In order to understand the decision-making process that students go through when deciding the best time to use a computer lab and which computer lab to use, I looked at several journal articles. I found two in particular that were relevant to my topic.
The first article, “Seasonal, weekly and diurnal patterns of computer lab usage by students attending a regional University in Australia,” was published in 2007. The article examines the busiest times of the semester, week, and day for computer labs at a large university in New South Wales. The researchers found that the peak computer lab usage occurred during the middle to late part of the semester. For example, computer lab use was highest during the sixth to seventh week of the term. These weeks tend to coincide with mid-term exams and increased workloads, so it makes sense that students would be spending more time on campus computers than usual, for reasons such as writing a paper or researching a topic.
The study also found that Mondays through Thursdays are the busiest times of the week. These days correspond to typical class days for most students. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays tend to be less busy. This could be because students leave campus on the weekends or because they are participating in activities outside of the computer labs. Also, some schools do not offer lab hours on weekends, which means that students are unable to use the computers at this time.
I have not been doing observations long enough to notice patterns of use over the course of the semester in general, but I have noticed that the computer labs I have been in tend to be busiest around noontime and midafternoon, and that there are few students in the labs on Friday afternoons and over the weekend. It is important to look at these patterns, so that college administrators can determine whether these facilities are being utilized to their full potential.
The second article I looked at was “When and why students choose to use computer facilities: a collaborative study at an Australian and United Kingdom University.” It was published in 2008. This article examined the factors students use to determine which campus lab to use (assuming they have an option).
The researchers broke these criteria down into 12 sections and surveyed students to see which criteria were most important to them. Overall, students rated immediate availability of computers, opening hours of the lab, and availability of printing facilities as being the most important factors in their decision of which lab to go to. I have noticed that when a computer lab is particularly busy, students get impatient about having to wait for a computer to open up. It seems that students want to be able to use a computer at the moment they need it. This goes along with the importance of a labs operating hours, because students want to be able to access the labs whenever they need them.
During my observations, I haven’t noticed that there are often long mines for the few printers available in the lab. It seems that students rely on being able to print material on campus. This is especially true when students have a large number of pages they want to print or when they do not have access to a printer off-campus.
Both of these studies were done outside of the United States. In fact, I have had a hard time finding resources about the topic of computer labs and college students in this country, overall. This suggests that little research has been done on this particular topic. It is possible that because access to this much technology in universities is relatively new, research is ongoing and has not been published at this point.
