An exploratory study of the behaviours of students who turn up late for lessons in Singapore Polytechnic.

GROUP: FORTIS UNION

Title : An exploratory study of the behaviours of students who turn up late for lessons in Singapore Polytechnic.

Date : 9th January 2008, AY 2007/08, Semester 2
Conducted by :
Muhammad Rizwan Bin Radzali (0610890),
Goh MingRui Marie (0628118),
Ng Weijun Luke (0649618),
Gurubalan S/O Nadarajan (0746429),
Koh Yu Ling Eileen (0745709),
Ang Jingshi (0731641),
Ye Yun Hong (0661333),
Gabriel (0716639)
AIM OF STUDY

The aim of this study is to answer the main research question as below:

Why do many students in Singapore Polytechnic turn up late for lessons?


DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS METHODS

This study employs a qualitative social-psychological research paradigm. The research is conducted in Singapore Polytechnic. The research takes a total of three weeks to complete. The research stretches from 14th November 2007 to 5th December 2007.


The forms of data collection for the research are as below:
a) Non participant observation of the twenty students in a class (first lesson of the day at 8am), taking a total of 4 observation sessions of 45 minutes each.
b) Selected informal open-ended interviews of the twenty students taking an average of 15 minutes per interviews.

The forms of analysis used are as follow:
a) Open Coding. Examples of open coding of an observation and interview are shown in Appendix C.
b) Noting relations between variables.
c) Clustering.

FINDINGS

The findings for this research are as follows:

a) The conditions and the causes that evoke students turning up late for lessons are as follows:

i) Types of lecturers
In this study, it is shown that unconcerned and uncaring lecturers always evoke late coming on the participants in this study. They feel that their lecturers do not bother about their punctuality in attending a lesson. When this happens, the students will tend to create a bad habit of constantly turning up late for lessons. Most of the students also would also expect the lecture given would be boring, thus they prefer to attend the lesson at a later time so that they will not doze off halfway through the lecture.

ii) Types of friends
Friends also play an important role which causes students to take the habit of turning up late for lessons lightly or even treating it as ‘part of life’ theory. This is especially so when they encounter friends who are usually late for lesson and behaving, as it is all right to be late, without having good or even proper reason to do so. These peers make them feel normal for being late and thus further normalizing their attitude for being late.

iii) Types of behaviour
Three categories of behaviours are employed by late coming students evolve from this study. They are named as the categories of procrastinating behaviours, delusive behaviours and resistant behaviours respectively in this study.

1) Procrastinating Behaviours
Procrastinating behaviours are subdivided into self-procrastinating behaviours and group procrastinating behaviours.

Self-procrastinating behaviours
Continue to be late for lessons
After apologising, a number of the late coming students will still carry on to be late over the semester. These may include waking up late, strolling to school, taking own sweet time before heading down to school, taking a longer bus ride even though its possible to access the shorter ones and went to buy breakfast or drinks before entering the class.

Group procrastinating behaviours
Deliberating coming late for lesson
On a number of occasions, especially within a group, they will tend to wait for one another at the train station or bus stop even though it is late. They will tend to go and get a bite or a drink before entering class. This is more frequent whenever, it is between lunch breaks or even short breaks in between lessons.

2) Delusive Behaviours

Self Deluding Behaviours
Refusal to admit errors
There are instances that the late coming students would be pointed out that some of the travelling time could be improved or even change. However, the late coming students will usually refuse to acknowledge it by refuting or ignoring them.

3) Resistant Behaviours
Resistant behaviours are categorised into two groups – independent resistance and influencing resistance.

Independent Resistance
Refusal to come early
When given a choice and chance to come early, road and time planned for the students, such students will not take it into consideration at all. They are also ready to take any admonishments or punishments meted out by the teacher.

Influencing Resistance
Resistance in Group
Some late coming students set out to just come late for class. They take effort to walk slowly, wait for all their classmates, go to buy food or drinks and go to toilet. These activities usually lengthen the process of being late.


CONCLUSION
In order to provide the most effective solution to a problem, there is a need to understand the problem thoroughly. This applies for the case of students turning up late for lessons in Singapore Polytechnic. From this study, we are able to analyse the main reasons why students turn up late for lesson and find solutions to eliminate this bad habit. Understanding such problems, lecturers can better understand the behaviours of their own students and give them proper advice. Students will also be more independent, responsible and discipline, and also understand that turning up for lessons punctually is a top priority to achieve good results. Researchers can use it as a platform to study other aspects of students’ behaviours too. Nevertheless, if the students, lecturers and researchers cannot see the significance of late coming and refuse to act on it, this study will remain a research article that serves the sole purpose of pleasure reading.