Grant Recipients
Alice Gao, Cheriton School of Computer Science
Victoria Sakhnini, Cheriton School of Computer Science
Description
Research has shown that effective time management strongly correlates with successful outcomes (Denny et al. 2018; Kazerouni et al. 2017). Unfortunately, from our experience, many upper-year Computer Science (CS) students procrastinate on their programming assignments. We design and evaluate several scaffolded programming assignments for an upper-year CS course, aiming to reduce procrastination by providing early, detailed, and personalized feedback. We will determine the effectiveness of the early feedback by comparing students’ submissions data, students’ answers in weekly quizzes, and their participation on Piazza and during office hours in two course offerings. Our long-term goal is to design a standardized procedure to scaffolded complex and multi-week assignments and projects to reduce procrastination in upper-year courses at the University of Waterloo.
References
Allevato, A., & Edwards, S. H. (2013). The effects of extra credit opportunities on student procrastination. Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE, 1831–1836. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2013.6685154
Denny, P., Luxton-Reilly, A., Craig, M., & Petersen, A. (2018). Improving complex task performance using a sequence of simple practice tasks. Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE, 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3197091.3197141
Denny, P., Whalley, J., & Leinonen, J. (2021). Promoting Early Engagement with Programming Assignments Using Scheduled Automated Feedback. Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE ’21), 88–95. https://doi.org/10.1145/3441636.3442309
Edwards, S. H., Martin, J., & Shaffer, C. a. (2015). Examining Classroom Interventions to Reduce Procrastination. ITiCSE ’15, 254–259.
Kazerouni, A. M., Edwards, S. H., & Shaffer, C. O. A. (2017). Quantifying incremental development practices and their relationship to procrastination. ICER 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, 191–199. https://doi.org/10.1145/3105726.3106180
Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2018). Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: The costs and benefits of dawdling. Self-Regulation and Self-Control: Selected Works of Roy F. Baumeister, 8(6), 299–309. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315175775
Zavaleta Bernuy, A., Zheng, Q. Y., Shaikh, H., Petersen, A., & Williams, J. J. (2021). Investigating the Impact of Online Homework Reminders Using Randomized A/B Comparisons. Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’21), 921–927. https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432427