Students Time Use Research – STUR

Several factors lead to consider that the temporal organization of students is a major object of analysis, necessarily multidisciplinary. The student community has, more than other groups, a great liberty in terms of time budget allocation. This temporal organization, according to the time devoted to different activities, maintains close links with learning, academic success, health and quality of life. Above all, the progression, within higher academic education, of hybrid forms of transmission of knowledge (combinations of face-to-face, distance learning, independent learning, etc.), renews questions relating to temporal and spatial organization, to the conditions of learning and success, student QoL (Quality of Life) and health in the broadest sense. Under these conditions, STUR is an exploratory and experimental project, which has three complementary components:
- It proposes innovations in terms of the methodologies deployed (e.g., the use of electronic activity diaries), favoring a triangulation of methods and making it possible to deepen understanding the processes at work in the temporal organization of activities. These constituent elements of time are essential to the knowledge of phenomena related to the activities affecting physical and mental health, as well as learning;
- It is multidisciplinary and organized in such a way that it allows all disciplines to work together, with their own contributions, on original data. The objective is to produce new knowledge on interrelated phenomena (learning strategies, use of time budget, feeling of efficiency, motivations, eating behaviors, sports practices and sleep), which affect academic performance and learning, QoL and well-being, and health;
- Finally, STUR is clearly oriented towards national and local practices and policies and towards the different communities of higher education (HE) at the university level. The results will be returned to HE stakeholders (Universities, Crous, university health services, Mutuals, etc.). They are used to support hybridization policies for HE courses, and more generally in the organization of student work. All STUR teams have already worked on the student community, training hybridization, temporal allocation phenomena, quality of life and well-being, learning strategies, health, circadian rhythms and feeding, and on supervised classification methods as well as unsupervised automatic ones used by the “Maxwell” classifier.