Promoting Early Engagement with Programming Assignments Using Scheduled Automated Feedback

Programming assignments are a common form of assessment in introductory courses and often require substantial work to complete. Students must therefore plan and manage their time carefully, especially leading up to published deadlines. Although time management is an important metacognitive skill that students must develop, it is rarely taught explicitly. Prior research has explored various approaches for reducing procrastination and other unproductive behaviours in students, but these are often ineffective or impractical in large courses. In this work, we investigate a scalable intervention that incentivizes students to begin work early. We provide automatically generated feedback to students who submit their work-in-progress prior to two fixed deadlines scheduled earlier than the final deadline for the assignment. Although voluntary, we find that many students welcome this early feedback and improve the quality of their work across each iteration. Especially for at-risk students, who have failed an earlier module in the course, engaging with the early feedback opportunities results in significantly better work at the time of final submission.