What is it about?
Post-secondary institutions have experienced a continuous trend of student procrastination on course work, thus leading to lower academic performance and potentially worse knowledge retention and other longer-term impacts. Sending reminders about deliverables is a simple approach, but it has the potential to be a valuable tool to mitigate such issues and assist students with time management. This paper will introduce specific processes of conducting such experiments, especially email designs and randomization, to help instructors and researchers conduct similar experiments or field-deploying reminders.
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Why is it important?
We designed and deployed a real-world randomized A/B experiment at a North American university in a CS1 course where students were randomly assigned to either receive these reminder messages or not. Our findings suggest that students who received the reminder messages have a higher homework completion rate and performed significantly better on the following midterm test than students who did not receive the reminder message.
Perspectives
We hope researchers and course instructors get inspired after reading it, and believe that simple reminders can do big things. We are also welcoming any ideas, thoughts on the subject area and exploring other ways to facilitate the student learning process.
Runlong (Harry) Ye
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Behavioral Consequences of Reminder Emails on Students’ Academic Performance: a Real-world Deployment, September 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3537674.3554740.
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