Late or Not Late - Student Perception of Performance, Confidence, and Sense of Belonging When Late Submission Is Accepted

In this research full paper, we report on the results of a large-scale study to answer the following research question: What is the impact of the late submission practice on students' perception of their sense of belonging, confidence, and performance, their actual performance in the course, and other experiences in their course?; Does the impact differ by different socioeconomic, and demographic student groups (e.g. ethnicity/race, gender, first-generation, transfer-student status, work status, etc.), and whether students utilized or did not utilize the practice? Being intentional in fostering an environment where diverse groups of students can thrive in a discipline can contribute to increasing diversity in the corresponding workforce. This is especially true for fields like Computer Science and Engineering where lack of diversity continues to be a major challenge. One way to broaden participation and increase student success is the adoption of equitable pedagogical and grading practices. In this paper, we describe students' perception of performance, confidence, and sense of belonging (SoB) when they are permitted to submit coursework past a set deadline. We report on the data in the context of the different student groups outlined above. Our hypothesis is that such practice contributes to improved student performance by focusing on learning rather than grades. Our results show that students highly valued this practice and provided a 4+ rating on a 5-point Likert scale, indicating a positive perception and more specifically perceived them as having a positive impact on their SoB, confidence, and performance. This practice also helped in improving students' course performances. This work will help in understanding the empirical evidence of the impact of this practice on student experiences across various student groups.