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- All Subjects: Academics
- Creators: Legere, Jenny
Description
The Downtown ASU campus Bio 201 and 202 anatomy labs are planning on revising the method in which students are presented and evaluated on lab material for the Fall 2016 semester. The goal of this thesis project was to analyze the methods used in previous semesters in order to determine which method, if any, proved to be the most effective means of evaluation for the students. The general setup of the anatomy labs is that the students come to lab, receive that week's instruction, and then are quizzed on that week's material at the beginning of their next lab. Then roughly every five new segments there is a practical covering the cumulative information from the last five segments. Therefore it is imperative to analyze the current and previous methods of evaluation in order to find which one has the strongest correlation with an individual's quiz performance and their practical grade. Since the Fall 2014 semester three different quiz types have been used in lab while the practical has remained the same. The three different types of quizzes are written, turning point, and no quiz; in order to determine which method was most effective overall practical averages for each student was compared to their corresponding quiz average. This data was put into Excel and used to generate a graph in order to determine the r-squared values to determine which had the strongest correlation. The results showed that no matter what quiz type was used there was no statistically significant correlation between quiz performance and practical performance; in fact practical averages were nearly identical between semesters for Bio 201 and 202. However, visual analysis of the graph demonstrated that certain quiz methods did seem to be more effective than others. For Bio 201 it seemed that written quizzes were the most effective means of evaluation, while in Bio 202 the turning point quizzes were best.
ContributorsOlson, Zachary G (Author) / Kingsbury, Jeffrey (Thesis director) / Legere, Jenny (Committee member) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Thirty percent of engineering students suffer from extremely severe stress, which is associated with poor academic performance, decreased motivation, and poor mental health. As a result, new, effective techniques must be developed to improve student outcomes. A potential technique that could be valuable in the classroom is persuasion techniques. There are six primary persuasion techniques: reciprocity, liking, social proof, scarcity, commitment, and authority (coercive and expert). Persuasion has been studied exhaustively with respect to altering behavior (e.g., sales, compliance), but has only briefly been studied in education. Studies show that positive student-teacher relationships can improve grades, positive peer relationships can improve mental health, and coercive power can increase stress. No studies have examined all persuasion techniques with respect to student outcomes, and this study aims to fill that gap. The objective of this study is to evaluate the use of persuasion techniques in the classroom to improve mental health and enhance academic outcomes.
I hypothesized that methods that enhance community and improve sense of belonging (reciprocity, commitment, liking, social proof) will lead to better academic and mental health outcomes, and methods associated with negative professor attitudes (coercive authority) will lead to poor academic and mental health outcomes. To evaluate these hypotheses, a sample of 336 university students were surveyed to see which persuasion techniques they perceived their professors to use and examine the effects of these on academic outcomes (grades, attendance, assignments) and mental health outcomes (engagement, positive impact, stress, well-being, executive function).
The data partially supports the hypotheses, with various student academic and mental health outcomes significantly improving with higher use of liking, social proof, commitment, and expert authority, and worsening with higher use of coercive authority. In conclusion, by teaching professors to use liking, social proof, expert authority, and commitment in their classrooms while decreasing coercive techniques, professors can effectively improve student grades and mental health.
ContributorsPautz, Daniella Joy (Author) / Honeycutt, Claire F (Thesis advisor) / Smith, Barbara S (Committee member) / Middleton, James A (Committee member) / Krause, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023