Semester Countdown: Motivate Your Student with Time Estimates

 

Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash

Ah, that magical time of the year. The time your inbox overflows with help requests. The time when students show up to office hours. 

I'm talking, of course, about the end-of-the-semester push, when students you've never even seen in class before show up on your office doorstep.

Yes, it's a hectic time, but I enjoy the hell out of it. Not only do I get to see how far students have come over the semester, I actually get to see them! This has become especially precious now that I teach my undergraduate courses asynchronously online.

Students, though, are nerves all over, worried about passing their classes. I teach a disproportionate number of graduating seniors, so they're even more on edge than everyone else, paranoid that some little thing might keep them from their graduation plans. In short, they're desperate for any guidance that will keep them from having to repeat my course or, worse, move their graduation date.

The heart of my technical writing class is a capstone project whose structure almost guarantees that students will be successful. We spend half the semester on the assignment, with lots of feedback given from TAs, from peers, and from me.  Nevertheless, they have to put in a lot of work to get to the finish line and there is always some refinement needed near the end. Usually, these are minor, but even when they're not, most students hit their aha moment in those final office hours and can figure out what to do to fix any remaining problems.

This is how my class has unfolded semester after semester. Nevertheless, sometime last year I hit upon an extra trick that not only helps students put the finishing touches on their projects, but that also motivates them to put in the final effort. 

Once I'm confident a student understands what needs to be done and they have no more questions, I rehash my expectations followed by a simple estimate of how much time I think they have left to finish their work.

This has been surprisingly transformative. At first, I was puzzled as to why, but I think I understand now how this becomes such a profoundly motivating tool. 

No matter how clearly I express my expectations, students aren't in my head. They will always have some degree of uncertainty. Worse, most of my students are pre-med. Perfectionism, sadly, comes with the territory. When uncertainty, perfectionism, and anxiety about the future mix, bad things happen, ranging from "paralysis by analysis" to endless tinkering, which inevitably weakens writing.

Giving students a simple time estimate helps to short circuit those negative pathways. If I tell them that I think they can fix the remaining issues in 45 minutes to an hour of focused effort, it reassures them that the revisions really are as simple as I'm telling them. It also gives them the permission they need to stop working on their capstone and push it out the door so they can focus on other priorities. Finally, it gives them a nudge to just get it over with. I've found that they're far less likely to procrastinate if they know they only need to put in a couple hours of work than if they think they might need to put in a full day.

I may be completely off, of course, but I have been completely amazed by how students respond to a simple time estimate. You might be, too.