Sowing the seeds of success: the provision of a personalised study time management plan

To assist students to better manage study-time, the authors took a fresh approach in a previous study deviating from a traditionally adopted personal time management focus to a project management focus. The framework developed in the previous study, later labelled as REST, underpinned this study. One element of this framework calls for a good understanding of the ‘scope of work’ to facilitate ‘success’. To make the scope of work more understandable and manageable, an editable, bar-chart-style personalised milestone-time-plan with scheduled assessments for all courses was provided to selected first and second year construction and civil engineering students. A questionnaire-survey was carried out to establish current practice and ascertain the suitability of the proposed time-plan with respect to its usefulness, style, adaptability, and integration. Students use calendars, diaries, and time schedules but also resort to various ad-hoc practices suggesting the need for study-time management training. The personalised bar chart was found to be more useful than the calendar provided on the online study desk. However, given that students place almost equal preference for bar charts and calendars, it is recommended that personalised time-plans be made available in both formats. It is expected that with further training students may eventually move away from the less informative and inflexible calendar format to a more useful and strategically resourceful bar chart format to effectively manage scope of work