I agree with aeh as I recently researched this topic because our school bought in a new homework policy. There was no good evidence that homework was of any value in primary (elementary) school, of some but little value in the junior years of high school and of value in senior school. The research was universely poor however.
The difficulty is that work in senior school, here at least, requires the student to have well developed planning and study skills by senior school to cope with the workload.
I do not agree with busy work. I do agree with incremental development of study skills across high school. Homework should relate to those skills and be formative not summative. Maybe write a short practice essay which we will go through it in class. Do the math problems on page 3 and we will go though the ones you had trouble with tomorrow. Summarise this section of the text and show me your notes to see if you have the idea of what it means to make a summary. This week, half the class pre read and summarize the chapter and the other half just rely on what we learn in class. Then we will do a test and see if there is a difference in the test results between the two halves. Test results do not count for your grade.
