The rename reflex: why calling homework an experiment does not raise follow-through

Renaming homework does not raise follow-through. In Bennion’s 2025 review of 59 studies, what predicted whether between-session work got done was the client’s belief that the task would help, plus the practitioner’s skill at planning and reviewing it. The word on the worksheet was not one of the predictors.

One r/ADHD poster wrote about explaining to a therapist that executive dysfunction kept a task from ever starting. The reply, upvoted 188 times: “yup but sometimes you just need to do it anyways”. No better word for the task would have saved that exchange.

Coaches rename it anyway, to an experiment or an action step. I have done it on forms I wrote myself. Call the habit the rename reflex.

Does renaming homework raise follow-through?

Not by any predictor Bennion’s team found. Mia Bennion and four colleagues at the University of Manchester searched five databases, kept 59 studies, and sorted the predictors of between-session engagement into ten themes. Two of the ten came out as relatively consistent: the client believing the task helps, and the practitioner giving a reason for it and then reviewing it, difficulties included.

Whether the task itself moves outcomes is contested, and the split runs by age.

Study	What it looked at	Finding
Mausbach 2010, cited 512 times	meta-analysis of homework compliance in CBT	greater compliance related to better treatment outcome
Arendt 2016	98 youths aged 7 to 16, Cool Kids anxiety program	no association once pretreatment severity was controlled

Neither one is a coaching trial. Sibley’s January 2026 survey of 481 coaches in JAMA Network Open carries the flat line behind all of it: no randomised trial establishes coaching efficacy. Read the homework research as borrowed therapy evidence.

Why does ‘coaching homework’ sound like school?

Because the phrase belongs to school tutoring. Search it and most of the first page is companies helping children finish schoolwork: homeworkcoach.com, coachbit.com, thehomeworkcoach.org, with a 2015 HBR piece about managers among them.

Coaches write it the same way. In 316 ADHD coaches’ blog and social posts harvested in July 2026, the pages that mention homework are about school homework, including Cindy Goldrich on homework time and Darren Boyd-Annells on a child’s focus.

Which is the honest case for renaming. The r/ADHD threads on the word are mostly about school and the years of not turning it in, so a client who flinches is flinching at something real, and a coach who swaps the word is reading the room correctly. The swap just does not do the work of the review.

What actually raises follow-through between sessions?

Three moves, all of them inside the two predictors that survived Bennion’s review:

1. Give the reason for this task, in one sentence, before the session ends.
2. Open the next session with the task rather than the news. Ryum’s 2024 paper on between-session homework puts that review inside the method.
3. Read a miss as information about the task: was the step too big (the reachable rung) or did something change after you set it (the decay date)? Two misses in a row is the point to change the task, not repeat the ask.

Rename it if the word stings. The follow-through comes from what you do when you see the client again.

Questions people ask next?

Should I stop saying homework?

Only if your client flinches at the word. The r/ADHD threads about homework are mostly about school and the years of not turning it in, so the flinch has somewhere real to come from. A rename with no review behind it still changes little.

What does one missed task mean?

One miss is information about the task, not about the client. Two in a row is the point to shrink it or swap it and ask what got in the way, rather than set it again with more encouragement.

Does homework help adults with ADHD?

Unknown. Mausbach’s 2010 meta-analysis covers CBT broadly, and Arendt’s 2016 null covers children with anxiety. Nothing isolates between-session tasks for adults with ADHD, so your own before-and-after is the only local evidence.