Forget It?

Soon after Marjorie McGill entered high school, she began to call on her father for help with homework problems. Occasionally, father & daughter struggled until 2 a.m. over the stuff, sometimes didn't get through all Marjorie's assignments even then. As a teacher himself (at the John Adams High School in Queens, N.Y.), father James V. McGill began to wonder: Was all this travail really necessary?

Teacher McGill persuaded four of his colleagues in the social sciences to join him in an experiment. He picked 185 pairs of students, each pair closely matched in ability. To one group the teachers gave the usual homework assignments, to the other, none at all. Last week in High Points, official magazine of New York City public high-school teachers, McGill made his report.

The homework group had the edge in economics, but the non-homework group (possibly less bleary-eyed) scored slightly better in comprehensive tests of "social-studies abilities." In American history the two groups were even. In all tests, score differences were so small that McGill could only draw one conclusion: in the social sciences, at least, high-school homework neither helps nor hinders very much, merely takes up time. McGill's advice to his colleagues on homework: forget it.

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