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By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Business majors spend less time on course work than other college students, but they devote more hours to nonschool duties, like earning money and caring for family members. In contrast, engineering students spend the most time studying and the least on outside demands.
Those are among the findings released on Thursday from the annual National Survey of Student Engagement, a project that tries to measure how hard, and how effectively, students are working. This year’s results are based on forms filled out last school year by more than 400,000 undergraduates, all of them freshmen or seniors, at nearly 700 colleges and universities in the United States.
Grouping students into seven academic disciplines, the study shows wide differences in the number of hours they put into schoolwork outside the classroom. Among students concentrating in engineering, 42 percent say they spend at least 20 hours per week on such study, well ahead of any other group.
They are followed, in descending order, by students studying physical sciences, biological sciences, arts and humanities, education and social sciences. Business majors ranked last, with 19 percent saying they spend 20 hours or more each week on schoolwork.
As the hours spent studying decline, the hours given to other duties increase. Business majors spend the most time at paying jobs, averaging 16 hours a week, while engineering students spend the least, 9 hours. Education and business majors also have the heaviest family responsibilities.
“Business and education students are more likely to be older students,” said Alexander C. McCormick, director of the survey and a professor of education at Indiana University. “We see a fair number of older students trying to do it all — going to school, working and having families.”
The survey shows that many students fail to use study techniques that have been proved effective. The great majority of students take notes in class, but fewer than two-thirds review them later, and even fewer take notes while reading. Only about half of the students surveyed make outlines of course material, or talk with other students or teachers about study strategies. And about 30 percent do not ask for help when they do not understand the course material.
“There’s a growing movement in the last 10 years or so of colleges explicitly teaching students how to be good students,” Mr. McCormick said. “But too many of our institutions still just assume that students show up knowing it already, or that they’ll figure it out, and too many of them never do.”
Students who are in the first generation of their families to go to college are more likely to use a range of those effective study techniques, though they spend fewer hours studying over all.
The survey does not make public the results for individual colleges, but it does give them to the schools, along with information about how they compare to their peers.
It also breaks down the results by type of school, showing that students at liberal arts colleges on average get a heavier and more challenging workload than those at universities with graduate schools — more reading, more and longer papers to write, more hours studying, and more emphasis on critical thinking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/ed...ml?_r=1&ref=us
Business majors spend less time on course work than other college students, but they devote more hours to nonschool duties, like earning money and caring for family members. In contrast, engineering students spend the most time studying and the least on outside demands.
Those are among the findings released on Thursday from the annual National Survey of Student Engagement, a project that tries to measure how hard, and how effectively, students are working. This year’s results are based on forms filled out last school year by more than 400,000 undergraduates, all of them freshmen or seniors, at nearly 700 colleges and universities in the United States.
Grouping students into seven academic disciplines, the study shows wide differences in the number of hours they put into schoolwork outside the classroom. Among students concentrating in engineering, 42 percent say they spend at least 20 hours per week on such study, well ahead of any other group.
They are followed, in descending order, by students studying physical sciences, biological sciences, arts and humanities, education and social sciences. Business majors ranked last, with 19 percent saying they spend 20 hours or more each week on schoolwork.
As the hours spent studying decline, the hours given to other duties increase. Business majors spend the most time at paying jobs, averaging 16 hours a week, while engineering students spend the least, 9 hours. Education and business majors also have the heaviest family responsibilities.
“Business and education students are more likely to be older students,” said Alexander C. McCormick, director of the survey and a professor of education at Indiana University. “We see a fair number of older students trying to do it all — going to school, working and having families.”
The survey shows that many students fail to use study techniques that have been proved effective. The great majority of students take notes in class, but fewer than two-thirds review them later, and even fewer take notes while reading. Only about half of the students surveyed make outlines of course material, or talk with other students or teachers about study strategies. And about 30 percent do not ask for help when they do not understand the course material.
“There’s a growing movement in the last 10 years or so of colleges explicitly teaching students how to be good students,” Mr. McCormick said. “But too many of our institutions still just assume that students show up knowing it already, or that they’ll figure it out, and too many of them never do.”
Students who are in the first generation of their families to go to college are more likely to use a range of those effective study techniques, though they spend fewer hours studying over all.
The survey does not make public the results for individual colleges, but it does give them to the schools, along with information about how they compare to their peers.
It also breaks down the results by type of school, showing that students at liberal arts colleges on average get a heavier and more challenging workload than those at universities with graduate schools — more reading, more and longer papers to write, more hours studying, and more emphasis on critical thinking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/ed...ml?_r=1&ref=us
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