Their intro shows the bias directly. Quotes between "enrichment", and framing of everything antagonistically, a "vs. enrichment" thing. So let's start where th

Their intro shows the bias directly. Quotes between "enrichment", and framing of everything antagonistically, a "vs. enrichment" thing. So let's start where they should start: what is "enrichment" to the authors? > Our definition of enrichment intends to capture the kinds of activities that are typically considered to be investments in children’s skills. Therefore, our baseline measure includes only those activities that are unambiguously related to skill development over and above class time in school. > we aggregate the 300+primitive time-use categories into eight categories: enrichment activities, other enrichment activities, play and social activities, passive leisure, duties/chores, class time, sleep, and other They go on to show (on page 8) that (1) 3% of children's time is "Enrichment" and 2% is "Other Enrichment" (...), which is all in all a whopping 5% (70 minutes) in the day, and (2) that 66% of that time is homework. Seems to me like they have a beef with kids having 45 minutes of homework per day. The title of this paper is attractive and the conclusions broad, but really they could have said "let's compare children doing homework to children doing no homework and measure cognitive abilities", and they'd have something more substantial. But what is cognitive skill vs non-cognitive skill then? Well it's not explained in the paper, but they say that they use the Child Development Supplement (CDS) to aggregate that information, and that the CDS is three "waves" that they look at together. All of those "waves" correspond to years, respectively 1997, 2002 and 2007. I'd like to argue that these last 13 years have seen a wee-bit of change in the world (remember when youtube and twitter were one-year olds?), but whatever. It takes a text-search to finally find the data, on page 44. Cognitive skills include (and are limited to) Letter Word (?!), Applied Problems, and Passage Comprehension (?!). So... ok. Let's just say they were really trying to research homework, in which case those only-three-existing-cognitive-skills would mean something (although the jury's out on what Letter Word means). The NON COGNITIVE SKILLS include things like "Curious and exploring, likes new experiences", "Does neat, careful work", "Tries things for himself/herself", "Thinks before acting, not impulsive". At this point I throw my hands up in the air, I forget that I spent far too much time reading this "paper", and I move on.