More Carrot or Less Stick: Organically Improving Student Time Management With Practice Tasks and Gamified Assignments

Students often struggle with time management. They delay work on assignments for too long and/or allocate too little time for the tasks given to them. This negatively impacts their performance, increases stress, and even leads some to switch majors. As such, there is a wealth of previous research on improving student time management through direct intervention. In particular, there is a heavy focus on having students start assignments earlier and spend more time-on-task - as these metrics have been shown to positively correlate with student performance. In this paper, however, we theorize that poor student time management (at least in CS) is often due to confounding factors - such as academic stress - and not a missing skill set. We demonstrate that changes in assignment design and style can cause students to organically manage their time better. Specifically, we compare two alternative designs - a low risk preparatory assignment and a highly engaging gamified assignment - against a conventional programming assignment. While the conventional assignment follows common trends, students do better on the alternative designs and exhibit novel behavior on the usual metrics of earliness of work and time-on-task. Of note, on the preparatory assignment, time-on-task is negatively (albeit weakly) correlated with performance - the opposite of what is standard in the literature. Finally, we provide takeaways and recommendations for other instructors to use in their own approaches and research.