1 / 7

Scheduling and Student Performance

Scheduling and Student Performance. Clifford A. Shaffer and Stephen H. Edwards Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech. Student Project Scheduling. Managing large-scale projects involves significant efforts to plan and schedule activities

thomasjames
Download Presentation

Scheduling and Student Performance

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Scheduling andStudent Performance Clifford A. Shafferand Stephen H. Edwards Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

  2. Student Project Scheduling • Managing large-scale projects involves significant efforts to plan and schedule activities • It is human nature to work better toward intermediate milestones. • The same concepts can/should be applied to mid-sized projects encountered in class. • Students need training in this practice if we expect them to do it • For any project that needs more than a week of active work to complete, break into parts and design a schedule with milestones and deliverables

  3. Study • CS2606 Data Structures and Algorithms, Fall 2006 • 3-4 week projects (four during semester) • Kept schedule information: • Estimated time required • Milestones, estimated times for each • Weekly estimates of time spent.

  4. Results Amount Done 1 Week Prior to Due Date

  5. Interpretation • Results were significant: • 90% of scores below median involved students who did less than 50% of the project prior to the last week. • Few did poorly who put in > 50% time early • Some did well who didn’t put in >50% time early, but most who did well put in the early time • Correlations: • Strong correlation between early time and high score • No correlation between time spent and score • No correlation between % early and total time

  6. Correlation vs. Causation • Do successful students behave that way because they are “good students”, or does behaving that way make them good? • Test causation with Web-CAT data • Over 5 years, compare students who got A/B on one project, and C/D/F on another to see effect of early progress. • Again, we found a significant difference.

  7. What is the Mechanism? • Spreading projects over time allows the “sleep on it” heuristic to operate • Avoiding the “zombie debugger” effect makes people more productive (and cuts time spent)

More Related