Abnormal psychology is taught in two sections: at 9:30 am and at 11:30 am. Students who have classes at 9:30 am are more talkative and also seem to perform better in midterms and finals. This suggests a hypothesis that active participation by a teacher positively impacts the results of their students. Active participation is the independent variable, while grades are the dependant variable. Students at 9 am are the experimental group, while students at 11:30 am are the control group. There are two issues with this study – ethics and poor experimental design.
The decision to deprive one group of teacher’s participation can be seen as unethical. O’Connor et al. (2017) conducted a survey in which they established that the vocal participation of students is not as important as their engagement. By denying students an opportunity to participate in a discussion, the teacher can discourage them from putting more effort to learn. This way the control group will have less incentive to provide insight into material on classes, as it will not be acknowledged by the teacher, essentially hinging the progress.
The choice to split the groups based on the participation criterion has a drawback. It stems from the possibility that students at 9:30 am performed better not because of vocal participation, but due to morning productivity. Pope (2016) points to a study that concluded that in morning the mind memorizes better and productivity is higher. Subsequently, students at 11:30 am are more mentally fatigued, which might manifest itself in the lack of participation. This unaccounted finding can render the results of the experiment imprecise.
Provided the success of the experiment, it will be possible to establish a theory that active participation by the teacher in classwork has a positive influence on students’ performance. However, this experiment puts the students constituting the control group at a disadvantage, which may present itself in not objective results. Besides, the overall performance can be influenced by mind productivity during the day rather than participation in discussion.
References
O’Connor, C., Michaels, S., Chapin, S., & Harbaugh, A. G. (2017). The silent and the vocal: Participation and learning in whole-class discussion. Learning and Instruction, 48, 5-13.
Pope, N. G. (2016). How the time of day affects productivity: Evidence from school schedules. Review of Economics and Statistics, 98(1), 1-11.