Understanding Students

Sean Cranston
9/21/2021

Questions

  • How many hours have you been putting into Calc II studies weekly?
  • Are you able to go to Tutor lab between 2-3 on Tuesday or Wednesday?
  • When stuck on a problem, what do you do?

How many hours have you been putting into Calc II studies weekly?

One thing I should have specified more here was if it should include lecture time or not. Since this is a 4 credit class and each credit should have 3 hours of engagement. It should be reasonable to assume most students included lecture time since the average time is about 10 hours.

 Hours_studied  
 Min.   : 4.00  
 1st Qu.: 8.00  
 Median :10.00  
 Mean   :10.64  
 3rd Qu.:10.75  
 Max.   :25.00

How many hours have you been putting into Calc II studies weekly? Continued

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-3

Note that most students are doing a little less than is recommended (12 hours of studying).

Are you able to go to Tutor lab between 2-3 on Tuesday or Wednesday?

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-4

We can see most student are able to meet with the LA. However, 21.4% of the students who responded are not able to meet with the LA in the tutor lab.

When stuck on a problem, what do you do?

  • 5 students mentioned using some type of search engine (i.e. Google,YouTube, internet,etc.).
  • 2 students mentioned using a math calculator like GeoGebra or wolfram.
  • 6 students mentioned asking a person for help like the professor, LA, friend or peer.
  • 5 students mentioned they would go to there notes and textbook.

When stuck on a problem, what do you do?

One alarming comment about the tutoring center.

[1] "I either go ask my friends who have taken this class. And then if they can't help then I use wolfframalpha to help point me into the right direction. When none of that works then I would go to the tutoring center. (the times I've gonna to the tutoring center when my TA for the class was not there the other tutors just didn't feel welcoming. They helped me get to the answer but the enviorment was negative.) "