College Students Are Doing Less Homework. Should Instructors Change How They Assign It?

Encouraging students to complete work outside of class has always been a struggle.

But many college professors say it has gotten even harder in recent years as students prioritize their mental health, have trouble adhering to deadlines and are more skeptical of the purpose of homework.

One cause is the pandemic, and how it disrupted middle and high school for today’s traditional-aged college students. Students who spent formative years learning online may be too nervous to raise a hand in class or have trouble paying attention. With the flexibility that came with pandemic-era school, they’re not used to firm deadlines or strict grading.

Today’s students also report greater mental health struggles, which some experts attribute to excessive social media use.

Then there’s the sudden temptation of ChatGPT and other new AI tools, which can make cheating on assignments easy and often undetectable.

Together, these factors have brewed a “perfect storm” of challenges keeping students from doing homework, says Jenae Cohn, the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Berkeley.

“It all sort of feels bundled together,” Cohn says. “This is a sequence of events where learning and environments for learning just feel harder and harder to cultivate.”

But complaining about students isn’t the answer, Cohn and other teaching experts say.

Instead, college instructors need to change how they assign and communicate their homework assignments. And they argue that teachers at the college level should now essentially teach the study skills that students might not have learned in school before arriving on campuses.

Teaching The Why

Sarah Z. Johnson, a writing instructor and chair of the writing center at Madison College, has noticed that many of her students have a much lower tolerance for routine assignments, some of which they see as busy work.

She often has to explain to students that her assignments will build the skills for the work they’ll do later in the year. She says that helps convince students that doing the work now will help them later. And if a student doesn’t think an assignment is worth doing, they’re much less likely to do it at all, she says.

“Maybe 20 years ago or 15 years ago, students were kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m doing a thing because she told me to do it,’” Johnson says. “I think there’s less willingness to just do the thing because somebody told you to do it.”

As more students focus on prioritizing their mental health, they’re intentionally choosing not to complete work if it keeps them from taking care of themselves, says Jessie Beckett, the director of Radford University’s learning center, otherwise they won’t feel motivated to get it done. A student may think an assignment isn’t as important, and choose to get more sleep or spend time with friends instead, she says.

While Beckett is glad students are making their health a priority, she adds that they still need to learn to find a balance. Some students don’t understand how important assignments are, Beckett says. If an instructor doesn’t explain the outcomes of a homework task, many students will assume that it’s not as important, she argues, and miss out on learning a skill they’ll need later on.

“They don’t necessarily understand what the value of something is, how it translates to a grade, how it translates to their success in that class, how it translates to a skill that will impact their success in future classes or in their major,” Beckett says.

Lily Martens, an undergraduate at Madison College, recalls an assignment in her environmental science class when students were asked to go to a park and take notes about the nature in the area. A few weeks later, the students went back to the same park and noted the difference in the animals and plant life.

That kind of assignment feels more purposeful than completing a worksheet or answering questions from a textbook, she says. “Not only was I learning about what species might be in the local area,” she adds, “but it was also teaching me how to record that and that was really awesome.”

Instructors need to show their students how an assignment will help them grow, says Darren Minarik, an associate professor at Radford University focused on special education and social studies education.

In his classes, Minarik often teaches his students, who are studying to become K-12 educators, to model the purpose of an assignment in class. For instance, they could assign a quiz that allows students to use their homework to see how the skills they’re learning will translate into class objectives.

This will “show that there’s a direct connection between the assignment that you’re asking to do outside of class and then how they’re going to be graded in class,” Minarik says. “So being open about ‘this is why I’m asking you to do it.’”

Many professors don’t go through the same training in how to teach that K-12 classroom teachers get, Minarik says, so they don’t realize how important it is to explain to students the purpose of doing their work. In some cases college instructors assign multiple readings about the same idea, which can feel redundant to students. From the perspective of the faculty expert, it might all be fascinating, Cohn says, but to students it can feel gratuitous.

Cohn encourages instructors to determine what skills they want their students to gain from a class and then review their assignments to consider how each one will help reach those goals. Often, instructors will realize that instead of assigning three long texts, they may only need to give students one key reading, she says.

“I’ve tried to help faculty think about, ‘What are you gonna have students do with this? Are they gonna need this assignment to be able to solve a problem down the road? Is it essential by the end of the term? Are they going to need to do this reading in order to write something later or conduct research later?’” Cohn says. Faculty need to clearly answer these questions in their syllabi so students will know, “here’s what you do with this information and here’s why it’ll matter to you in your class,” she adds.

Bad Habits

Aside from questioning the purpose of homework, many students also have more difficulty keeping up with deadlines.

In the past, Amanda Flint, a math instructor at Madison College, assigned her students homework that would be due at the end of each week. But many students began waiting until the day it was due, and then they couldn’t get everything done on time, she says.

Students picked up those habits during the pandemic, when teachers tended to be more relaxed about deadlines, allowing students to have extensions or not enforcing them at all, says Beckett. When those students got to college, they assumed they’d be able to finish all of their work late without any consequences.

In many K-12 schools, “students have regular check-ins around how they’re doing and opportunities to quickly submit all of the work before that grading period ends, even if that work was assigned or was considered due weeks prior,” Beckett says. While the effort to be more flexible has good intentions, making the switch to stricter rules is challenging for students when they get to college, she adds.

Martens, the Madison student, says the flexibility also makes assignments seem less important, leading students to feel less inclined to do them. Often routine textbook readings aren’t graded, she says, so a student likely won’t prioritize it. Even though she feels like this can put her behind in class, it’s difficult to be motivated to complete an assignment that feels like busy work and won’t impact her grade.

In high school, her teachers often graded students’ notes from the textbook to ensure they were doing the reading, Martens says. Now, her instructors “just give it to you and they’re like you should be reading, but they’re not checking,” she says. “I miss things I’ve noticed in some classes, especially where it’s hard to cover everything in class.”

The issue seems especially pronounced at community colleges, where instructors may be teaching students who have to work multiple jobs and need to take up an extra shift instead of completing an assignment. Or, as the number of students in dual enrollment programs skyrockets, some instructors, like Flint, find themselves teaching mainly high school students who haven’t experienced a college workload yet.

To encourage better time management, Flint has begun adding multiple deadlines throughout the week. Instead of expecting students to complete all of their work by Friday, she assigns two or three sub-deadlines on smaller pieces of the work to help them get everything done in time.

She also gives each student 100 “late passes” per semester, which averages out to about two per assignment. Each late pass extends the deadline by 24 hours, so a student could hand in an assignment up to two days after the due date, she says. Or, if students save their late passes they could get even longer extensions on certain assignments. Students are then able to choose when during the semester they may need more time without falling too far behind, she says.

“Instead of assuming that the student’s gonna do that scheduling on their own,” Flint says, “I turned it into the other direction, which is ‘You’ve got due dates, but you’ve got the wiggle room to move it if you need to.’”

Johnson has also noticed that students are more likely these days to simply give up on assignments they find difficult.

In the past, she would assign works by Geoffrey Chaucer in her British literature classes. Now students would likely find his writing too difficult to understand on their own. “I think they figure if they’re struggling this much, they must be doing it wrong,” Johnson adds. “So they quit.”

Since K-12 schools are required to follow standardized curriculums, Beckett says students start to think there is only one way to learn something, and if they aren’t good at it, they must not be good at that subject.

As a writing instructor, “I saw a lot of students who would dread coming to a writing class and would put off their work for a writing class readily because they had so much fear or anxiety around being able to do it well,” she says. Those issues aren’t unique to the pandemic or this generation of students, though, Beckett says. “Any student who has had a negative experience around their abilities or confidence in a particular subject is going to be less likely to prioritize that subject,” she adds.

College professors often don’t realize how complicated their assignments can be, Cohn says, or they don’t remember what it was like to first learn the material. Textbooks may use jargon that an expert in the field will understand, but a student new to the topic wouldn’t, she says. She encourages instructors to guide students through a reading by having them answer questions about specific concepts they most need to understand.

Minarik also teaches his students to craft lessons that will demonstrate how to be a good learner.

If a teacher expects students to take copious notes in class, they need to teach their students optimal note-taking practices, he says. They also need to teach how to study, and how to complete homework assignments, he says. They can’t expect students to know any of that right away, he adds.

“If you want an outcome, you need to model how to get to that outcome for your students,” he says.

From the student perspective, Martens says she has a tough time completing assignments when she starts them at home and realizes she didn’t understand what she learned in class as well as she thought. Offering multiple deadlines is helpful, she says — especially with essays — since she can get help on her rough draft and feel more confident about the final one. She also appreciates when a professor leaves time near the end of class for students to start their homework and ask questions if they need help.

The classes Martens is often most engaged in, though, are the ones where she can tell the professor cares deeply about a subject and is engaged with the class, she says. Despite not enjoying English much, when Martens took one of Johnson’s classes, she could tell how excited the professor was to teach the subject, something she says she saw less of in her high school classes after the pandemic.

“All of a sudden I was excited to write essays because Sarah was just like, so excited to talk about writing essays,” Martens says. “That was one of my favorite classes.”