Classroom Interventions to Reduce Procrastination

尽管有数据证实，计算机科学专业的学生尽早开始编程项目，并在一段时间内分散他们的努力，表现更好，但太多的学生把他们的工作推迟到限制他们获得帮助的机会的程度，从而使他们很难从意想不到的障碍中恢复过来。这个项目的首要目标是产生一种课堂策略，可以明显地减少拖延，提高学生的项目表现，同时适用于更大的教室，而不会增加教师的大量开销。本项目设计并评估了三种课堂干预对多周编程作业的有效性。自动态势感知警报基于学生进步模型，并向学生展示他们当前努力与过去学生表现数据摘要之间的比较。学生们也会积极反思，每次作业后都会写下来，并与同学讨论他们的时间管理选择是如何影响他们的工作的。学生们也会使用计划表，要求他们分解任务，并计划为每个任务分配多少时间，以帮助他们形成、表达、管理和跟踪较小范围的截止日期。这三种干预都以时间动机理论为基础。干预措施的影响是根据学生何时开始一个项目，何时以及是否完成这个项目，他们在项目上的分数，他们对项目所涉及的材料的保留，以及他们对拖延的态度的变化来衡量的。干预是通过开源工具Web-CAT自动化的，该工具支持对学生编写的程序进行分析。正在举办一个讲习班，以协助教师在他们自己的课堂上使用干预措施。这些干预措施不一定是针对计算机科学的，如果显示成功，可以适用于其他STEM学科。

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.