Research on Task Management for University Students
Ryoko Fukuzawa (AY 2013)
We usually live our lives with multiple tasks. This phenomenon of dealing with multiple tasks is called multitasking. In addition, a set of actions that involves planning, executing, and monitoring the progress of tasks is called task management. So far, research on task management has mainly been conducted with working adults, and the development of task management tools has been proposed. On the other hand, studies targeting students have found that multitasking has a negative impact on academic performance, but few studies have focused on task management among college students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was twofold: 1: to investigate the current situation of task management among college students and clarify how they perceive and perform tasks; 2: to propose and test a method to support task management based on what has been clarified; and 3: to examine the effectiveness of the task management system in college students' daily lives.
To achieve objective 1, we conducted a needs assessment survey and an understanding survey. In the needs identification survey, we conducted a questionnaire survey among students at the School of Knowledge Information and Library Science at Tsukuba University, and found that many students felt the need to improve their task management skills. In the survey, graduate and undergraduate students at Tsukuba University were asked to write down a week's worth of tasks, priorities, and estimated time, and after a week, the degree of task completion, working time, reasons for not completing tasks, and grouping perspectives were surveyed. The results showed that about 44% of the tasks were not accomplished during the week, and the reasons included low task granularity, inaccurate estimated time, dependence on others, and "lack of raw awareness." To address Objective 2, we tested the effect of feedback on the issues raised in the survey by comparing the achievement rate, task granularity, accuracy of estimated time, and GRO.
This study highlighted the challenges that university students may face in performing tasks efficiently and suggested that providing feedback on task management behaviors may have a positive impact on their task management. In the future, it will be necessary to consider how to verify the impact on performance and how to take concrete measures to address the problems.
(Translated by DeepL)