PME-NA

Time Literacy in Higher Education: Modeling Time for Academic Progress and Personal Well-being

• In Event: Humanizing and Affect

Description

Time literacy refers to one’s capacity to reason about time in relation to one’s priorities, commitments, resources, and needs. To build time literacy skills, models for time become consequential in order to represent a quantity that is both invisible and untouchable. We explore an intervention designed to support time literacy for undergraduates. We share pre-post results based on the Learning and Study Skills Inventory that show students’ skills improved. Given this, we present a case study of one student and how models for time—specifically, creating a Semester Calendar as a model for time over the entire semester—mediated his activity and decision-making. The case study suggests that time literacy and models for time for this student not only helped academic progress but also helped reduce feelings of stress and anxiety.

Authors

• Darrell Earnest, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Yuhwa Hong, University of Massachusetts Amherst