The Impact of Students’ Temporal Perspectives on Time-On-Task and Learning Performance in Game Based Learning

Time Factor On Game Based Learning

Time is one of the most common words used in education without characterizing the scope and nature of time. From objective time to subjective perception of time at both the individual and collaborative level, the concept of time has been defined and perceived in many forms. In educational contexts, the time factor is an implicit transversal perspective that some approaches have tried to make explicit through defining different typologies of academic time (Gros, Barberá, & Kirschner, 2010). Learners’ time can therefore be considered from a students’ time use perspective aiming to identify their temporal resources and their time management competencies; in this temporal approach of the time-on-task focus on the students’ time as a limited temporal resource that could be allocated to the learning activity. In educational activities, the time factor could be also considered as the temporal regulation of the students’ academic time (Romero, 2010) considering the external regulation, the self-regulation, the co-regulation and the socially-shared regulation. In a more intra psychological perspective, the students’ time could be considered from the psychological perspective, such as the students’ orientation to multitask or polychronism (Kaufman-Scarborough & Lindquist, 1999) or their Temporal Perspectives (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), defined as the way individuals and cultures divide their experience into different temporal categories: past, present and future.