Counting questions students procrastinate, practicing little until late in the semester, while counting days spreads practice across the term¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Daily activity patterns show counting questions students delayed practice until late in the semester and then tried to catch up, while counting days students answered more questions on most days. → Iman YeckehZaare & Paul Resnick 2025

Evidence¶

Iman YeckehZaare & Paul Resnick 2025¶

Iman YeckehZaare & Paul Resnick. (2025). Counting days is a spacing incentive that unlocks the potential of low GPA students. npj Science of Learning 10:35. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-025-00322-5

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Daily activity analysis in the within-class experiment, shown in Fig. 2 with the midterm and final exam dates marked: counting days students "answered more questions" on most days, and the pattern reversed at semester's end, indicating catch-up cramming by the control group. No effect size is printed.

"students in the counting days condition answered more questions. At the end of the semester, this was reversed i ndicating that counting questions students procrastinated until late in the semester and then tried to make up for it."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Counting days incentive strongly increases the number of days of practice in both a within-class and a between-instructor experiment — related
• Low-performing students tended to procrastinate more on graded problem-solving exercises and on video watching with formative MCQs — related
• Low performers completed activities on time for fewer topics and showed less catching-up only in early topics, while high performers showed no catching-up on later topics — related
• On the final exam, high performers had more dominant strategy–time-management links than low performers, who showed dominant catching-up, ahead-with-errors, and video-revision links — related
• In examination weeks, students revisited prior topics and used exercises, whose deadlines had passed, as formative practice for the exams — related
• The spacing incentive benefits lower-GPA students more, nearly equalizing exam performance across prior GPA levels — related
• A counting days grading incentive raises final exam scores more than a per-question points incentive in an introductory programming course — related
• The counting days treatment's benefit for exam scores is mediated almost entirely by the number of days practiced, not the number of questions — related
• An intervention study of Learning How to Learn reported improved study behaviors and higher second-semester proficiency scores — related