FYI from the Chicago Tribune (via Terry Kinnear)
College student devotion to homework
debated
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By Ann R. Martin
Special to the Chicago Tribune
January 4, 2004
Banish that image of a solitary college student huddled over a desk
laboring into the wee hours of the morning. It may be obsolete.
A national survey indicates that the majority of undergraduates are not
devoting long hours to doing their homework--at least not as many hours
as most educators seem to think they should.
Some educators find that cause for concern and are tackling the issue
head-on. Other people, including some students, say tracking time is not
an effective way to measure learning.
For many students, especially those fresh out of high school, the
college professor's concept of how much time an undergraduate should
spend on homework may come as a shock.
"If there is an academic mantra, it is at least two hours of study time
for every hour that class meets," said George Kuh, director of the
National Survey of Student Engagement and a professor of higher
education at Indiana University at Bloomington.
"If you think of full-time students spending 14 to 15 hours a week in
class, that would be around 28 to 30 hours [preparing for class] a
week."
The survey is a project sponsored by several educational and charitable
institutions that conduct research on education issues.
"Holy cow, that's a lot of homework," said Chris Burton, a freshman at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reacting to those
numbers.
Burton, who has not declared a major, said he is still learning to
budget his time to put in the 13 to 18 hours a week of preparation that
his classes seem to require. Yet he feels that he's working hard and
usually is well prepared for class. He is not alone.
"I don't understand how that would be necessary if you are doing your
work well and you stay caught up," responded Abigael Drew, a transfer
student in her third semester as an English and social science major at
Alverno College, a private women's college in Milwaukee, Wis. She
devotes about 10 to 12 hours a week to reading, writing, doing field
research projects, and joining in collaborative study outside of class.
"I'm always prepared for class," she said.
According to the survey, Burton and Drew are logging more homework time
than many undergraduates. In the survey's 2003 College Student Report,
41 percent of college students responded that they spend 10 or fewer
hours a week preparing for class, according to the survey's Web site.
Only 13 percent reported devoting more than 25 hours a week to homework.
The results in previous years have been about the same.
The survey, which has been conducted annually since 2000, attempts to
measure educational quality at four-year colleges and universities
throughout the United States. Questions focus on how students are
engaged in learning by asking about the types of activities and programs
they participate in.
About 145,000 freshmen and senior students at 437 participating schools
responded to this year's questions.
The results indicate that on average, undergraduates at four-year
colleges and universities spend 11 or 12 hours a week preparing for
class.
"That is far short of what everyone who has worked in education for the
last century says is adequate," Kuh said.
In most cases, apparently, the lightweight study time is not resulting
in bad grades.
"About 77 percent of the students studying 10 or fewer hours a week are
getting `B' or better grades," Kuh said. "In fact, fully a third of the
students who spend 10 or fewer hours are getting `A's.' There's an
uncomfortable disjunction there."
The idea that students should spend two hours outside of class preparing
for each hour in class comes from the industrial era model of the
40-hour workweek, Kuh said. The formula sets up attending college as a
full-time job.
The concept is "insane arithmetic," said Lee Shulman, president of the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Stanford, Calif.
The foundation is a co-sponsor of the student engagement survey.
"How many hours they spend is irrelevant," he said. "It's what they
spend their time doing. The questions on the [survey] that ask whether
students have written papers that are more than 20 pages long, whether
they've collaborated with other students out of class--things like that
are much more germane.
"What I'm saying is if we define the rigor of the curriculum by the
amount of time it takes the student, what that would suggest is when I
run a mile it's a much more rigorous curriculum than when a track star
runs a mile because it takes me four times as long."
At Illinois State University in Normal, however, administrators and
faculty are concerned about how much time their undergraduates are
devoting to homework, said Wendy Troxel, director of the university
assessment office, which tracks student performance. The survey shows
that on average, Illinois State students "hover around 10 hours a week"
preparing for class, she said.
The university has found one reason may be that incoming freshmen need
to "learn how to learn," Troxel said. A freshman survey done by Illinois
State shows that students expect to work harder in college than they did
in high school, she said. The survey, however, also finds that the
students are not devoting much time to homework in high school.
A study released jointly in October by the Brown Center on Education
Policy at the Brookings Institution and the RAND Corp., two research
institutions, said the typical high school student does not spend more
than one hour a day on homework.
Besides the fact that students often are not accustomed to spending a
lot of time preparing for class, school activities and other
responsibilities, such as jobs, may claim a significant chunk of their
time. Many students, however, need some help to strike a healthy balance
in how they spend their time.
Illinois State requires all freshmen to take a three-credit academic
course called Foundations of Inquiry that addresses managing time, as
well as critical thinking and other topics.
In addition, faculty members at universities are assessing whether they
are providing students with the challenges they need, she said. If the
faculty is not giving enough meaningful assignments, the students don't
need to put in more time, Troxel said.
More colleges are developing programs that address such issues, said
Stephanie Quinn, vice president of academic affairs and dean of the
college at Rockford College. The college extended its freshman
orientation program this year to offer more guidance on time management
and learning activities.
Chris Elgin, a freshman majoring in computer engineering at Texas A&M
University in College Station, definitely felt the homework time warp
between high school and college this fall.
"When you first get here, you don't realize how much work you're in
for," he said. "In high school I would spend maybe an hour or two a
night doing homework. Here I spend five hours a day."
Establishing learning communities is another way colleges are easing
students into more study time, said Mary-Claire Uselding, director of
public information at North Central College in Naperville. In addition
to the school's "freshman experience" program, this year the school also
is trying out two communities in which groups of students live together,
take classes together and do things outside of class together.
Such approaches, which focus on collaborative efforts to solve problems,
may be making the "industrial model" for homework and class time less
important, Kuh said. Classes that require participation rather than
lectures inspire more thinking and acting during class time and less
time trying to figure out what the teacher just said.
Students are finding that including study groups in their class
preparation time makes the learning process more efficient. Mark Lawery,
a senior biology major at Juniata College, a private liberal arts
college in Huntingdon, Pa., said that although his courses have become
more difficult over the years, he has decreased the number of hours he
spends studying by devoting some time to working with a group.
"I learned how to study better," he said. "We bounce ideas back and
forth among each other and reinforce the information.
Homework for some students means time logged in practice rooms and
listening intently to music. Anna Sophia Ahlborn, a sophomore voice
performance major at Northwestern University in Evanston, said her
success depends not only on spending a lot of time studying and
listening, but also on daily practice routines. Setting the right pace
is crucial.
"I have to spend at least 20 minutes each day preparing for aural
skills," she said. "You have to drill it, and finally it connects.."
Some undergraduates are so immersed in what they are studying that it's
difficult to isolate the hours that could be labeled as "homework time,"
said Monet Butler, a fourth-year acting major at DePaul University in
Chicago.
In addition to other class work during the fall quarter, Butler spent
four to six hours, four nights a week in rehearsal for the Theatre
School's production of "Marisol" by Jose Rivera, directed by Henry
Godinez.
For artists, preparing for performance becomes a part of your life,
Butler said.
"You can always spot Theatre School students a mile away because their
heads are always in scripts or they're talking to themselves," she said.
"When I'm on the train, I'm reading my script. When I'm on the bus, I'm
reading my lines."
Of course, there are some programs of study and some schools where long
hours of class preparation time are the rule, not the exception, Kuh
said.
At the University of Chicago, many students are high achievers and spend
even more than the recommended time on class preparation, said Susan
Art, dean of students in the college. The school offers undergraduates
help with time management, advising them to take breaks every couple of
hours and balance study time with other activities.
"There are students who spend an enormous amount of time studying," Art
said. "For them this is satisfying and meaningful."
The simple question of how much time college students are spending on
their homework must be considered in the light of many other factors,
Kuh said.
The idea behind asking the question and others on the student engagement
survey is to provide colleges and universities with tools to size
themselves up.
Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune
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