COLUMBUS, Ohio - Improving a lackluster grade point average takes more than a few extra hours of study each week. In fact, a study of 79 college students found that a one-letter-grade increase in quarter GPA was associated with a 40-hour increase in weekly study time.
"A lifestyle change has to happen before an impact is made on a student's grades," said Carl Zulauf, a study co-author and a professor of agricultural, environmental and developmental economics at Ohio State University. "A few extra hours of study each week isn't going to do it."
Overall, the study found that every additional hour spent studying per week meant only a 0.025 increase in GPA. "This finding raised the question of whether educators should be resigned to this small relationship between effort and reward," Zulauf said. "Or perhaps changes need to be made in how educators evaluate a student's efforts."
The study appears in a recent issue of the Journal of College Student Development. Zulauf conducted the study with Amy Gortner Lahmers, a former student of Zulauf's who is now with the Ohio Soybean Council.
The researchers asked 79 college students to keep a time diary for one week in the middle of a 10-week quarter. Each day was broken into half-hour intervals, and students were required to indicate how much time they spent on activities such as attending class, studying, working, socializing, watching television and sleeping. The students - freshmen through seniors - were enrolled in one of three agricultural economics classes at Ohio State. Researchers also had access to both the participants' cumulative GPAs, as well as the students' GPAs for the quarter during which the study took place.
Each student also completed the Time Management Behavior (TMB) scale, a 34-question scale that measured time management ability. The questions were rated on a scale of 1 to 5. Each one-point increase in total TMB score was associated with a 0.3 increase in GPA, Zulauf said.
"The ability to use time is positively related to academic performance," Zulauf said. "But it takes a lot of commitment by a student to significantly increase the number of hours he studies."
The students in the study spent an average of 17 hours in class per week, and about 20 hours of study time outside of class during the week. "This kind of schedule is equivalent to a full-time job," Zulauf said. And the current recommendation is two hours of study for every hour of time spent in class.
"So conventional wisdom says that the students in our study should be spending at least 34 hours studying outside of class," Zulauf said. "Either this is an unreasonable recommendation, or students are taking too many courses."
"If a student devoted more time to studying during the quarter, chances were good that his cumulative GPA increased," Zulauf said.
The researchers looked at the effect that holding down a job had on time spent studying. On average, each additional hour spent working reduced the amount of time spent studying by 14 minutes per week. But having a job didn't seem to have a serious impact on a student's GPA at the end of the quarter, unless the student was also carrying a heavy course load, Zulauf said. "If a student can properly manage his time, a part-time job has little impact on GPA," he said.
The researchers also found that the higher a student scored on the ACT - a college admissions test - the more time he spent in class, and the less time he spent studying. But fewer hours of study didn't mean a lower GPA for these students. "Each one-point increase in ACT score meant a 0.095 increase in the GPA for the quarter," Zulauf said.
Contact: Carl Zulauf, (614) 292-6285;
Zulauf.1@osu.edu
Written by Holly Wagner, (614) 292-8310;
Wagner.235@osu.edu
Journal
Journal of College Student Development