Yes, students typically take short pauses while working on assignments, but there does not appear to be a pattern within pauses of less than 6 hours aside from shorter pauses being more frequent. 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- 1) How do students space out their work? 
    - 1.1 On how many days on average per week do students work on course assignments?
    - 1.2 When working on course assignments, do students take short pauses and if so, what are the typical pause lengths?
- 2) How does the students’ tendency to pause influence the course outcomes?
- 3) Do pausing or spacing behaviors correlate with student background variables? 
    - 3.1 To what extent do the students’ background variables and answers to the Self-Regulation-specific questions from the MSLQ correlate with students spacing out their work over days?
    - 3.2 If there are pause lengths that are negatively correlated with exam scores, how are the relative amounts of such pauses correlated with students’ background variables and answers to the Self-Regulation-specific questions from the MSLQ?

Student Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Research Questions 

Leo Leppänen, Juho Leinonen, and Arto Hellas. 2016. Pauses and spacing in learning to program. In Proceedings of the 16th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 41–50. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2999541.2999549

Pauses and spacing in learning to program

Students work on the course assignments on 3 days per week on average. While working on assignments, the lengths of pauses ranges but come in two basic forms: pauses less than 6 hours in length and pauses of one or more days. For shorter pauses the only pattern sheen was that the shorter the pause, the more frequent it is. 

Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Answer to Research Question 1.1

Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Answer to Research Question 1.2

- There is a clear correlation between the students’ pauses and students’ success in the course final exam- a high relative amount of very short pauses of 1 to 2 seconds is positively correlated with the exam score. 
- Pauses between 1 and 4 minutes are negatively correlated with exam score.  
- There is a negative correlation between pauses of lengths 10 to 60 seconds and the course exam score, but this effect did not persist in the smaller (spring) course. 

Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Answer to Research Question 2

-  There appears to be a weak statistically significant relation between the average number of days per week the student worked on the exercises and the student’s background in programming. 

Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Answer to Research Question 3.1

-  "Only student programming background appears to be statistically significantly correlated with the percentage of pauses correlated with lower exam scores."

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