A story in a local London paper (page 3 of today's London Lite) says that a report by the UK Parliament's watchdog, the National Audit Office, reveals that UK professors are changing tutorial times to the afternoon in a bid to stop UK students quitting UK degree courses. The reports says that 28,000 full-time students drop-out in the UK each year, costing the taxpayer £300 million.
Is this the correct way to tackle the fundamental reasons behind drop-out? Or are other issues such as financial support being overlooked in the debate (see a previous post on the reform of UK student loans).
More abstractly, is students do have a preference for a lie-in, should institutions pander to student preferences in order to tackle drop-out?
5 comments:
Some empirical evidence towards both sides of the argument here- Improving Task Performance: The Relationship Between Morningness and Proactive Thinking. "The training was conducted at two different times of day. The results indicate that proactivity and morningness both accounted for a significant portion of the variance in task performance. Also, the training was more effective when conducted at a time consistent with participants' time-of-day preferences."
Time-of-day preferences is an interesting concept - I wonder if there is an intrinsic determination of such prefernce, or is it mostly culturally influenced? The theory of circadian rhythms suggests that our time-of-day preferences should be in sync with the conventional 9-5 routine.
Diurnal patterns of internet use support your theory Martin- Learning and teaching 24/7: daily internet usage patterns though I am actively trying to disprove it!
morningness is interesting - there are also clearly life-cycle trends in patterns of morningness. havent time to dig out the papers but know that adolescents in particular hate mornings with older people getting up earlier and earlier as they age. It would be interesting to factor something like that in to DRM and also to examine whether, for example, people do better on exams taht are timed consistent with their preferences. i always thought that if exams were held at 1 o'clock in the morning that i would have had nothing to worry about. not as silly a point as it seems because i certainly wrote my best essays at this time.
I have heard about those life-cycle trends in morningness before. I wonder what theory could be suggested to explain the phenomenon - maybe the socio-cultural factors which make young people deviate from their circadian rhythms become less pronounces as they become older?
I have been thinking recently about a possible link between well-being and adherence to the natural flow of circadian rhythms. An interesting experiment would be to do the DRM on people who sleep different patterns.
Another interesting experiment would be to see if people sleeping the same pattern wake up at the same time if some people sleep with balck-out curtains in their bedroom while others only have a see-through blind.
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