Reuter’s tells us, “The current findings suggest that parents and teachers could help students boost the effort they put into homework by improving students’ beliefs that they can do well, increasing their interest in the subject and providing a sense that the assignments are useful, researchers say.”
This is based on “responses to questionnaires on math homework and class work posed to 3,283 mostly Caucasian students from diverse educational and social backgrounds in grades five, seven, eight and nine in 11 urban schools in Germany.”