2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A critical component of educating civil engineering students and preparing graduates to enter professional practice is the inculcation of effective work habits and time management practices. This includes working well in advance of deadlines on assignments so that students can devote blocks of uninterrupted time to their work and seek assistance if needed. Anonymous student surveys regarding time spent on related work outside of class typically show that students alternate between two extremes: very little time spent on coursework outside of class when no assignments are due and many hours spent outside of class right before a homework assignment is due or an examination is imminent. This paper seeks to address the polar effect observed in student time use. Is there a motive for instructors to encourage students to work more regularly in their specific course or are student efforts naturally balanced across competing demands? The authors hypothesize that “peaks and valleys” observed on course specific surveys do not fully contextualize student engagement and time management practices. Rather, it is believed that on a macro level student engagement remains constant or increases gradually throughout the semester. Students alternate their attention and out-of-class efforts among their courses, spending significant time and effort on one course’s assignments prior to major deadlines and shifting their focus to other courses in turn. This would indicate students’ use of sustained single-tasking study habits: a time-management strategy generally lauded in literature and management books relative to similar durations invested in multi-tasking. To test this hypothesis, lesson-by-lesson anonymous surveys of student out-of-class time investment in civil engineering coursework are analyzed separately to show students’ pattern of engagement in each class over time. Students’ total lesson-by-lesson engagement is then analyzed collectively across all civil engineering courses undertaken in the same semester to reveal a program-level time assessment. Engagement trends in individual courses versus all courses are discussed. Results will provide insight as to whether additional out-of-class assignments provide utility in promoting positive time management strategies. This concern extends beyond the classroom: time management skills are vital in all industries and an implied outcome of undergraduate education. This study will benefit both graduate and undergraduate engineering educators seeking to harmonize student effort across multiple courses within a program.