Do You Consider Yourself An Active Participant In Class Essay

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Our primary Research Question was: What influences a student to be an active participant in their classes? In order to attempt to answer this question, we came up with six questions (apart from also collecting general demographics) we wanted to ask students around the NAU Flagstaff campus. We ended up interviewing 26 undergraduate students. We found our participants throughout campus- some of us stood in the academic student union, the north campus dining area, south campus outside the business college, and outside the social and behavioral sciences building. We decided that this would give us a good variety of the majors/ages of our participants. Our six questions were: 1. Do you consider yourself an active participant in class? 2. What kinds …show more content…
We collected data on mostly Business, Communication, Social Sciences, and Mathematics & Science students. Of those we were able to construct the following tables: “Do you consider yourself an active participant in class?” College Yes Depends/ I guess No Business 1 4 1 Communication 4 1 2 Social Sciences 4 1 1 Mathematics & Science 2 2 2 “Do you consider yourself an active participant in class?” College Yes Depends/ I guess No Business 17% 67% 17% Communication 57% 14% 28% Social Sciences 67% 17% 17% Mathematics & Science 33% 33% 33% Although we interviewed a relatively small amount of students, it was interesting to see that the Communication and Social Sciences students seemed to be more fully active in their classes, while Business students were mostly less consistently involved. Also, the Mathematics & Science students were split depending on each individual. One of the most interesting trends was the correlation between participation levels and their responses to our fifth question: “Why did you choose your major?” Most of the responses fell into two categories, either they were interested in their …show more content…
This varied from a response of simply “the professor” to more detailed “a professor that gives me positive feedback and encourages discussion”. In fact we got that response twice as much as any other response. However, the second most common answer was in fact having a high level of interest in the subject of the course. Some other popular answers were feeling confident in their knowledge of the subject, having discussion-based classes, smaller classes, or encouraging peers or working in

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