UCLA

The study was to analyze how senior high school students used their time (in-school and after-school time), and also connected their use of time to socio-cultural factors (i.e., social class, gender) as well as academic performance. To this end, the study utilized mixed methods, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches, to collect the required data. The research findings indicated that the Taiwanese three-year senior high school students' use of time was influenced by their cultural capital (parents' disciplinary styles, use of time, the amount of subjects acquired in cram schools). In particular, the middle-class students had more cultural capital, showed more active learning attitudes, and achieved higher in school, when compared with their working-class counterparts. In addition, female students also achieved higher than their male counterparts. However, there was no observed gender difference in the disciplinary styles of the parents with difference social classes.

The findings also showed that students created a "double-context learning situation" in an ongoing class, which included teacher's context and student's context. There were five types of use of in-class time derived from the interactions between the two contexts: Regular Learning (RL), Hop-on-and-Hop-off Learning (HHL) (on-subject or off-subject), Self Learning (SL) (on-subject or off-subject), Fragmented Learning (FL), and Not Learning (NL). The middle-class students were found to use RL, HHL, and SL by using the "Time-Stealing" strategy to steal time from an ongoing class to read something on their own. By contrast, the working-class students appeared to use RL, FL, and NL, letting the learning time pass.

One of the purposes of this study was to figure out some possible explanations for working-class students with high academic performance and middle-class students with low academic performance, which cannot be accounted for by Bourdieu's cultural reproduction and Willis's cultural production. The working-class students obtained high scores because of the operation of "anti-reproduction" attitude from their parents, while middle-class students failed in school due to the process of "mutual cultural adaption." In the end, some implications for future research, practitioners, and policy makers are provided.