EDT 180A Research Report

Group 3: Dayna Vasquez, Kelli Owens, Whitney Brown

EDT 180: MWF 11:50-12:40

Gary Lewallen

April 23rd 2018

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Introduction

For this research project, we decided to analyze the amount of academic rigor that

students perceived according to the college or school that they were enrolled in. In order to do

this, we asked a series of questions relating to this: “What year are you in currently?”, “What

school/college are you in?”, “Do you have a learning disability?”, “How hard are your current

classes on a scale of 1-5?”, “What is your cumulative GPA?”, “How many credit hours are you

taking?”.

We collected the data using Google forms, and got 146 responses. We then analyzed the

data, comparing the questions to each other. Even though we tried to have data for many

colleges, there was not enough data for all of them. Since most of the people who answered our

survey were part of two colleges, we ended up having to compare just those: the College of

Liberal Arts and Sciences with the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.

After analyzing the data by comparing our different categories, we created charts of the

most important comparisons. Some of these are the average GPA depending on the college the

students are enrolled in, difficulty depending on their year (freshman, sophomore, and so on),

difficulty depending on the existence of learning disabilities, and more. Below is the description

of all of these graphs, as well as the final analysis.

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Discussion

These graphs show the difficulty students perceived of their required classes, depending on the

school/college they were enrolled in. As stated before, these graphs only show the data we

collected from two schools/colleges out of the 6 we surveyed for -- the School of Liberal Arts

and Sciences and the Teachers college, Mary Lou Fulton -- because the gap in attendance

between the other schools/colleges was so large. From these graphs, we can conclude that

students who attend both of these colleges perceived the average difficulty of their required

courses to be from 3 to 5, with the most popular answer being a 3.

Difficulty v.s. Learning Disabilities and Difficulty v.s. Class

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The graph on the left shows us the perceived difficulty of classes associated with the existence of

learning disabilities. As we can conclude from this graph, the majority of students who attend

these colleges, do not have a learning disability, and they would still rate there rigor a 3 out of 5

for difficulty. For students that do not have a learning disability, the perceived difficulty of their

classes is around a 3.

The graph on the right shows the average difficulty from 0-5 based on grade or graduating class.

From this graph we can see that most people said that the average difficulty for most classes is a

3 out of 5. We can also see that graduate students find their course work slightly harder than

other students, and Post-Bacc students find their classes to be easy. Freshman, Sophomores and

Juniors however have a similar perception of difficulty, which is around 3, while Seniors find

their classes a bit easier, at around 2.

Average GPA v.s. School

This graph shows the difference in cumulative GPA based on what school/college the person

attendants. This shows us that people in the school of Liberal Arts and Sciences tend to have

higher cumulative GPAs then people who are in the teaching school. This is interesting,

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considering the data we collected about difficulty showed that people in the teaching school

found there coursework typically easier than the students in the school of Liberal Arts and

Sciences.

Hours Worked v.s. school

This graph shows us the average amount of hours worked by students weekly. From this graph

we can conclude that students in the Liberal Arts and Science college typically work an average

of 13 hours a week along with their school work. While students in the Teachers college work an

average of 11 hours a week. This is interesting considering that students in the teachers college

find their classes typically easier than the other students, but they are working less hours a week.

Average Credits v.s. Difficulty

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In this graph, we see the relationship between difficulty and the amount of credits that the

students are taking. Students who rated the difficulty of their classes as a 1, are taking an average

of 14 credits, the ones who rated them as a 2, 3, or 5 are taking an average of 16 credits, while

students who rated the difficulty as a 4 are taking an average of 15 credits. Students who rated

the difficulty of their classes as 1 have more time to work on their classes, so they perceive them

to be easier. Those who rated the difficulty as 5 have less time.

Average Hours Worked v.s. Difficulty

In this graph, we can see the comparison between the hours worked and the rated difficulty. As

expected, the average hours worked increase with difficulty, because harder classes require more

work time. Students who perceived the difficulty of their classes to be a 1, spend an average of

around 7 hours a week on coursework, while students who perceived their classes to be a 5 spend

and average of around 19 hours a week on coursework, outside of class.

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Analysis

When looking at all our collected data and after observing all of our charts, we can conclude the

following points:

a. The majority of people who attend both of these schools -- the School of Liberal Arts and

Sciences and the Teachers college, Mary Lou Fulton -- would say that the difficulty of

their courses averages to about a 3 out of 5.

b. The majority of students who attend these colleges do not have a learning disability, and

they would still rate there rigor a 3 out of 5 for difficulty.

c. Graduate students find their course work slightly harder than other students, but they

typically have similar cumulative GPAs.

d. People in the school of Liberal Arts and Sciences tend to have higher cumulative GPAs

than people who are in the teaching school, even though they find their classes harder

compared to the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.

e. Students in the Liberal Arts and Science college typically work an average of 13 hours a

week, two more hours than the average of 11 hours a week for students in the Teachers

College.

f. Students who rated their class difficulty as a 1, are taking less credits, so they have more

time to work on them outside of class.

g. The average hours worked outside of class increases with difficulty. They either rate their

classes as more difficult because they require more hours to keep up with their classes, or

they work on them more because they try to get a good grade despite the difficulty.

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Some other questions that come to mind now that we're finished with this research are: “What

specific classes do you find most challenging?”, “Do you think your learning disability makes

your classes harder?” and “Do the class and hours worked weekly affect your GPA in any

way?”. If we were to do this again, We would ask these questions during our survey so we could

have more in depth data.

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