Examining Classroom Interventions to Reduce Procrastination

ABSTRACT

Procrastination is a common problem for students. Many believe procrastination may keep otherwise competent students from succeeding. However, the most effective interventions for procrastination are resource-intensive---providing supplemental training or courses in study skills and self-regulation. These techniques do not scale to large courses. This paper investigates three new classroom interventions designed to be low-cost and low-effort to implement. Reflective writing assignments ask students to reflect on how their time management choices affect their work. Project schedule sheets require students to plan out and schedule specific tasks on their projects. E-mail situational awareness alerts give students feedback on how their progress compares to others, and to expectations. 353 students over two semesters of a junior-level advanced data structures course participated in a study where these interventions were investigated. While neither reflective writing assignments nor schedule sheets produced any significant effect, e-mail alerts were associated with both significantly reduced rates of late program submissions, and increased rates of early program submissions. As a result, this intervention shows promise for further investigation as a potential strategy for reducing late submissions among students.

References

1. A. Allevato and S. Edwards. Effects of extra credit opportunities on students' time management on programming assignments. In Proceedings of the IEEE 43rd Annual Frontiers in Education Conference, pages 1831--1836. IEEE, October 2013.
2. C. Bonwell and J. Eison. Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University, 1991.
3. S. H. Edwards. Using software testing to move students from trial-and-error to reflection-in-action. In Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE '04, pages 26--30, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM.
4. S. H. Edwards and M. A. Pérez-Quiñones. Experiences using test-driven development with an automated grader. J. Comput. Sci. Coll., 22(3):44--50, Jan. 2007.
5. S. H. Edwards, J. Snyder, M. A. Pérez-Quiñones, A. Allevato, D. Kim, and B. Tretola. Comparing effective and ineffective behaviors of student programmers. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Computing Education Research, pages 3--14. ACM, 2009.
6. R. M. Klassen, L. L. Krawchuk, and S. Rajani. Academic procrastination of undergraduates: Low self-efficacy to self-regulate predicts higher levels of procrastination. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 33(4):915--931, 2008.
7. C. H. Lay. At last, my research article on procrastination. Journal of Research in Personality, 20(4):474--495, 1986.
8. J. Spolsky. Painless software schedules. http://www. joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html. Accessed: 2015-01-11.
9. D. Stead. A review of the one-minute paper. Active Learning in Higher Education, 6(2):118--131, July 2005.
10. P. Steel. The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1):65, 2007.
11. J. Stodder. Experimental moralities: Ethics in classroom experiments. The Journal of Economic Education, 29(2):127--138, 1998.
12. D. M. Tice and R. F. Baumeister. Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: The costs and benefits of dawdling. Psychological Science, pages 454--458, 1997.
13. B. W. Tuckman. The development and concurrent validity of the procrastination scale. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 51(2):473--480, 1991.
14. B. W. Tuckman. Relations of academic procrastination, rationalizations, and performance in a web course with deadlines 1. Psychological Reports, 96(3c):1015--1021, 2005.
15. L. Williams. Lessons learned from seven years of pair programming at North Carolina State University. SIGCSE Bull., 39(4):79--83, Dec. 2007.

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Education

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing education

      • Computing education programs

        • Computer science education

        • Information science education