Time On Task As An Assessment Tool for Student Learning

Time on task – the number of hours per week that our students spend on their coursework – is an essential indicator of student learning.  Based on some fairly alarming data from the National Survey of Student Engagement in 2010, famously emphasized in Academically Adrift, it seems that the profession of higher education has some serious analysis to do in order to show that we are engaging students and forcing them to at least satisfy the necessary conditions for learning – spending continuous blocks of time digesting and focusing on the material.

In my talk, I’d like to discuss the current state of educational research on time on task, specifically as it may relate to chemical engineering curricula and what survey data can tell us about how much time our students are spending on coursework.  I will then present some preliminary data on “time on task” which I’ve collected from two courses at The Cooper Union, one a junior level course on Mathematical Methods / Numerical Analysis and the other the capstone senior design course.  I’ll propose some fairly seamless ways of incorporating this data collection into weekly assignments in order to create a larger body of data on how the chemical engineering profession in particular is doing at keeping our students engaged and working.  I’m hoping this work will inspire others to collect this data as well in order to attempt to quantify the impact of time on task on learning for chemical engineering undergraduates.