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I find that students are willing to spend time doing coursework/studying
outside of class/recitation/lab but that the amount of time depends on
how the course is structured/presented and what is expected of the
students. Around the turn of the century I made it a goal of mine to
structure the introductory calculus-based physics course that I teach so
that students would spend, on the average, 6-9 hours per week outside of
class/recitation/lab working on the course. For a set 9 consecutive
semesters, I included a question on the course evaluation sheet that
students fill out anonymously at the end of the semester, asking for an
estimate on how much time they spent per week on the course, outside of
class/recitation/lab. Prior to and during the corresponding period of
time I made changes to the course designed to increase the amount of
time students spent working on the course outside of
class/recitation/lab. Rounded to the nearest hour, with each horizontal
line of xs representing a semester and each x representing an hour per
week, here in sequential order, starting with a Fall (semester I of the
2-semester course) semester, is what the students, averaged over the
students in the class for the corresponding semester, estimated:
xxxx
xxxxx
xxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxxx
xxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx
Jeff Schnick