Does the Early Bird Catch the Worm? Earliness of Students' Work and its Relationship with Course Outcomes
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Intuitively, it seems plausible that students who start their work earlier and work on more days than their peers should perform better in any course. But does the early bird really catch the worm? In this article, we examine introductory programming students' time management behavior as evidenced by data collected from a programming environment. We analyze: 1) the earliness of students' work, i.e. when they start working on their course assignments, 2) the number of days students work on course assignments, and 3) the relationship between earliness, the number of days worked, and course outcomes. Our results provide further support for the notion that, on average, students who start working on course assignments early perform slightly better in the course. At the same time, we found that starting early does not necessarily mean that students work on more days, and that starting early and working on many days does not necessarily mean that students get better grades. In addition, some students who start working early on the assignments in the first weeks of the course seem to start delaying when they begin working on assignments as the course progresses, while other students seem to be able to continue starting early throughout the course.
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Some work has used fine-grained programming process logs from instrumented IDEs to uncover student work patterns and to visualize student programming processes.
“Some work has looked into using fine-grained programming process logs gathered from instrumented IDEs to uncover student work patterns [21-23, 26, 40] and to visualize student programming processes [10,14,35,38].”
From Instructor Perceptions of AI Code Generation Tools - A Multi-Institutional Interview Study (2024) · cites this paper as [22]
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- Authors
- Leinonen, J., Castro, F. E. V., & Hellas, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Helsinki (FI)
- University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
- Aalto University (FI)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2021-06-26
- Pages
- 373-379
- OpenAlex
- W3174267545
- Cited by
- 23
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 7
- FWCI
- 5.54
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) (publishedVersion)
- Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Teaching and Learning Programming
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Online Learning and Analytics
- Social Sciences › Education › Educational Outcomes and Influences
- Keywords
- time management, introductory programming, course outcomes, assignment completion, student procrastination, course grades
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