Kris McLain

Recent research has emphasized that the collective experiences of the pandemic have influenced not only how students spend their time but have also impacted students’ fundamental relationship with time itself. The present study is based on a large-scale survey, distributed to students (n=396) enrolled in two introductory engineering courses at a large, public research-intensive university, The Pennsylvania State University, in the northeastern United States during the Fall 2021 semester. Students were asked to respond to a series of open-ended questions asking them to articulate changes in how they spent their time compared to before, during, and (approaching) the end of the global COVID-19 pandemic. A team of coders then reviewed the students’ responses and coded them for review. The present study results suggest that many students have experienced fundamental shifts in their use, perception, and orientation towards social, academic, and personal time. Furthermore, the results from this study also suggest that these effects were neither universally experienced nor evenly distributed by all students. Our findings provide support for the notion that student time management is best framed as an optimization problem that students and faculty inherently view differently. By reconceptualizing the student time management question in this new light, new avenues for improving engineering education practice open, particularly with respect to the development of more inclusive and equitable teaching practices.

Numerous surveys, both internal and external, have indicated that many students are struggling with time management under COVID-19 conditions, and that their normal pattern of activities, such as sleep, exercise, and studying, have been disrupted. Even prior to the pandemic, each of these factors (e.g. sleep, exercise, and studying) have been identified as critical for student success, yet, to date, there are no studies that address the shifts in student time allocation that may have taken place under the current, unprecedented conditions of remote learning. For this IRB-approved study, we collected evidence of how students are allocating their time (e.g. what activities and for what duration), using online time diaries completed by students enrolled in several online (synchronous and asynchronous) undergraduate engineering courses. The present study builds on previous studies that analyzed the nexus between student activity patterns (e.g. sleep, studying, exercise, eating) and learning to ascertain changes in these patterns that have occurred under the new pedagogical (and broader global) conditions. Our findings are intended to inform human-centered course design, to optimize student well-being, and – by extension, learning – under the conditions of remote/multi-modal learning and beyond.

This article examines the social and political philosophy of Phintys the Pythagorean (ca. 1st BCE – 1st CE). Special attention is given to the tension between the oikos, polis, and the individual in her brief treatise. Through an analysis of the virtue of sōphrosynē (self-discipline), Phintys argues that certain women are deeply impacted by state and social expectations and ought to approach those constraints thoughtfully and strategically. I argue that Phintys aims to convince other women to act in a way that maintains the current social structures of power, continuing her and others’ privileges, opportunities, and responsibilities. In this engagement with Phintys’s work, I develop a nuanced view of the ancient world while navigating and critiquing her complex argumentation and her approach to power.