Relationship between time management and class attendance in university students: clustering techniques for detection of profiles

Abstract

Low class attendance by university students is one of the factors that may be related to abandonment ratios, which constitute a serious socio-economic issue. The aim of this work is to confront the influence of the time management capacity of first-year students with their class attendance. With a factorial analysis of a survey carried out, four factors emerged: the students' perception of how they manage their time, the time they spend on less productive tasks, the ability to finish tasks on time and the use of time management tools. Moreover, with classification trees it was seen that students who are able to finish the tasks on time, have a greater capacity for concentration and spend less time on trivial tasks, have higher class attendance. With these profiles identified, it is expected to guide them to improve their time management, increase their class attendance and, as a consequence, decrease dropout rates.