Students Name: Hannah Ali Students Id#- 813001660 Students Faculty: Humanities and Education Semester and Academic

Year- Semester 2 Year 1 Course Code: FOUN 1106 Course Title- Academic English for Research Purposes Tutors Name: Mrs. Yatali Course Work Assignment- Credit Assignment 1 Due Date: Week 3 (Monday 10th February 2014)

Ian Douglas and Nicole D. Alemann conducted a research paper on Measuring Student Participation and Effort. Their research questioned the impact of attendance and participation within the online classroom at the tertiary level, on a students overall grade. They hypothesised, based on previous studies, that attendance and participation has affected a students overall grade at the tertiary level face to face classroom but may differ within a flexible online classroom. A Masters programme in Library and Programming class of thirty two (32) students were used as the sample population. However, two students were omitted from the study, one student dropped out during the course, the other was a teachers assistant, who worked closely with the professor, doing research. Therefore leaving a sample population of thirty (30). The course required attendance and participation on twelve consecutive Mondays for two hours. The attendance and participation was measured by the contributions to class discussion (inclusive of question), the number emails that were sent to the lecturer, the number of posts on the discussion board were counted (only voluntary posts were counted), the number of visits that were paid to the course website. Students participation and attendance when calculated the highest level of participation being eighty nine (89), the lowest thirteen (13) and the average thirty three point three (33.3). The website clicks were calculated separately because of the belief that students would use the website knowing they were being monitoring or while navigating committed a mistake by clicking on the course. The highest web clicks were 5017, the lowest 1460 and the average being 2871. The class was then split into two groups those who scored the mean in participation and attendance and those scoring below. Students who scored the mean and above surpassed those who scored below the average out of 20 was 16.85, highest being 20 and the lowest 7, when their participation was added to their final marks. Therefore it can be concluded that the monitoring of a students and participation within a tertiary level class or course greatly impacts upon their overall grade. Those who made very little attempt or none whatsoever allowed for poor grades whereas those who were consistent and made an effort benefited greatly from the course.