Benefits of Class Participation
Benefits of Class Participation
Benefits of Class Participation
Petress, 2006; Weaver & Qi, 2005). Participation is a way to bring students
actively
into the educational process and to assist in enhancing our teaching and
bringing
life to the classroom (Cohen, 1991, p. 699). Students are more motivated (Junn,
1994), learn better (Daggett, 1997; Garard, Hunt, Lippert, & Paynton, 1998;
Weaver &
Qi, 2005), become better critical thinkers (Crone, 1997; Garside, 1996), and have
selfreported gains in character (Kuh & Umbach, 2004) when they are prepared
for class
and participate in discussions. The more they participate, the less memorization
they
do, and the more they engage in higher levels of thinking, including
interpretation,
analysis, and synthesis (Smith, 1977). Students who participate also show
improvement in their communication skills (Berdine, 1986; Dancer &
Kamvounias, 2005),
Fassinger (1995a) noted that both students and professors can see the benefits
of
any given classroom who participate regularly (Karp & Yoels, 1976), a
phenomenon
dubbed consolidation of responsibility (p. 429). This finding has been
reconfirmed
decades later in several studies (Crombie, Pyke, Silverthorn, Jones, & Piccinin,
2003;
Fritschner, 2000; Howard & Henney, 1998; Howard et al., 1996; Nunn, 1996).
Howard and Henney (1998) found that about 90% of interactions were made by
a
handful of students and only around one-third were regular participators, while
half
188 K. A. Rocca
of the students observed did not participate at all. Nunn (1996) found that an
average
of only around one minute of a 40-minute class period was spent in student
participation. Pearson and West (1991) and West and Pearson (1994) found that
students asked only 3.3 and 3.6 questions per hour of class time, respectively,
(West & Pearson, 1994). Although instructors, researchers, and students all
appear to
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