Overnight Feedback Reduces Late Submissions on Programming Projects in CS1

Abstract

Some novice programming students procrastinate the start of a programming assignment. These students also seem to struggle knowing whether or not their program meets the requirements of the assignment. Both of these factors play a role in a student’s success in a programming project with negative impact on their grades; but more importantly, a negative impact on learning. Finding ways to motivate students to start earlier could improve learning outcomes and performance in the course with little, if any, risk. This paper reports on the experience of giving students ‘Overnight Feedback’ with the goals of 1) motivating earlier project work, and 2) helping students to know when they have met, or not met, project requirements. This report is more about the concept of providing feedback on a once-daily basis - overnight; and less about the specific tool used. In our experience, the Overnight Feedback technique seems to have achieved the goal of getting students to start earlier. Late submissions dropped from approximately 34% for a project without a feedback system to approximately 4% with Overnight Feedback. Also included in this report is a summary of students’ perspectives on the Overnight Feedback tool we used, which were collected as responses to a survey.