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The Effects Of Homework On Teens ' Sleep Schedules, Stress Levels, And After School Opportunities

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Roberto Nevilis, a teacher in Venice, changed history when he created the first use of homework in 1095. Since then, students’ opinions of homework haven’t changed. Roberto Nevilis started homework as a way of punishing his students for not doing their work. Nowadays, homework is assigned to help students receive more practice for what they learned in school that day. Despite the good intentions that homework is supposed to provide, it actually proves more harm than good. In the twenty-first century, the increase of homework negatively affects American teens’ sleep schedules, stress levels, and after school opportunities. Parent involvement in homework can turn into parent interference. In 1984, a survey was conducted that reported twenty-five percent of seventeen year olds did less than an hour of homework each night. A decade later, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, reviewing trends in data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, found thirty-nine percent of seventeen year olds said they at least one hour of homework each day. Moving into the twenty-first century, the amount of homework has increased significantly. In 2011, a survey of 1,000 kindergarten through twelfth grade teachers found high school teachers on average assign about three and a half hours of homework each week. For high school students who typically have five classes with different teachers, that could mean as much as seventeen and a half hours each week.

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