Teacher responses to homework can have a significant effect on performance. Grading homework and providing feedback very shortly after assignments arc submitted have been shown to have a positive effect on achievement. College notes, whereby the teacher informs parents on a daily basis about the homework performance of a student, have been shown to be effective. Further, peers can serve an important role in the completion of homework. Peer-mediated strategies that involve teams of students working on homework assignments and group contingencies have been shown to be effective in improving homework performance.  A wealth of research has demonstrated the impact that parents can have on the attention and behavior of children. Parent training has been demonstrated to be a very effective method for helping parents to change their behavior and to achieve desired, targeted goals for their child. One of the hallmarks of parenting programs is training parents to selectively attend to and reinforce responsible, productive child behavior and to ignore and refrain from reinforcing non adaptive, unproductive behaviors. Other critical components include training parents to effectively deliver requests for compliance and providing specific labels when issuing verbal praise. Enhanced reinforcement programs that involve the provision of tokens and concrete reinforce for the attainment of targeted goals has been shown to be effective in improving behavior and performance.

The systematic withdrawal of positive reinforcement through the use of response cost and time-out procedures can be very useful in changing children's behavior. Response cost is often used in the context of a token reinforcement system and involves the removal of points or tokens when specified undesirable behaviors are committed by the child. Time-out refers to the systematic removal of a child from opportunities to receive positive reinforcement, which is usually operationalized as the placement of a child onto a chair in a quiet, non-stimulating location at home or in college. Time-out can be a highly effective intervention when it is used as an immediate response to targeted behaviors and results in a significant loss of positive reinforcement. Time-out is often ineffective when it enables the child to avoid a demanding task, such as homework. In this case, time-out may actually serve to negatively reinforce avoidant, unproductive behavior. For this reason, parents need to be extremely careful in using time-out in addressing problems that arise with homework. Given that children with ADHD typically avoid tasks that require sustained effort, timeout is rarely an effective response to unproductive behavior with these individuals.

A particularly promising approach to the behavioral treatment of homework problems is goal setting with contingency contracting. This strategy consists of training a parent and child to (1) establish realistic goals for homework completion, accuracy, and duration; (2) evaluate performance in relation to established goals; and (3) administer positive reinforces, using a menu of reinforces negotiated by the parent and child, contingent on the child's attainment of goals. This strategy was demonstrated to be superior to a standard parent training intervention in improving parent-ratings of homework performance, as well as children's actual performance on homework assignments. These results strongly suggest that goal setting with contingency contracting should be a major component of a comprehensive homework intervention program.  A specific problem with homework can have multiple purposes or functions that vary from family to family.