The findings are based on a study by afanti100.com, a Chinese education service provider. They found that primary school students spent an average of 2.64 hours per day to finish their homework, while high school students spent 2.94 hours.
Experts and parents have called for more reasonable amounts of homework and an evaluation system of students’ performance that goes beyond just examinations.
“The schools only assess students’ development using scores and ranks,” said Chu Zhaohui, researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences.
“The government and society must try to enrich the assessment system, which would help students find advantages in different ways rather than focusing only on passing examinations.”
Teachers have advised parents not to treat the education system like a competition for the students.
In 2013, the Ministry of Education issued a regulation on primary school pupils’ homework, saying that there should be no written homework for Grade 1 and 2 pupils. Students in other grades were supposed to have less than an hour of written homework per day.
The ministry has yet to introduce any rules on homework for middle school students, reported the Straits Times.
The study was conducted on 446,836 students in 31 provincial areas, with 56.7% from primary schools, 38.6% from middle schools, and 8.7% from high schools.
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