-  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

-  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. 

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

Student Pauses and Spacing in Learning to Program: Discussion

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. 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

San Jose State University

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

Spacing Effect and STEM Students

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

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 


Learn Before

Related

Learn After