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Abstract
Many institutions regularly conduct surveys of students. In some cases these provide descriptive statistics about students’ actual use of course components and the descriptive statistics are discussed using ordinary language. A number of refinements to these surveys are proposed. It is argued that mathematical modeling as used in the discipline of economics can usefully complement existing approaches. A mathematical model of student use of media is developed. The parameters are empirically estimated for an equation expressing the amount of study of a particular component in terms of its ‘essentiality’ and its effectiveness. Thus an ordinary language account can be given greater precision thanks to the mathematical modeling.