Within-Day: Session Position in Day and Day of Week

Qualitative comments made by students suggest that they dislike timetabled sessions at the extreme ends of the day, and this is supported by findings of other studies into the links between timetable and session attendance (Kelly, 2011, Kottasz, 2005, Persky et al., 2013, Devadoss and Foltz, 1996, Davis et al., 2012).

Students were asked to list their least preferable times and days of the week for timetabled sessions, Graph 7.

The most unpopular session time is from 17:00-18:00, closely followed by those sessions scheduled between 9:00-10:00. Tuesday is the least unpopular day, followed by Thursday. Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons appear to be equally unpopular, but neither is as unpopular as Fridays (morning and afternoon). Around 20% of survey respondents indicated that on any given day they had no preferences regarding session position, and that all slots were equally preferable. Combining the session preference data with the respondent current timetables allows the potential inconvenience caused by sessions scheduled at the unpopular times can be estimated. The most

inconvenient time for timetabled sessions is between 9:00-10:00 with 12-15% of all students potentially finding these sessions inconvenient. Inconvenience levels decline across the day reflecting the fact that fewer sessions are scheduled later in the afternoon and as a consequence only 2%-4% of students might be

inconvenienced by sessions scheduled from 17:00-18:00 even though this appears to be the most unpopular session time overall.

The qualitative data also includes comments which suggest a general preference for a later start, an earlier finish but also with more sessions earlier in the day.

To analyse the individual timetable preferences, three continuous measures were derived representing the: mean timetabled day start, day end and session start time across the week for each respondent for both the current and ideal timetables.

The value of each of these measures was found to vary systematically by contact hour, with successively earlier mean start times and later mean end times with increasing contact hours. Therefore the measures were adjusted by the group mean for all the current timetables with an equivalent number of contact hours. This adjustment allows the measures taken from the current timetables to have

distributions centred around a mean value of zero, whilst for the measures taken from the ideal timetables the distributions will be centred around a non-zero mean, with the difference from zero reflecting the degree of preference demonstrated by the respondents.

Graph 7 – TQS: Least Popular Session Times

Paired sample t-tests were used to test for significant differences between the value for each measure in the respondent current and ideal timetables. The distributions of the differences for each measure were normal, although slightly leptokurtic, with a higher than statistically expected frequencies of students indicating no change.

The t-tests report highly significant preferences (p<0.001) for both earlier finishes, and for sessions scheduled earlier in the day, but no general support is shown for a change in start times with a mean difference close to zero and a non-significant p value (p=0.441).

This is surprising given that a discrete measure for the number of days including an early start before 10:00AM is consistently lower at all levels of contact hours, and that the percentage of days with an early start falls from 29% in the current timetables, to 17% in the ideal timetables.

This disparity suggests that although current mean day start times are acceptable for some students, others would prefer either a later, or an earlier start time, and that the effect of these complementary preferences may be cancelling each other out in the paired t-test. One possible explanation is that start time preference varies systematically and is influenced by student commute time.

To test this hypothesis each respondent was classified into one of four categories by comparing the mean day start time in their current and ideal timetables with the respective group mean start time for their given number of contact hours,

classifying each as falling either before or after the group mean, Table 19.

Category Current

n Travel Time (minutes)

μ σ

1 Earlier Start Earlier Start 347 24.06 20.31

2 Earlier Start Later Start 178 19.83 13.1

3 Later Start Earlier Start 178 25.79 23.61

4 Later Start Later Start 299 20.6 18.96

Table 19 – TQS: Travel Time by Session Start Time Preference

The mean travel times for the two categories that specify a preference for an earlier session start time are longer than those for the two categories which demonstrate a preference for a later start. This suggests that respondents with longer travel times have a preference for earlier starts, and those with shorter travel times for later starts.

To test if the differences between the travel times in each category were significant independent t-tests were performed between pairs of similar and opposite

categories. The results of the t-tests are consistent with the hypothesis. There is no significant difference between the travel times between the pairs of categories

which demonstrate similarity in preference for start time, whilst there are significant differences when the preferences expressed by the categories are opposite.

Survey respondents with the longer travel times to campus prefer earlier starts, whilst those whose travel time is short prefer later starts. Similar tests were performed to investigate any relationship between preferences for day finish time/mean session time and home to campus travel time but no significant relationship could be found in either case.