-wellbeing-in-australia-report.pdf?sfvrsn=7f08274d_4.


The study, led by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College, shows that although students who spend more time doing homework are sometimes more behaviourally engaged in school, they also tend to be more anxious, and report more physical symptoms due to stress.


Australian children feel more stressed about homework during the middle years of school than children in most other parts of the developed world, and this stress may be responsible for increased levels of anxiety and psychosomatic health complaints among children.


Does homework affect family time?Excessive homework can cut down on productive family time. This is especially true in families where the parents are incapable of assisting with the homework. As the stress levels increase, fights begin, which takes away from any quality family time students can spend on school nights.


Does Homework Cause Anxiety?A study conducted by Stanford University determined that students who feel that they spend "too much time" on homework experience stress and physical ailments that can be tied to anxiety. Students also cited having difficulty balancing everything in their life, including family time and extracurricular activities in addition to homework, which can contribute to the anxiety.


What health problems can homework cause?Excessive homework, which exceeds the 10-minute per grade rule, has been known to cause digestive issues, sleeping problems, headaches, weight loss, and generalized stress.


Does more homework mean better grades?A Penn State and the Curry School of Education study claims that a relationship does not exist between homework and better grades. In fact, it can actually hurt a child if it causes unnecessary stress or anxiety.


How should you cope with too much homework?If you find that you just have too much homework, try talking to your teacher about it. If it's overwhelming you and making you stressed out, your teacher may have ways to help you.


The scrutiny stems not only from homework's questionable academic value, but also its role as a stressor in students' lives. In particular, the practice of assigning homework to elementary students has been widely criticized.


Even when homework is well-designed and does foster learning, too much of it can be damaging. Children who have more than one hour of homework each night overwhelmingly report that they feel stressed about their ability to complete their work. Over time, this stress can create real problems for a developing brain. When we are under stress, the brain produces cortisol, which lowers immune function and processing speed. On a short-term basis, cortisol can help us deal with stress. But when the brain is constantly releasing cortisol, development and learning can slow. This is especially damaging for children, whose brains are rapidly laying down neural connections. Even more troubling, excessive doses of cortisol can damage the hippocampus, which plays an important role in memory, inhibition, and spatial reasoning.


The year 2020 was certainly an unprecedented challenge for everyone. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health was (and still is) immense. The levels of negative emotions such as anger, sadness, worry, and stress peaked worldwide, as Gallup's report points out. 80% of workers reported they were either actively disengaged or not engaged enough at work, so productivity levels dropped significantly. Time management and productivity statistics reveal that this loss of productivity cost the global economy $8.1 trillion, according to the same Gallup's report. That's close to 10% of Gross Domestic Product. Workplace culture surely matters here, but employees ought to be proactive and start measuring their performance and efficiency.


Taking away traditional homework and testing can greatly reduce the stress that children feel about school, and allow them to spend their free hours simply playing and being kids. This also allows for more time learning and engaging in lessons rather than on memorising facts and stressing over marks.


Everyone knows the stress that school brings. Whether you are currently a student, or graduated last year or 50 years ago, we all remember feeling overwhelmed and lost in piles upon piles of homework. More often than not, students feel that professors do not remember being a student and feeling these negative emotions. When students, especially younger students, find themselves feeling overwhelmed and lost academically, it can lead to them feeling those same emotions in other aspects of their life. This can negatively affect their mental health, causing them to feel even more stress.


More than half of the parents would like to have an arrangement with an extended school day and no homework. Such a solution would satisfy both their desire for no homework and less homework stress at home.


A poll conducted for the Associated Press in January 2006 found that about 57% of parents felt their child was assigned about the right amount of homework. Another 23% thought it was too little, and 19% thought it was too much. A survey conducted by MetLife in 2007 found that 87% of parents saw that helping their child with homework was an opportunity for them to talk and spend time together. More than three fourths (78%) did not think homework interfered with family time, and nearly as many (71%) thought that it was not a source of major stress.


Students are usually mentally and physically drained when they come home from school, sports, or after they go somewhere after school and having homework assigned to them puts more even stress onto their plates. Whereas other students might like homework or enjoy doing it because it can benefit them academically or might help with avoiding boredom. Either way, there are both positive and negative sides to homework.


These demands take a toll, resulting in job dissatisfaction, workplace fatigue, burnout, and reduced occupational commitment. The statistics on teacher turnover are grim: Research estimates that between 19% and 30% of new teachers leave the field within the first five years of teaching, which can reduce the espirit de corps of their campus community and negatively affect student learning (Guin, 2004; Kraft & Papay, 2014). In the most recent PDK poll, half of teachers surveyed said they had considered leaving the profession within the last year, with low pay and high stress most frequently cited as the reasons (PDK International, 2019).


The Victoria University study is one of the first to examine the link between year 12 homework and stress. A paper on the research is published in the latest edition of Psychological Reports, an international academic journal.


Researchers Gerard Kennedy and Nadya Kouzma, who wrote the paper based on their two-year study of VCE stress, found that year 12 students spent from 10 to 65 hours a week on homework. The average was 37.


"These results indicate that homework may have a direct or an indirect influence on students' psychological well-being," the researchers said in their paper. They also found that year 12 girls scored significantly higher than boys on stress and mood disturbance.


Ms Kouzma told The Sunday Age that Victoria University chose to do the research because of concern about VCE stress. She said further research was needed to establish if a lack of time management was a major reason for students spending so much time on homework.


\\\"These results indicate that homework may have a direct or an indirect influence on students' psychological well-being,\\\" the researchers said in their paper. They also found that year 12 girls scored significantly higher than boys on stress and mood disturbance. 2ff7e9595c


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