Students in two subsequent introductory programming courses completed programming tasks in an integrated development environment that saved detailed logs of their actions, including time stamps of all the participants keypresses. 

Student Pauses and Spacing in Programming

One research study published in 2018 looks at how students tend to struggle in STEM courses, especially students of underrepresented minorities (URM). This study focuses on decreasing the achievement gap between URM (Latino, African-American, and Native American students) and non-URM (white and Asian students) groups by implementing interventions that impart studying strategies, such as spacing and self-testing, to see if the students' course grades improve. The reason for this intervention is to teach students who do not know how to study on their own how to do it effectively for STEM courses. 

Study Methods of Students in STEM Courses 

- This study is about how spacing versus cramming impacts students interactions with the LMS (learning management system) and their final grades in the course 

Utilizing learning analytics to map students' self-reported study strategies to click behaviors in STEM courses

- This study looked at the impact of spacing and self-testing on final student outcomes for both URM and non-URM students
- URMs were less likely to employ self-testing which might contribute to the achievement gap 
- The intervention helped to close the self-testing gap for URMs in one of the years that they completed the study 
- Reported self-testing and spacing did better, but especially those who continued to use the practice over the entire course period, meaning that these techniques need to be consistently practiced 


Spacing and Self-testing impact on URM students study

How student engage in spacing out their studying either in class or on their own. 

San Jose State University

How the spacing effect has been used and observed in STEM learning by teachers and students. 

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