Studying and working: The busy lives of students with paid employment

Article: Studying and working: The busy lives of students with paid employment (PDF)

Objectives

• To discuss how time spent on paid employment and other activities affects the academic achievements of students
• To compare the experience of your students to that of respondents to the General Social Survey
• To learn how to design a survey on time use.

Methods

1. Develop a time use diary with the class. Decide on duration of time that will constitute an episode (e.g., 5, 10 or 15 minutes); how detailed the activities should be (e.g., should travelling to work be counted as time spent working or a separate category called commuting? is watching a video or DVD in the same category as watching TV or is it a separate category?); whether it's important to record who was with you when you were doing something; any other data you think would be useful to collect.
2. Ask your students to keep the time use diary for a few days or a week.
3. Have them compare their results with those found by the author of "Studying and working."
4. As a class project, create a database linking the number of hours class members work for pay and their marks, and correlate the relationship between marks and hours. Discuss the factors other than hours worked that can affect a student's marks.
5. Discuss the trade-offs that students make, or are willing to make, to accommodate other activities (for example, work time and time with friends).

Using other resources

Look at the lesson called "Paying off student loans" on the Learning resources site for a tool to help students understand what may be involved in paying off student loans for their postsecondary education.

Please e-mail comments or examples of how you used this exercise in your class.