Morning or Evening? An Examination of Circadian Rhythms of CS1 Students

TL;DR

This study investigates students' circadian rhythms and chronotypes in an introductory programming course using keystroke data, revealing typical population patterns, correlations with academic achievement, and challenging stereotypes about programmers' nocturnal tendencies.

Contribution

It introduces an unsupervised learning approach to identify student chronotypes in CS1 courses and compares effects across different teaching methods and cultural contexts.

Findings

Identified typical chronotypes aligning with general population data.

Found correlations between chronotypes and academic performance.

Challenged the stereotype of programmers as night owls.

Abstract

Circadian rhythms are the cycles of our internal clock that play a key role in governing when we sleep and when we are active. A related concept is chronotype, which is a person's natural tendency toward activity at certain times of day and typically governs when the individual is most alert and productive. In this work we investigate chronotypes in the setting of an Introductory Computer Programming (CS1) course. Using keystroke data collected from students we investigate the existence of chronotypes through unsupervised learning. The chronotypes we find align with those of typical populations reported in the literature and our results support correlations of certain chronotypes to academic achievement. We also find a lack of support for the still-popular stereotype of a computer programmer as a night owl. The analyses are conducted on data from two universities, one in the US and one in Europe, that use different teaching methods. In comparison of the two contexts, we look into programming assignment design and administration that may promote better programming practices among students in terms of procrastination and effort.