Reducing Procrastination While Improving Performance: A Wiki-Powered Experiment With Students

Students in higher education are traditionally requested to produce various pieces of written work during the courses they undertake. When students' work is submitted online as a whole, both the ethically questionable act of procrastinating and late submissions affect performance. The objective of this paper is to assess the performance of students from a control group, with that of students from an experimental group. The control group produced work as a unique deliverable to be submitted at the end of the course. On the other hand, the experimental group worked on each part for a week, and their work was managed by a wiki environment and monitored by a specifically developed software. Positive effects were noticed in the experimental group, as both students' time management skills and performance increased. Replications of this experiment can and should be performed, in order to compare results in coursework submission.