What type of information displayed on digital scheduling software facilitates reflective planning tasks for students? Contributions to the design of a school task management tool
Résumé
To facilitate an efficient homework planning strategy, scheduling software tools should take students’ needs into consideration, in order to provide information that is useful for planning homework and that minimizes cognitive load.
In order to contribute to the design of a time management interface that could support students in their interactions with the information they require to create their weekly schedule efficiently, we designed an experiment in which three groups of participants had to allocate 15 homework assignments within a constrained and realistic high-school student timetable. Three interfaces were developed. These interfaces varied in the number and kind of internalized and externalized information elements they displayed: (1) one interface displayed all the required information elements (i.e. the homework assignment title – Math exercise, History quiz… – the homework assignment deadline, and the time required to complete the homework – the duration), (2) another interface displayed the deadline and duration (with the homework assignment title in a pop-up), and (3) the final interface displayed the homework assignment title and duration (with the deadline in a pop-up).
The main results showed that internalizing information led to more in depth analysis of the problem, to more reflective and less reactive behavior, and to better performance in terms of efficiency and completion time for the whole planning task. More precisely, the condition that involved the externalization of the homework assignment title and the memorization of its temporal properties (the deadline) was the most efficient in terms of the time required to make decisions and to successfully complete the whole planning task (the construction of a homework schedule). Several explanatory factors are proposed for this: externalizing the assignment title might have supported working memory, facilitated information processing at a deeper level, facilitated decision-making, and promoted and enhanced planning.