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When children bring home a load of fresh homework every evening, their parents also see their free time usurped in their children's pursuit of knowledge.

After all the time invested in assignments, some wonder if the amount of time students hit the books has any correlation with how much they're learning.

The four students at the Murphy family's house in Lakeville, Minn. spend varying amounts of time on homework. High school students Connor and Casey both devote about five hours a week on their assignments, whereas their middle school siblings Charlie and Maggie spend nearly double that.

Parents Wendy and John Murphy said they believe their older students should be doing more homework. They also said they believe they, as parents, should be doing less themselves.

"I would say that I'm probably spending maybe half an hour to 40 minutes a night on homework," said John Murphy.

Their involvement goes way beyond helping a kid who's stuck. They said they also edit papers and correct math assignments.

"Some nights I just come home and I think, 'Why do I have to do this?' I wish I didn't," said Wendy Murphy. "I wish that our time right now would just be for us, and it wouldn't necessarily be revolving around homework."

But some teachers suggest that "parent homework" is no accident. Minnesota's Teacher of the Year Mike Smart endorsed it.

"Research shows, and my own experience as well shows, the more parents get involved with education, the better it is," said Smart.

Another concern for some parents is how early some of their children are being sent home with assignments. Burnsville, Minn. mother Pam Morrison said it is too early for her first-grade daughter Abby to be devoting a half-hour each day to homework.

"She won't do it unless I sit down and do it with her. A six-year-old can't read an assignment," said Morrison. "My concerns are that Abby will not like school."

As director of the University of Minnesota's Center for School Change, it's Joe Nathan's job to increase student achievement, and he said too much homework doesn't always do that.

"You can really turn off young children by assigning massive amounts of homework," he said, adding that heavy homework loads don't necessarily translate to higher test scores. "There's sort of this myth that bigger is better, more is better. So there's this assumption that more homework equals more achievement. That's just not true."

Especially for elementary school kids. The nation's leading homework authority at Duke University found that, for them, "homework has no effect on achievement." Despite this, homework for young students is on the rise. In 1981, 34 percent of 6- to 8-year-olds had homework on a given night. By 2002, that number jumped to 64 percent.

"I think that we have to use a common sense approach and, for me, that means some homework done in the right kind of way has enormous benefit," said Nathan, adding it's like practicing a sport -- some practice improves your performance, "but you can also practice so much that you hate the sport."

It's the same story for math.

"If, as I've said, you're assigned 75 problems, and you know how to do the problems with the first two or three, you don't need to do 75," he said.

So what's the right amount? Nathan recommends less than 45 minutes a week for grades one through three and twice that for grades four through six. Junior high students can do up to 5 hours a week and high schoolers should be maxing out at 10 hours a week.

Also worth noting is that, while some parents bemoan the homework deluge, other parents actually request teachers assign as much as they can. Their line of reasoning is that education is important and that, the more they're assigned, the more they'll learn.

http://wcco.com/education/hard.look.homework.2.596280.html