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.