Using an Instrumented Learning Environment to Understand Procrastination

This study aims to identify procrastinating behavior of students by tracking their activities in an undergraduate engineering course and to explore its relationship with course performance. In our research, we have examined methods for instrumenting students' ordinary learning activities in undergraduate engineering courses. More specifically, we provide students with digital smartpens they use to complete their assignments, lecture notes, and exams. We also provide them with an instrumented document viewer that records reading effort for course documents. This technology provides a fine-grained, time-stamped record of writing and reading throughout the course. In the present work, we examine a student's studying effort in relation to the due dates of assignments and compare this with academic achievement in a course. The results show that when a student studies is a powerful predictor of academic success. For example, students who do their work in the 24 hours immediately preceding a due date tend to do poorly, while those who do their work one or two days early, tend to perform well. This work is a first step toward building tools that allow students to monitor their learning habits and use this information to improve their own academic performance.