Under busy or normal queue load, the New Student First (NSF) strategy significantly increases the percentage of students who receive help compared with FCFS, LWF, and VLWF¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · causal r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 2024 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Under busy load, around 65% of students receive help with NSF versus around 54% with the other three strategies (p<0.01). → Z. Gao 2024 q2 i? Under normal load, NSF raises the percentage of students receiving at least one help from 70% (FCFS) to 82% (p<0.01). → Z. Gao 2024 (2)

Evidence¶

Z. Gao 2024¶

Z. Gao, G. S. de Oliveira, D. Babalola, C. Lynch, and S. Heckman. (2024). Who should i help next? simulation of office hours queue scheduling strategy in a cs2 course. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12729866

q2 · i? · no effect size: the entry prints simulated percentages helped (about 65% NSF vs 54%) and p<0.01 · causal · r1

Simulation of a busy-load queue (λ = 0.15) repeated 100 times per condition, evaluated with Mann–Whitney U tests. The busy-load results show "around 65% of the students would receive help" under NSF versus around 54% under the other strategies, a significant difference (p<0.01).

"the NSF strategy appears to be significantly higher than the other three ( p <0.01); on average, around 65% of the students would receive help if the teacher used the NSF strategy, while only around 54% of the students would receive help if one of the other three strategies was applied"

Z. Gao 2024 (2)¶

Z. Gao, G. S. de Oliveira, D. Babalola, C. Lynch, and S. Heckman. (2024). Who should i help next? simulation of office hours queue scheduling strategy in a cs2 course. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12729866

q2 · i? · no effect size: the entry prints simulated percentages helped (82% NSF vs 70% FCFS) and p<0.01 · causal · r1

Normal-load simulation (λ = 0.10) comparing FCFS and NSF on percentage of students receiving help. The normal-load results show the helped-student percentage "would increase to 82%" under NSF versus 70% under FCFS, significant at p<0.01.

"When the teacher applied the FCFS strategy, 70% of the students would at least receive one help on average, while when the scheduling strategy changed to NSF, this percentage would increase to 82%, and such difference is significant as well (p <0.01)"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• The NSF advantage over FCFS appears only above an arrival-rate threshold (λ > 0.06); under relaxed queues no strategy makes a difference — related
• Code commit features before a help request show no correlation with interaction time, and commit-based scheduling strategies perform no better than FCFS — related
• Choice of scheduling strategy does not significantly affect the number of resolved requests or students' overall wait time — related: different outcome (resolved requests and wait time, not percentage of students helped); same simulation