The Impact of Programming Project Milestones on Procrastination, Project Outcomes, and Course Outcomes: A Quasi-Experimental Study in a Third-Year Data Structures Course

When faced with a large and complex project for the first time, students face numerous self-regulatory challenges that they may be ill-equipped to overcome. These challenges can result in degraded project outcomes, as commonly observed in programming-intensive mid-level CS courses. We have previously found that success in these situations is associated with a disciplined personal software process. Procrastination is a prominent failure of self-regulation that can occur for a number of reasons, e.g., low expectancy of success, low perceived value of the task at hand, or decision-paralysis regarding how to begin when faced with a large task. It is pervasive, but may be addressed through targeted interventions. We draw on theory related to goal theory and problem-solving in engineering education to evaluate the value of explicit project milestones at curbing procrastination and its negative impacts on relatively long-running software projects. We conduct a quasi-experiment in which we study differences in project and course outcomes between students in a treatment (with milestones) and control group (without milestones). We found that students in the treatment group were more likely to finish their projects on time, produced projects with higher correctness, and finished the course with generally better outcomes. Within the treatment group, we found that students who completed more milestones saw better outcomes than those who completed fewer milestones. We found no differences in withdrawal or failure rates between the treatment and control groups. An end-of-term survey indicated that student perceptions of the milestones were overwhelmingly positive.