Coasting Through Class: Learning Opportunity Loss from Time Leakage During Individual Seatwork

Measures of disengagement provide insights into unproductive use of learning opportunities. While measures such as gaming the system, wheel-spinning, and mind-wandering capture important aspects of learner behavior, avoiding engagement altogether remains relatively understudied. Beyond measures like idle time or off-task behavior, little is known about opportunity loss from task avoidance. This study addresses this gap by combining two new session-level measures (delayed start and early stop) with the existing measure of idle time to examine loss of practice time due to task avoidance. We characterize the combined lost time as coasted time and the associated behavior as coasting behavior. Using ASSISTments (N = 1,425) data from two school years, we find that students dedicate only 40% of available classwork time to math practice and coast through the remaining 60%. Of the coasted time, 36% resulted from delayed starts, 2% from mid-practice idling, and 62% from stopping early. Delayed start and early stop account for 98% of coasted time and showed moderate temporal stability (G = 0.73, 0.71), supporting coasting as a consistent behavioral pattern. Even after adjusting for stopping upon assignment completion (early stop = 0), coasted time remained substantial at 32%. Across student characteristics and school contexts, we observe significant differences by gender and IEP status, but not by other demographic factors or school locale. Critically, students who invested extra effort by continuing to work beyond their first assignment performed significantly better on standardized tests. For researchers, coasting offers a new lens on opportunity loss from disengagement that complements existing measures of within-task disengagement. For practitioners and system designers, our results highlight the need for improved implementation norms and platform affordances that encourage sustained engagement throughout allocated practice time.