American teenagers, on average, are spending less time on homework than they did a generation ago—and the decline has steepened since the pandemic.
The homework slide, happening since at least the early ‘90s, accelerated between 2021 and 2023, according to Monitoring the Future, an ongoing national research project that tracks behaviors of teens and others.
In 2023, 8th graders averaged 36 minutes of homework daily, down 17% from 2021; 10th graders spent on average 47 minutes daily in 2023, from 60 minutes in 2021. Also in 2023, the most recent year of data available, “no homeworkers” reached a peak: 15% of 8th graders and 10.8% of 10th graders reported doing no homework that year.
“I think post-pandemic, there’s been just a real reconsideration of everything—a lot more cynicism, a lot more pessimism, a lot more pushing back on the idea of working hard, period,” said Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego University and author of Generation Tech, a Substack newsletter on teens and social media.
The data didn’t differentiate between how much homework students completed and the amount teachers assigned. And many teachers have scaled back on assigning homework for a variety of reasons, including gaps in access to resources and parental help, the rise of artificial intelligence that could be used for cheating, and a shift toward grading policies that don’t give students credit for completing homework.
Even so, some educators say they’ve seen an uptick in students not completing what is assigned.
Twenge noted that 36% of 18-year-olds in 2022 said they were willing to work overtime in their jobs, compared to 54% in early 2020, according to the Monitoring the Future data. The accelerated decline begs the question: Why?
Doing less homework may be symptomatic of students’ declining motivation, which is part of a broad cultural shift that accelerated during and after the pandemic, suggest experts.
The pandemic has been over for a few years, and some pundits say it’s well past time to stop blaming it for academic and related fallout. But it’s hard to discount its impact. For instance, in an EdWeek Research Center survey administered in February 2021, a nationally representative sample of educators reported that a significant percentage of their high school students were experiencing more school-related problems than pre-pandemic levels: 74% said students procrastinated more, 65% reported worse or incomplete grades, and 56% noted less class participation.
Other surveys in the following years have noted persistent increases in student misbehavior and disengagement. It’s worth noting that many adult employees today appear to be having motivational issues on the job similar to those that teens show at school. Further, the factors blamed for low employee morale may be similar to those that plague students.
Adults’ attitudes about work mirror students
As teens report low motivation at school and work, working adults shared similar feelings.
For example, the Wall Street Journal and NORC, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Chicago, polled 1,019 U.S. adults in March 2023, and 67% of respondents agreed that hard work was “very important” to them—down from 83% in 1998, the first year the survey ran.
Other statistics showed negative changes in employee attitudes post-pandemic. Findings from a recent national Gallup survey of U.S. employees that examined employee engagement before, during, and after the pandemic showed that it began to fall in 2021 and reached a 10-year low in 2024, when only 31% of U.S. employees reported being “actively engaged” in work and 17% reported being actively “disengaged.”
These data align with the recent and highly publicized workplace trend of “quiet quitting”: workplace behavior in which employees do as little as possible on the job. Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report indicated that “quiet quitters” made up 59% of the total global workforce.
The latest Gallup data found a strong correlation between low employee morale and employees’ feelings of disconnectedness. Only 30% of employees reported feeling connected to their company’s mission and purpose, according to the survey, published in January 2025. Related data published in August asserted that only a minority of U.S. employees—23%—believe that their organization cares about their well-being.
Like employees, students are motivated when they feel connected
Students, like adults, report working harder when they have a positive connection—in their case, to school and, in particular, with a teacher or other staff member.
“When there’s a teacher that I have a relationship with, I—100%—try harder in class. Even if I got no sleep the night before, I’ll stay up for first period because I like the teacher,” Warren Coates, a then-senior at Smyrna High School in central Delaware, told Education Week in the fall of 2024.
Michael C. Reichert isn’t surprised by this assertion. Reichert, a psychologist and executive director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania, believes all students, especially boys, are what he calls relational learners: They learn best when they have a positive relationship with their teachers. He and his colleagues have conducted multiple studies in diverse school settings that support this assertion.
Notably, Reichert has developed “relational gestures” intended to help teachers initiate and maintain positive learning relationships with students. These gestures include proactively engaging with students to show interest in them beyond who they are in the classroom.
Antoine Germany, an assistant principal at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., agrees that students need to feel connected in order to perform their best at school. He suggests that teachers give students specific roles or responsibilities in class to boost engagement and effort. He also recommends celebrating students’ work by displaying it publicly, in the classroom or hallways, for instance.
These strategies may not translate immediately to students doing more homework. But, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, students—not unlike employees—may be motivated by educators whose concerted efforts make them feel like an integral part of a community.
