I find the first study a bit concerning. If students feel like they're being tracked every hour of every day by their tutor, that's not going to do wonders for already enormous levels of stress and anxiety in the student population. Personally, I always begin my assignments as soon as possible, but I still work on them until the last minute to get them as good as possible and I don't really want my tutor to know that sometimes I finished it at 3 a.m. on the morning of the deadline, or be able to see the initial poor-quality drafts. One of the points of university is to get used to independence: tutors aren't high school teachers that have to make sure you work on their assignments during specific times and regularly check on your progress. — Bilorv (talk) 12:12, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that creating more pressure can be a bad thing! But I also think it can be edifying for instructors to be able to see how students are spending their time, to help them structure assignments or understand how much time their assignments take. I wonder if it comes down to how grades are assessed and how instructors communicate about how the data will be used. Groceryheist (talk) 22:23, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It depends on how we define the usefulness and how we can measure it ;) If we're talking about popularity measures, such as number of readers or authors, they are more suitable for relevance dimension. --Lewoniewski (talk) 20:31, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Bilorv As a high school student, I can confidently say that even thinking about that amount of stress makes me feel stressed. Also, I'm confused about how exactly procastination is "ethically questionable"? That description is something I'd expect to see for other serious academic problems (like plagiarism, which is definitely ethically questionable 'cuz it's intellectual theft). Clovermoss (talk) 01:23, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The abstract quoted in the "Shocks make both newcomers and experienced editors contribute more" item is all well and good, but where's a definition of what the authors meant by "shocks"? I frankly wasn't even tempted to click on the link in the citation in hopes of finding out: an abstract should include that basic detail: whether they meant literal electric shocks, upsetting experiences, or something else. – Athaenara ✉ 07:50, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's not the clearest thing in the world, but it's there in the abstract: [We study] participation following shocks that draw attention to an article. They give as an example in the citation the death of a celebrity—they're investigating how that celebrity's article changes shortly after that news breaks. — Bilorv (talk) 08:39, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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