Behavioral Consequences of Reminder Emails on Students’ Academic Performance: a Real-world Deployment

Abstract

Post-secondary institutions have experienced a continuous trend of student procrastination on course work, thus leading to lower academic performance and potentially worse knowledge retention and other longer-term impacts. Sending reminders about deliverables is a simple approach, but it has the potential to be a valuable tool to mitigate such issues and assist students with time management. This paper will introduce specific processes of conducting such experiments, especially email designs and randomization, to help instructors and researchers conduct similar experiments or field-deploying reminders. To evaluate homework reminder messages, we designed and deployed a real-world randomized A/B experiment at a North American university in a CS1 course where students were randomly assigned to either receive these reminder messages or not. Our findings suggest that students who received the reminder messages have a higher homework completion rate (p < .05) and performed significantly better (p < .01) on the following midterm test than students who did not receive the reminder message. Finally, we discuss how a homework reminder can improve student behaviours, as well as how this type of reminder can be enhanced for future interventions.