Cumulative Compensatory Assessment in Engineering Education

Procrastination – delaying the start or completion of intended work – is extremely common among higher education students. The situation in Materials Science 1 course is a point in case. Students in this course tended to postpone their learning activities until just before the end-of-course assessment. This academic procrastination was problematic because it reduced the effectiveness of the teachers instruction. Specifically, the classes and lessons scheduled in the seven-week Materials Science 1 course feature tasks and exercises designed to produce meaningful knowledge. However, these were considerably less worthwhile when students came unprepared. To prevent this negative effect of academic procrastination, an intervention was designed that should promote retrieval practice and spaced study, and its impact on academic performance was assessed in a randomized field experiment. This article reports on the nature of the intervention and the outcomes of the experiment.