In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, James M. Lang and Kristi Rudenga discuss combining intrinsic motivation strategies with extrinsic motivators that have come under scrutiny, like deadlines, grades, and punitive course policies. 

These recommendations speak to the moment many educators find themselves in: We’re no longer in the acute phase of the pandemic, where instructors and students are doing the best they can amidst historically challenging circumstances that necessitated changes to many educational norms. Now, we’re grappling with a gray area that’s just as challenging, as we try to decide which educational norms need to be reinstated and which “pandemic lessons” should be integrated into our practice moving forward.

While Lang and Rudenga address several helpful elements in their piece, I was most interested in what they noted in the beginning of their article: deadlines became demonized, but that’s antithetical to how the world works. People are always working within deadlines, whether those are work project deadlines or “life event” deadlines, such as weddings, births, or the ever-dreaded annual (US) tax filing deadline, April 15. 

My own practice in setting up the deadlines and pacing of course assignments isn’t research-supported. Rather, I tend to approach syllabi like a puzzle, aiming for the most efficacious and common-sense course organization for our ten-week quarter system.

It seems I’m not alone in this approach, given that there’s not very much research on course assignment deadlines. Instead, I found a few studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives that were interesting and informative. I’ve shared summaries of those below, but here are my primary initial takeaways:

Key Takeaway 1: Deadlines are a good thing. They help us with prioritization and motivation.

Teaching application: Having deadlines that you expect students to meet is important. If you offer a way for students to miss a deadline, require them to communicate with you and create a make-up plan.

Key Takeaway 2: There’s a deadline “sweet spot”: not too short, not too long.

Teaching application: Break up larger projects into deliverables every 2-3 weeks (additional benefit: scaffolded projects tend to be higher quality!). 

Key Takeaway 3: That deadline “sweet spot” works because it aligns with our brain’s preference to prioritize more immediate tasks/deadlines.

Teaching application: Students don’t want to miss deadlines! They’re learning to balance a range of different deadlines across courses, work, and family obligations, and if they’re in cognitive overload, they’ll default to the shortest and most feasible deadlines. If your course is the one with the big, looming project at the end of the quarter, then you’ll be the one fielding panicked requests for extensions. 

Steffen Altmann, Christian Traxler, Philipp Weinschenk (2022) “Deadlines and Memory Limitations.” Management Science 68(9): 6733-6750.

Article Summary: In a natural experiment on the impacts of deadlines conducted in a dental office, researchers found that changing the text on the biannual appointment reminder cards to include a deadline increased the number of appointments scheduled.

There also seemed to be a deadline “sweet spot”: the three-week deadline was more effective than a one-week or six-week deadline. 

The researchers also tried attaching incentives (a free cleaning or dental kit) to the deadlines, but they found that the deadlines themselves increased appointment scheduling, separate from the incentives.

That said, as they evaluated all the variables, the researchers noted that a three-week deadline and a “large” incentive (free cleaning) had about the same impact in increasing appointment scheduling. For the budget-conscious dentist, then, a three-week deadline is the better option!

Narayan Janakiraman and Lisa Ordóñez (2012) “Effect of effort and deadlines on consumer product returns.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22(2): 260-271.

Article Summary: This study focused on the impacts of shortening deadlines for customers to return a product. Interestingly, they found something counterintuitive: When a return deadline was shortened, the number of returns increased (instead of decreasing as a result of consumers having less time to make the return).

The authors hypothesize that this unexpected result occurred because of the cognitive load associated with the return window: In a 30-day return window, a person might more easily put off the return (thinking, “I have 30 days to take care of this!”), but by day 25 or so, they’ve completely forgotten about the return. However, a 12-day return window might create a sense of urgency and keep the return task at the forefront of the customer’s mind. 

Don A. Moore (2004) “The unexpected benefits of final deadlines in negotiation.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40: 121-127.

Article Summary: This study focused on the impacts of deadlines in negotiation, and Moore also landed on a counterintuitive finding: Subjects tended to think that setting a deadline in negotiation would have negative impacts on the outcome, but this egocentric perspective wasn’t accurate. 

Study participants were told to negotiate the price of an item within a $1300-$2200 range, with the seller losing $1.67 per second of negotiating time. Negotiators were then given three deadlines for each round of negotiation: 30 seconds, 3 minutes, and 10 minutes. Participants predicted that the 10-minute deadline would produce the most advantageous results, but here again, there was a sort of deadline “sweet spot”: The 3-minute deadline was best. 

The author focuses on the fact that egocentrism leads negotiators to ignore the fact that the three-minute deadline benefitted the sellers *and* the buyers; but for my purposes, it’s most interesting to note that the “in-between” deadline was the most efficacious for both parties.

Timothy Ballard, Jeffrey B. Vancouver, and Andrew Neal (2018) “On the pursuit of multiple goals with different deadlines.” Journal of Applied Psychology 103(11): 1242-1264

Article Summary: I was interested in this piece because it aimed to research something that students and employees face all the time – multiple types of deadlines across varied courses/projects — that’s difficult to understand in a systematic way. 

These researchers used a crop-growing video game to create a variety of priority and deadline conditions and examined how participants playing the game responded to that range of priorities. They found that across the crop growing conditions, participants tended to prioritize the shortest-term goals (unless the goal was too difficult).

The authors hypothesized that participants focused on the shorter-term deadlines because of time pressure and temporal discounting, meaning that the participants felt it easier or wiser to just knock out the short-term grows before turning their attention to the longer-term crops. 

One part of the discussion is worth quoting in full:

“There are countless situations in the workplace where people juggle multiple goals, but can only allocate time or resources to one at a time. Most of the time, these goals will have different deadlines. One example is an employee working to prepare a financial performance report by the end of the year, while simultaneously responsible for producing weekly client briefs. The finding that people may be responsive to time pressure has implications for how to improve employee feedback. Our findings suggest that providing employees with accurate information about the pace of work that must be sustained in order to achieve the goal by the deadline (e.g., to complete the performance report by the end of the year) may be more important than providing them with information about the total amount of work to be done.”

There’s a reason places like the New York Times’ Wirecutter publish articles that break up big, stressful, unwieldy processes like moving into a series of digestible checklists: Tackling a move in digestible phases is what our brains need to process such a huge project (the enemy) into something that feels much more doable (which can be energizing!).