A matter of time: temporal influences on engagement of first year university students

This paper confirms the influence of temporal orientation on student engagement as investigated in a survey of first year university students at a multi-campus institution in Australia. The study considered inter-relationships between five temporal orientations (Future, Past Positive, Past Negative, Present Hedonistic and Present Fatalistic) and three measures of student engagement (Academic Orientation, Academic Application and use of Deep Approaches to study). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that the five temporal factors were able to explain between 13% and 34% of the variance of the student engagement measures. Future was an important predictor of engagement for traditional and mature age students, though the influence was tempered by different variables in the case of traditional and mature age students. We propose that developing students’ temporal orientations is a new dimension to approaches in enhancing student engagement.