-  This study looks at how students in the course take pauses and space their work, and further look at how this behavior affects their exam scores. 
-  Looking to identify pausing and spacing patterns and their relations with good or bad course outcomes. 
-  Also want to discuss the transferability of past work on pausing and spacing to the context of learning a task like programming. 

San Jose State University

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

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

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

-  Past research has shown that spacing produces better learning results than massing (or cramming). Research also shows that pausing is beneficial within the context of a single problem, due to the dual phenomena of fixation or incubation. Fixation is when someone is stuck on a problem but takes time off to get unstuck, while incubation is the act of spending time off-task, essentially letting the subconsciousness solve the problem. 
-  Studies also show that multitasking can have a beneficial effect on learning through decreasing boredom. 
-  Research has also shown disadvantages of pausing. For example, it has been seen that the act of changing your focus causes slower response and more errors. Research also shows that multitasking using an electronic device is detrimental to learning. 
-  This is important, because programming is an activity that includes working on multiple files at a time while multitasking through referencing manuals and documentation— meaning that programming might inherently require both multitasking and task-switching. 

Student Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Background

Student Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Introduction & Aim

- 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 

-  Spacing Work Over Multiple Days
-  Short Pauses and Course Outcomes
- Correlations of Pauses Lengths And Exam Scores
-  Correlations Between Background Variables and Pausing Behavior

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