Classroom Interventions to Reduce Procrastination

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Despite data confirming that computer science students who start programming projects early and spread their effort over time perform better, too many students put off their work to a point that restricts their chances to get assistance thus making it difficult to recover from unexpected hurdles. The overarching goal of this project is to produce a classroom strategy that measurably reduces procrastination and increases student project performance, while being applicable in larger classrooms without adding substantially to faculty overhead. This project designs and evaluates the effectiveness of three classroom interventions for multi-week programming assignments. Automated situational awareness alerts are based on a model of student progress and show students a comparison between their current efforts and a summary of past student performance data. Students also engage in active reflection and after each assignment write and discuss with classmates how their time management choices affected their work. Students also use scheduling sheets that require them to break down tasks and plan how much time to allocate for each piece to help them form, express, manage, and track smaller-scale deadlines. All three interventions are grounded in temporal motivation theory. The impact of the interventions is measured in terms of when students start a project, when and if they finish the project, their score on a project, their retention of the material covered by the project, and changes in their attitudes on procrastination. The interventions are automated through the open-source tool Web-CAT which supports analysis of student-written programs. A workshop is being held to assist faculty on using the interventions in their own classes. The interventions are not necessarily computer science specific and, if shown successful, can be adapted to other STEM disciplines.