Giving Students Time for the Academic Resources that Work

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2004 by Taraban, Roman, Hayes, Matthew W, Anderson, Edward E, Sharma, M P

ABSTRACT

Engineering courses offer students multiple resources for learning; however, it is not clear how much time students devote to these resources or how effective they are for mastering the course material. We examined students' use of learning resources in introductory thermodynamics through the use of activity logs, and the relation of these self-reports to objective measures of course performance. Self-report data revealed that students generally favored some resources over others, that these resources were mutually supportive of instruction, and that measures of resource use were significantly correlated with each other and with academic performance. We suggest that knowledge of how students allocate time to course resources, and correlations between the use of these resources and course performance, could assist instructors in course and curriculum planning.

Keywords: study time, learning resources, thermodynamics

I. INTRODUCTION

Technology has greatly expanded the possibilities for instruction. Course instructors can place syllabi, lecture notes, interactive homework problems, virtual labs, and other course resources, on the World Wide Web (henceforth the Web). Textbooks come with tutorials, electronic tools, and Web sites offering supplemental material and activities [1]. Several questions face instructors when implementing these resources: will students use the resources; do the resources place appropriate demands on students; and will use of the resources assist in learning the course material [2, 3]? In this paper we describe a study in which we asked introductory thermodynamics students to create a record of the resources that they used and the time spent with each resource. We hypothesized that these self-reports could be used to identify which learning resources students used, which in turn would allow us to examine the resources that aided learning, and ways in which resources were mutually supportive in the learning process. If these self-reports were successful in revealing what students did and how effective those behaviors were, then they could be used for course planning.

How students spend their time has been of interest to educators since the early 1900s. College educators of the time wondered: "Are they [students] overworked or is college a country club where young people may find rest and pleasant relaxation between social engagements?" [4]. One of the earliest studies [5] was published in 1915 in which questionnaires were distributed to 1,715 students in 56 different college courses. Often, students were asked to keep a careful record of all their activities for a week-to record the distribution of their time in study, extra-curricular activities, leisure, and sleep, but in other cases they were asked to simply indicate how much time they spent in various activities, including study, for the entire week. Variations of the activity log method continue to be used today [3, 6, 7].

Monitoring students' allocation of time for academic work has also been applied to engineering. Ressler and Lenox [3] described a time survey that is used extensively in civil engineering courses at the United States Military Academy. For each of the 40 lessons in the course, students anonymously indicate the number of minutes they spent outside of class to prepare for the lesson. The faculty use the survey results for course management, evaluation, and change. The survey allows faculty to ask whether students are spending an appropriate amount of time preparing for class, and to monitor, evaluate, and modify course demands as deemed appropriate to the goals of the course and program. The time survey has been in continuous use since 1988. Over the long-term it has provided objective depictions of courses in terms of temporal demands on students. One outcome was to reduce course demands from about 120 minutes to about 60 minutes per lesson in order that the course might fit in more effectively with the overall program. (See also [7]).

The research presented here is part of a joint effort of Texas Tech University, the University of Wyoming, and other partners, to develop computer-based materials for introductory thermodynamics. The two primary additions to the thermodynamics course that have been implemented over the last several years are required weekly on-line homework exercises and a CD with supplemental learning materials [8, 9] that span the content of the entire course. The on-line homework and CD materials were readily accessible to all students, and we wanted to know how much they would use the materials, and whether the materials had a measurable effect on learning. We were interested in understanding the use of these materials in the context of a detailed picture of students' academic behaviors in this course. Therefore, students provided considerably more information about their activities than is required in an instrument like the time survey [3,7].

In this study, we asked the following questions:

* How much time did students allocate to each of the learning resources available to them in introductory thermodynamics? This included the materials that we had developed, as well as more traditional academic resources, like the class lecture, lecture notes, and the textbook.