Refusing to Try: Characterizing Early Stopout on Student Assignments

A prominent issue faced by the education research community is that of student attrition. While large research efforts have been devoted to studying course-level attrition, widely referred to as dropout, less research has been focused on finer-grained assignment-level attrition commonly observed in K-12 classrooms. This later instantiation of attrition, referred to in this paper as "stopout," is characterized by students failing to complete their assigned work, but the cause of such behavior are not often known. This becomes a large problem for educators and developers of learning platforms as students who give up on assignments early are missing opportunities to learn and practice the material which may affect future performance on related topics; similarly, it is difficult for researchers to develop, and subsequently difficult for computer-based systems to deploy interventions aimed at promoting productive persistence once a student has ceased interaction with the software. This difficulty highlights the importance to understand and identify early signs of stopout behavior in order to provide aid to students preemptively to promote productive persistence in their learning. While many cases of student stopout may be attributable to gaps in student knowledge and indicative of struggle, student attributes such as grit and persistence may be further affected by other factors. This work focuses on identifying different forms of stopout behavior in the context of middle school math by observing student behaviors at the sub-problem level. We find that students exhibit disproportionate stopout on the first problem of their assignments in comparison to stopout on subsequent problems, identifying a behavior that we call "refusal," and use the emerging patterns of student activity to better understand the potential causes underlying stopout behavior early in an assignment.