Steinberg and his colleagues at Temple, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford University tried to measure whether students were actively engaged in school. He conducted a three-year study from 1987 to 1990 of 20,000 students and their parents at nine high schools in northern California and in Wisconsin. “I think now we’ve probably reached a consensus that working more than 20 hours a week during the school year is probably not a good thing,” says Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. Paul, Minn., area even suggests that students who work moderate hours-fewer than 20 hours a week-get better grades than students who don’t work at all or students who work more hours.īut the experts all seem to agree that too much work is a bad idea.

One ongoing study of 1,000 students in the St. Whether or not work is bad for students, it seems, depends on which students you’re talking about, how many hours they work, and what sort of work it is.įor example, more-recent studies show that if researchers control for differences in students’ academic backgrounds, a little bit of work never hurt anyone’s grade point average. That group is scheduled to issue recommendations on teenagers and work this summer.īut, while experts and researchers have raised questions about after-school work for two decades now, the answers they’ve offered have been less clear. Seniors Near Bottom in World Test,” March 4, 1998.)Ī panel convened by the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council and the National Institute of Medicine is also re-examining the subject. In both math and science, America’s 12th graders-even the best of them-scored well below the international average.

Some commentators suggest that such intense work schedules might explain the poor showing of U.S.

Working on homework