On the relationship between study duration and academic performance in students

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to address an educational research question – the correlation between a student’s practice duration and performance in problems. This intends to offer rule-of-thumb advice for students in formulating a particular study plan. Throughout the paper, we investigate such a topic by using data from roboTutor tablets, which provide granular, real-time insights into students' learning patterns. These tablets enable the collection of data on various study parameters such as study duration, accuracy, and time of day, offering a comprehensive view of the factors affecting academic performance. In addition to the basic analysis, we design a few naïve approaches, such as basic 2-dimensional scatter plot and aggregation, to capture any potential patterns in the data. By comparing the results from each of these approaches, we develop an educated inference about the correlation between study time and performance. The findings suggest that while the correlation exists under certain fixed effects, the relationship is not straightforward and is influenced by various external and internal factors such as time of day, subject type, and the individual characteristics of students. This research aims to provide valuable insights into the significance of a structured and scientifically informed study routine, emphasizing flexibility in planning.