What Doesn't Meet the Eye

Time Spent Studying and Doing Homework

A common view is that an important reason for achievement gaps may be that black and Hispanic students do not work as hard at their studies as white and Asian students.²¹ Therefore, the question is asked: Is there evidence in the data that black and Hispanic students in MSAN districts are not working as hard as whites and Asians?

The best measure of student effort in the Ed-Excel data is the student's report of how much time he or she spends on weekdays after school studying and doing homework. The data show very small racial differences among classmates. Panel A of Table 4 shows that only Asians stand out as studying more than other groups. Among students not enrolled in honors or advanced placement (AP) classes, Asians report that they study and do homework for about half an hour more per night than other groups. Among those enrolled in at least one honors or AP course, Asians report about two-thirds of an hour more. The differences between Asians and others in this regard are very significant statistically. Conversely, the differences in studying and homework between whites compared to blacks and Hispanics are statistically significant, but they are miniscule—the largest is 0.09 hours per night (about five minutes, which is roughly one-twentieth of a standard deviation). Among blacks, whites, Hispanics, and mixed-race students, racial differences in time on homework come primarily from differences in the degree to which the groups enroll in honors and AP courses, not from differences among students taking the same classes.

Although course-level differences among blacks, whites, Hispanics, and mixed-race students in time studying and doing homework are trivial, blacks, Hispanics, and mixed-race students report lower rates of homework completion than whites for any given amount of time spent studying. Panel B of Table 4 shows the differences in standard deviation units. By roughly 0.20 to 0.30 standard deviations, blacks, mixed-race students, and Hispanics complete less homework per night than whites do. These are not huge differences, but they are probably large enough to be noticed by teachers and may cause some teachers to assume that blacks, Hispanics, and mixed-race students put less time and effort into their studies compared to whites and Asians classmates. Evidence here suggests that such assumptions about time and effort would be correct regarding how blacks, Hispanics, and mixed-race students compare to Asians, but incorrect regarding how they compare to whites.

Table 5 shows homework completion patterns, cross-tabulated with time on homework. It pools student reports of homework completion for math, science, English, and social studies into a composite index of homework completion. Describing how much homework students complete, the three values of the index are "some or not much of it," "most of it," and "all of it."²² The time-on-homework data are collapsed into three categories, representing about one hour or less (labeled "~1 hour"), about two hours (labeled "~2 hours") and about three hours or more (labeled "~3 hours").

The first three columns of Table 5 show the patterns for whites and Asians combined while the second three columns show the patterns for blacks, Hispanics, and mixed-race students. For each amount of time indicated, blacks, Hispanics, and mixed-race students are less likely than whites and Asians to complete all of their homework and more likely to complete "some, or not much of it." For example, among students not enrolled in honors or AP courses who report about two hours per night doing homework, blacks, Hispanics, and mixed-race students are only about half as likely as whites and Asians (20 percent versus 38 percent) to report that they usually complete all of their homework. It appears that black, Hispanic, and mixed-race students work longer to complete the same amount of homework that whites and Asians complete in a shorter time.

Multiple-regression estimates indicate that differences in family background together with gaps in comprehension of readings and teachers' lessons predict almost all differences in homework completion among black, white, Hispanic, and mixed-race students. This finding—together with findings of equal time on homework among blacks, whites, Hispanics, and mixed-race students taking the same classes—supports the interpretation that levels of effort among these groups are quite similar, but knowledge, skills, and family backgrounds are not.²³

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