WASHINGTON, D.C. – A new study shows that some students are assigned up to three times the amount of homework recommended by the nation’s largest teachers union and other “education experts.”

The study, published today in The American Journal of Family Therapy, compared answers to a survey of 1,100 parents of students in kindergarten through 12^th grade about homework with supposed best practices suggested by the National Education Association and the National Parent-Teacher Association, CNN reports.

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The NEA believes teachers should strive for the “10-minute rule” – which means students should gain 10 minutes of after school homework with each grade level, starting with 10 minutes in first grade. The union advises against giving homework to kindergartners. The new study claims students are taking home three times the recommended workload, according to the site.

Researchers contend kindergartners are spending about 25 minutes per night on homework, first graders averaged 28 minutes, and second grade students received about 29 minutes of homework per night, all of which are well over the guidelines.

“It’s absolutely shocking to me to find out that particularly kindergarten students (who) are not supposed to have any homework at all … are getting as much homework as a third-grader is supposed to get,” said Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, clinical director for the New England Center for Pediatric Psychology and contributing editor of the report.

“Anybody who’s tried to keep a 5-year-old at a table doing homework for 25 minutes after school knows what that’s like. I mean children don’t want to be doing, they want to be out playing, they want to be interacting and that’s what they should be doing,” she said. “That’s what’s really important.”

Donaldson-Pressman said previous research shows excessive homework can be detrimental to student learning and health.

“The cost is enormous,” she told CNN. “The data shows that homework over this level is not only not beneficial to children’s grades or GPA, but there’s really a plethora of evidence that it’s detrimental to their attitude about school, their grades, their self-confidence, their social skills and their quality of life.

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Stanford Graduate School of Education lecturer Denise Pope co-authored a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education last year that showed excessive homework really stresses students out. Fifty-six percent of students in the study cited homework as the primary stressor in their lives, according to the news site.

“We found a clear connection between the students’ stress and physical impacts – migraines, ulcers and other stomach problems, sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and weight loss,” Pope told CNN last March.

That study focused primarily on high school students in upper-middle-class schools, where homework is often stressed more than at other schools, but data also suggests students in lower grade levels and of lower income levels face similar problems.

Other studies argue homework is virtually pointless.

“Harris Cooper, a well-known homework researcher, who is a professor of education and psychology at Duke University, says that no more than two hours of homework a night should be assigned to students in high school,” according to The Washington Post.

“Author Alfie Kohn argues that there is no research to show that homework in elementary and middle school has any benefit and that the correlation between homework and academic achievement in high school is at best weak.”

The research published today points out that excessive homework often causes conflicts between students and parents, particularly in cases where the parent does not have a college degree. The study found those parents are 200 percent more likely to have fights with their children over homework than those with a degree, Fox 2 reports.

“Undereducated parents really believe that their children are supposed to be able to do (the homework), therefore, their children must be doing something else during school” instead of focusing on their studies, Donaldson-Pressman said. “So the parents argue with the kids, the kids feel defeated and dumb and angry, very angry, and the parents are fighting with each other. It’s absolutely a recipe for disaster.”

“All of our results indicate that homework as it is now being assigned discriminates against children whose parents don’t have a college degree, against parents who have English as a second language, against, essentially, parents who are poor,” she said.

The study was conducted by researchers at Brown University, Brandeis University, Rhode Island College, Dean College, the Children’s National Medical Center, and the New England Center for Pediatric Psychology.