University Students’ Approaches to Making the Most of Their Study Time

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ University Students’ Approaches to Making the Most of Their Study Time © 2022 the Authors Published version Kosonen, Toni; Annala, Johanna; Penttinen, Leena; Mäkinen, Marita Kosonen, T., Annala, J., Penttinen, L., & Mäkinen, M. (2023). University Students’ Approaches to Making the Most of Their Study Time. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 67(3), 377390. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2021.2021440 2023 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csje20 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csje20 University Students’ Approaches to Making the Most of Their Study Time Toni Kosonen, Johanna Annala, Leena Penttinen & Marita Mäkinen To cite this article: Toni Kosonen, Johanna Annala, Leena Penttinen & Marita Mäkinen (2022): University Students’ Approaches to Making the Most of Their Study Time, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, DOI: 10.1080/00313831.2021.2021440 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2021.2021440 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 08 Jan 2022. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data University Students’Approaches to Making the Most of Their Study Time Toni Kosonen a , Johanna Annala b,c , Leena Penttinen d and Marita Mäkinen c a School of Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland; b Uppsala University, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden; c Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland; d Student and Academic Services, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT This article explores university students’approaches to and positions with regard to making the most of their study time. The article discusses how various normative societal expectations around students’use and management of time feature in their talk about how they organise their everyday lives. The research is based on thematic interviews (n= 28) that focused in detail on students’day-to-day activities that were generated with students from two sets of generalist study fields in three regional Finnish universities. The results of a discursive analysis of students’positionings reveal three discursive positions that represent of a variety in students’approaches to make sense of the temporal organisation of their everyday lives as students. The identified discursive positions draw on broader societal discourses and ideals about fast completion of studies, significance of academic immersion in becoming an expert, and optimising one’s time use to enhance employability. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 16 April 2021 Accepted 16 December 2021 KEYWORDS University students; student life; temporality; study time; discursive positions Introduction Discourses on student study times have been enduring themes in higher education (HE) research, practice, and policy around the globe. Approaches inclined to students’learning processes focus merely on students’perceptions of time in the study context (e.g., Case & Gunstone, 2003), or on concerns about prolongation of the studies (e.g., Wild & Heuling, 2020). In turn, many HE policy driven perspectives on study times have currently drawn upon the notion of “graduate employability”, especially in Nordic countries, where the studies are fully funded by the state (Nielsen & Sarauw, 2017; Sarauw & Madsen, 2020). This tends to encourage governments to expect HE institutions to deliver value-for-money, and to set certain employment indicators and indicators related to the study time (Ulriksen & Nejrup, 2021). Therefore, as Brooks (2021) states, the understanding of students within education policy differs across countries. For instance, while Sabri (2010) and Brooks (2021) argue that UK policy tends to converge with the Anglo-American model by understanding students as consumers, Nielsen and Sarauw (2017) state that Danish students are pushed to adopt such an anticipatory study orientation and paying their attention “towards processes of piecing together and forecasting a particular future in the labour market”(p. 156). This study focuses on Finnish university education at a point of time where discussion around study time has intensified. In recent years, in the same way as in Denmark (see Ulriksen & Nejrup, © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. CONTACT Toni Kosonen toni.kosonen@uef.fiSchool of Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2021.2021440 2021), ever more forceful limits to study time and incentives for graduation have been introduced by the state: for instance, in 2014, a state compensation for 40 percent of study loans was introduced for those who complete their master’s degree in target time (Kela, 2021). As noted earlier, another current emphasis in the Finnish HE policy concerns graduate employability. Recently, a new criterion for state funding focusing on the “quality of employment”was introduced, and is effective from 2021, through which HE institutions are incentivised to produce “employable”graduates (Ministry of Education and Culture, 2019). The criterion focuses on monitoring how well graduates’degrees produced in different institutions match their positions in the labour market. In contrast to many other countries, like the UK, discourses around employability have only relatively recently adopted a central position in the Finnish HE (Siivonen, 2017). These discourses have, however, arguably become quickly influential also in terms of informing students’ experiences (Komulainen et al., 2020; Siivonen & Isopahkala-Bouret, 2016). Students are increasingly faced with intensifying and often conflicting expectations concerning what to do with their study time and how to organise their everyday lives: namely, how to graduate quickly while acquiring a broad set of competences to survive in the labour market (Nielsen & Sarauw, 2017). This study focuses on how different and often conflicting emphases regarding the use of study time in the current HE policy translate into expectations that students face in their everyday lives. We draw on theoretical and empirical discussions on time and temporalities in HE that approach study time as an experiential and discursive category negotiated by students in their everyday lives (e.g., Bennett & Burke, 2018). Drawing on interviews with 28 university students from two different sets of study fields in three regional Finnish universities, our analysis explores different kinds of discursive positions that are available for student to draw on as they talk about and describe their approaches to “making the most of their study time”. Study Time and Temporality in HE Research Concerns about study time in HE policy, including discussions related to prolongation of studies, study progress, retention, and dropout, have spurred a broad research literature to address these problems (e.g., Douglas et al., 2016; Porath & Rosenblum, 2019; Wild & Heuling, 2020). In Finland, in comparison to other European countries, dropout rates have not been as big a concern as long study times, slow study progress, disengagement from studies and various time management problems (e.g., Kivinen & Nurmi, 2014; Mäkinen et al., 2004; Merenluoto & Lindberg, 2012). Our research adopts an approach to temporality in university studies that is not focused on addressing a variety of factors influencing students’time use and seeking to identify “at-risk”students (e.g., Korhonen & Rautopuro, 2019), but instead addresses time and temporality as such as categories of interest and as social and cultural phenomena. Alongside discussions on the temporalities of academic work (e.g., Gibbs et al., 2014; Vostal, 2015; Ylijoki & Mäntylä, 2003), research has recently emerged focusing on temporalities in student life (Bennett & Burke, 2018; Bunn et al., 2019; Liao et al., 2013; Mäkinen et al., 2018; Nielsen & Sarauw, 2017). These studies on HE students’ experiences and notions of temporality are often informed by a critical approach that addresses new kinds of temporal structures that emerge in the context of neoliberal policy emphases on enhancing the work life relevance of HE and employability of graduates. In this context, Clegg (2010) has argued that the category of “future”is becoming a dominant discursive category in HE featuring in concerns about future employability of students that inform both HE policy and practice, and students’own approaches to their use of time (also Bunn et al., 2019). Sharma (2014, p. 18) depicts this kind of an anticipatory orientation to future as temporal recalibration where “individuals and groups synchronize their body clocks, their senses of the future or the present, to an exterior relation”. In addition to emphases that highlight a shift in the notions of temporality, research has documented multiple simultaneous discourses that represent different historical and cultural layers pertaining to different contexts in HE. Influentially, Ylijoki and Mäntylä (2003) have described 2T. KOSONEN ET AL. different kinds of orientations to time among academics with “scheduled time”referring to working according to externally imposed and controlled timetables and contrasted to “timeless time”which is not subjected to any kinds of external pressures and demands. Instead, it refers to “internally motivated use of time in which clock time loses its significance”(p. 62). Academic community has traditionally encouraged and valued timeless time, featuring a deep interest in encounters with knowledge. During the last decades, scheduled time and “time of systems”(Nowotny, 1996) have entered the academic world, both faculty and students, requiring a change of focus from the deep immersion with the object of activity towards visible outcomes within certain scheduled time frames. Consequently, also students today describe time as a resource that can be spent, owned, budgeted, used, wasted, invested and sacrificed (Liao et al., 2013; Mäkinen et al., 2018). Students’approach to their study time is connected to the life transitions from the former educational experience at school towards more autonomous adulthood with freedom and responsibilities (Hussey & Smith, 2010). Bunn et al. (2019) argue that flexible learning environments, like 24/7 student hubs, online courses and recorded lectures, work to responsibilise students for their own time management. They found that some students have internalised and are, more than others, ready to align with the new flexible structures, pointing to the importance of recognising “temporal inequity”. According to their argument, structures of temporality are entwined with social differences and inequalities, like class, ethnicity and gender, in ways that result in disadvantaged categories of students to blame themselves for their failure to manage their time use (see also Bennett & Burke, 2018). Changing temporal structures may thus work to create new kinds of social divisions between those with sufficient resources to respond to expectations related to being able to make sound temporal investments and those without such resources. Similarly, Sharma (2013) emphasises that time is relational and uneven; how sense of being short on time and the ideal to be free and have time, rests on a particular relationship to class and power. Methodology This study utilises a discursive approach to studying what kinds of discursive positions are available for university students to make sense of and legitimate their use of study time. Our approach draws on the traditions of socio-psychological discursive and narrative research, and on the notions of discursive positions and positioning in particular (Bamberg, 1997; Davies & Harré, 1990). We understand discursive positions as context-dependent categories, or situational identities that are available for speakers to adopt as they describe their activities, ideas and values in the interview context (Nikander, 2012). Discursive positions on their part draw upon and are linked to broader discursive resources available in the culture. From this perspective, our specified research questions are: (1) What kinds of discursive positions are available for university students from different fields to make sense of their approaches to utilising study time in the context of their everyday student lives? (2) What kinds of notions of temporality inform and are drawn upon in discourses and discursive positions related to study time? Interview Data The empirical study draws on thematic interviews with university students (n= 28; 15 women, 13 men) at the final phase of their undergraduate studies (the 3rd year of studies in most cases) representing two sets of “generalist”(non-professional) study fields: (1) humanities and human sciences (including cultural studies, languages, art history, literature, and also social and educational sciences) and (2) technological sciences (predominantly computer and information systems sciences, and one biotechnology student). The study phase (third year) and the study field were criteria for purposeful sampling (Patton, 2002, p. 243). Third-year students were chosen as a target group because they had experience of studies but were not looking for entering working life yet. Two sets of fields were investigated to capture diversity in academic student life regarding different SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 3 kinds of academic cultures and “tribes”(e.g., Becher & Trowler, 2001; Ulriksen, 2009). While our analysis focuses on discursive positions that are relevant across disciplines, accounting for emphases stemming from different academic cultures plays a significant role. Two sets of study fields can be described along the dimensions of soft to hard and pure to applied, with the first set representing mainly “soft”and “pure”disciplines with a “traditional”academic orientation and the second “hard”and “applied”disciplines with a professional orientation and a stronger labour market linkage (Becher & Trowler, 2001). Expectedly, the first set consists predominantly of female interviewees (12 out of 13) and the second of male interviewees (12 out of 15) in our data. However, this study did not adopt an explicit approach to gender, nor did gender emerge as a constitutive category with regard to discursive positions identified in the analysis. All the participants were white Finnish citizens. Faculty contacts and student union social media sites were utilised in the recruitment process to deliver an invitation to third-year students. In addition, snowball sampling was used by asking voluntary interviewees if they know any fellow students who would be interested in participating. The aim of the interviews was to capture the everyday experience of student life. The interview schedule was organized around themes and included supporting questions to help probing a particular theme, but the focus was on encouraging open narrative accounts. In the beginning of the interviews, students were, by utilising a week calendar sheet, invited to talk in detail about the activities they engaged in during their previous week in study, work and leisure contexts. After this, we probed particular themes of use of time, planning their activities, and engaging in social activities and encounters during the previous week and within a longer time frame, as well as their ideas about their future and future careers, and how their considerations about the future are present and inform their day-to-day activities. Thus, the data gives insight into students’approaches to making sense of their everyday activities and organising their studies as well as locating and assigning meaning to studies in the context of their on-going lives as a whole. The data consists of 30 h 55 min of interview material that were transcribed verbatim. The interview excerpts were translated from Finnish to English by the first author. Data Analysis In this study, the interview is seen as an interactive site for performative construction of meaning and discursive positions that provides a window into on-going legitimation work students are engaged with in various contexts in academia (Nikander, 2012). Different modes and definitions of temporality informed the analysis and provided a frame for interpretations (Bunn et al., 2019; Liao et al., 2013; Ylijoki & Mäntylä, 2003). The first reading of the data was data-driven and sought to identify sections in which students talked about how they manage their studies and their everyday lives and where they describe their relationship to academic studies in a more general sense. The second phase of the analysis focused on selected sections from the perspective of discursive legitimation work: that is, how different approaches of studying and managing one’s time were described and argued for in students’ talk. The discursive reading focused on the ways of positioning oneself in relation to studies and on placing academic studies in the flow of one’s everyday student life. Finally, three discursive positions were identified that inform and organise students’accounts across disciplines under scrutiny. They were named (1) the practical-instrumental position, (2) the academic expertise building position, and (3) the competence and career building position. The identified categories represent a set of discursive positions that are available for students to adopt, in part depending on the context, for instance the topic of discussion or a setting evoked in the interview, and several positions can feature in the same interview. An important feature of the positions under scrutiny is how they are defined in relation to each other. Adopting one position often entails taking distance from other culturally recognisable and available positions, and from the types of students or student identities associated with them. 4T. KOSONEN ET AL. Findings The next data-driven sections present the three discursive positions identified in the analysis, which will be followed by a discussion on how these positions are related to broader societal discourses around students’time use and how positions feature as relational categories and vary with regard to different academic cultures represented in our data. The Practical-instrumental Position The first position identified in the analysis, the practical-instrumental position, is characterised by a notion of university studies as a distinct life stage and sphere of life. The position reflects an idea of a normative life course progressing from education and professional preparation to working life. In students’accounts across disciplinary contexts, studies are emphatically defined in practical and instrumental terms, simply in terms of needing to be completed in order to transition to working life and find good employment. From this position, academic studies are often referred to as “going to school” in a specific sense (cf. Siivonen & Filander, 2020). References to university as “school”can be found across data, but here it has a specific emphasis according to our interpretation. “School”is described as clearly distinct from other domains of life, like leisure, paid and voluntary work. From this position, extracurricular activities, like being involved in student associations, are often defined as non-study related social activities, or sometimes in terms of acquiring generic work experience. All in all, “going to school”is given clear temporal limits within students’everyday life from this position. The orientation adopted from this position could be described as “completionist”in a sense that “going to school”is usually described in terms of going to the university just to complete courses, modules and eventually a degree. The position is characterised by the interviewees placing relatively little emphasis on the actual academic contents of the studies in their accounts. This involves motifs of defining oneself as not being “academically”or “theoretically”oriented, and emphases rather on a more practical approach to studies that guarantees graduating swiftly, in good time. Taking distance from “being academic”can be seen as one of the defining features of the practical-instrumental position. A Practical Orientation to Studies as a Distinct Life Stage The following excerpt by a female information systems student, describing her study objectives, highlights an emphasis on swift completion and transition to working life: Well, I’d like to graduate relatively quickly, because I don’t want to hang around here for too long. I’ll be 24 [years old] now, so I don’t want to hang around here until I’m 30, doing a master’s degree. 1 I just want to graduate, find work and move on. (P24, female, IT) In a similar fashion, the following excerpt by a male information systems student can be interpreted as a motif of positioning studies as a distinct life stage preceding employment and as detached, in a particular sense, from employment and career concerns: I’m not thinking about it [the future employment] a lot in my everyday life. Because I just have …I have shorter-term goals myself. […] I have thought that it’s useless to make any grand plans. I just want to complete my studies relatively honourably, and perhaps after the bachelor degree phase, I will think about it [the future employment] more closely. In my everyday life, I really don’t think about employment. For me it’s like, that of course I will be employed. My attitude is that, of course, I will find work, it won’t be a problem. (P22, male, IT) The quotes above include expressions of trust in finding employment after graduation and not seeing much value in worrying about it in advance. The study time as a life stage is located here before working life and detached from future employment concerns. These concerns are portrayed as 1 In Finnish universities, most of the students are accepted to study both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. An undergraduate degree is seen, in the study fields represented in our data, rather as a stage in the studies than to have value for employability. SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 5 becoming relevant only nearer to the transition from education to work. The orientation adopted here differs starkly from positions –that will be discussed later –where thinking about employment and managing one’s“employability”are given a central role throughout one’s studies. The reference in the second excerpt to “grand plans”, that some students may have, can be interpreted as hinting to an awareness of a “career-oriented”approach which is contrasted in the excerpt by an approach emphasising “shorter term”and by implication, perhaps more practical, realistic and down-to-earth goals. Motifs of Taking Distance from Being “Academic” The next excerpts, from an interview of a female cultural studies student, feature an emphasis on how completed, well-chosen study modules and a completed degree in the end matter more for becoming employed than best grades and top academic performance on individual courses. The first excerpt includes –what could be interpreted as –a motif of distancing from academically oriented student types: “straight-A students”. In the second excerpt, these straight-A students’ orientation to studies and to the use of study time are portrayed, in a sense, quite impractical, compromising living and welfare for the sake of studying. Furthermore, the excerpt includes an emphasis on placing “school”in a limited role in one’s everyday life: I don’t know if I understand […] straight-A students as such, if one has to put such an effort into it [into studying, into getting the best grades]. Myself, I’m not a ‘super-learner’, so that it would be easy for me to get [the best grades]. And then, even if I want to be employed well, I still have this idea that these individual courses […] do not have much significance, rather it’s the modules you’ve chosen, your major subject and your minors [that matter]. [……] Even if education is important to me, I have never been a straight-A student, because I find that it’s almost useless. I rather live the kind of life I like and get worse grades [laughs]. So, this is the mindset through which I set my priorities [in relation to school things]. And then, for instance, I consciously avoid stress. (P01, female, humanities) The next example from an interview with another female cultural studies student also illustrates disidentifying with being an “academic”person. Here, coming from a non-academic social environment is connected to not having internalised the “university life”: Maybe it’s some old habit or something, but I don’t feel that I’m as good and as smart as people at the university usually are. I have this feeling that I may not be as academic a person as others in that sense. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that most of my friends are …Like, I am the only one who studies at the university, and when you spend time with people who don’t even study anymore, you probably don’t internalise that university life so well. (P03, female, humanities) It is possible to suggest that the excerpt above draws on classed cultural discourses, like a (workingclass) discourse concerning the division between theoretical and practical domains of knowledge and learning, with emphasis on and identification with the latter (Lehmann, 2009). Thus, the practical-instrumental position may be linked to social class in a sense that it affords itself especially for those who do not feel entirely “at home”in the “academic life”because of their social background, networks and cultural resources (Käyhkö, 2015; Reay et al., 2010). Overall, the practical-instrumental position is marked by discursive work around what it means to be “academic”. From this position, a “traditional”academic orientation –that includes deep immersion into the subject matter and striving for academic excellence –is portrayed as impractical or even elitist. Indeed, from a temporal perspective, it is portrayed as “wasting time”for useless activities (cf. Mäkinen et al., 2018), for activities that are not seen as necessarily contributing to getting employed. As a response to the broader societal and cultural expectations concerning the “proper”use of study time and making the most of one’s studies, it is possible to interpret that the practical-instrumental position aligns with current higher education policy discourses that emphasise fast completion of studies and transition to working life. From this perspective, the interviews feature emphases on the virtue of keeping up with the schedules in completing courses and eventually 6T. KOSONEN ET AL. graduating. Emphasis is placed rather on meeting the set quantitative expectations within a given time frame than on investing time in building academic or professional disciplinary-specific expertise, or in improving networks and “employability”–which characterise positions discussed in the following sections. The Academic Expertise Building Position The academic expertise building position shares, to an extent, the notion of university studies as a distinct and separate stage and domain of life with the previously discussed practical-instrumental position. However, the orientation to, and the understanding of the role, place and timing of studies in one’s everyday life and life course are quite different. Taking up the academic expertise building position is marked by placing emphasis on academic excellence, on meeting the academic learning goals and professional standards, and on meaningful engagement with the disciplinary contents. In fact, distance is sometimes explicitly taken from merely “completionist”or “instrumental”orientations to studies. Focus is placed on building a disciplinary and professional identity, becoming an expert and a member of a professional or scientific community. Regarding the sets of disciplines under scrutiny, the academic expertise building position expectedly features more commonly in the accounts of humanities and human science students in our data. However, it is also present in a few of IT students’accounts who adopt a “traditional”professional identity as experts. Emphases on Engaging with the Disciplinary Contents and Adopting an “Academic”Outlook The temporal positioning of studies in everyday student life differs in particular ways with regard to the discussed positions. While adopting the practical instrumental position is associated with giving a rather limited space for studies in one’s life, the academic expertise building position often features emphases on academic virtues of deep learning and immersion into the subject matter, as well as transcendence over set temporal limits for study time. These different notions of temporality resemble the notions of “scheduled time”and “timeless time”identified by Ylijoki and Mäntylä (2003) in their study of temporalities in academic work. The following excerpt of a process of writing a bachelor thesis illustrates descriptions of learning as an “immersive”experience, where one can experience having hard time recalling details of one’s schedule. It needs to be noted though that writing a thesis is a particular kind of a learning activity where students are expected to go deep into the topic. However, here this process is emphatically described as an all-encompassing state of immersion, of being “outside time”, in a sense. I really don’t remember anything. I have been lost in thought and written it. There hasn’t been anything else: the bachelor thesis has been constantly in my mind, even when I have not been doing it. The thought process has been going on. (P04, male, humanities) The disciplinary contents of studies are given a central role from the academic expertise building position, which sets it apart from emphases that characterise the practical-instrumental position. The interviewees adopting this position emphasise their engagement with the subject matter and with the particular culture of their chosen discipline. The following excerpt, for instance, includes a description of how the interviewee has past her initial concerns about unclear and uncertain employment prospects in her field. 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