Doing time—Killing time at school: An examination of the perceptions and allocations of time among teacher-defined at-risk students |
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Authors: | Dr James E Bruno |
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Institution: | (1) University of California, Los Angeles;(2) Graduate School of Education, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., 90024-1521 Los Angeles, CA |
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Abstract: | “Doing time” is an expression that is generally associated with prisoners who are disconnected from society and find themselves
counting the days and minutes until their release from prison. In many respects, at-risk students attending our nation's large,
urban, inner-city middle and high schools also consider themselves as not being connected to school or society and to be “doing
time” in the classroom. Qualitative and subjective impressions of doing time at school have become the theme of many movies,
books, and research articles. This study extends this qualitative type of research by quantitatively framing time allocation
preferences and temporal dominance characteristics for a large sample of teacher-perceived “at-risk” students at several large
urban high school sites. A sample of normal attaining students at the same school site served as a comparison group. The findings
of this research effort generally support other more qualitative studies and indicate that there are strong preferences in
at-risk students toward nondirected time-consuming activities (i.e., hanging out, video games, watching TV, etc.) with low-directed
to nondirected time preference ratios. Normal attaining students had the reverse pattern, i.e., higher-directed to nondirected
time preference ratios and higher preferences toward directed time-consuming activities that might be associated with investments
in the schooling process (homework, studying, personal development, etc.). Interpretation of the circles test, a projective
psychological procedure for establishing temporal dominance for at-risk students, revealed a general lack of recognition and
connectiveness between past, present, and future events in their life and weak temporal dominance or orientation toward the
future. |
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