Study Ties Procrastination to Lower Scores

Waterside School Faculty & Staff Blog

Data mining finds lessons about procrastination

Highest grades achieved by college students who start their homework at least three days in advance

The Hechinger Report

Education by the Numbers

Column by JILL BARSHAY

June 15, 2015

Students scored 3 percent points worse than the class average when they waited until the last day to start their college chemistry homework. Source: “The Early Bird Gets the Grade: How Procrastination Affects Student Scores,” by Hillary Green-Lerman at Knewton.

Many college students say they procrastinate because they do their best work under pressure. And there’s usually no way to prove that they’re wrong. But now that more college students are logging onto a computer to do their assignments, data scientists can sometimes measure what the actual cost of procrastination is.

In one recent data-mining analysis, researchers from an education technology company found that almost one third of the students they studied waited…

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Are We Helping Our Kids or Nagging Them?

Waterside School Faculty & Staff Blog

The New York Times Motherlode Blog

By KJ DELL’ANTONIA

JUNE 5, 2015 1

It’s a parent’s job to teach our children: to do the right thing, use the right words, learn and practice the skills they’ll need to handle life at school and out in the world. But some mornings — after a seemingly endless stream of corrections intended to help my daughter — I end up feeling as if I am sending my unlucky child off to school with the extra burden of never getting anything right.

For parents of a child with any kind of “special need,” reminders and corrections are especially complicated. Prodding a child to pronounce the “s” at the end of the word or to look into someone’s face when they’re speaking or to finish a task or use a developing physical skill — can dominate the relationship between parent and child and become the…

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