Does Researching Faculty Improve Academic Performance?

Group D2: Olivia Fratantoni, Sophie Pieri, Benjamin Bisgrove

EDT 180D: Research Report

Gary Lewallen

April 19, 2017

 Is Researching Faculty Helpful?

The topic we decided to research was if researching faculty members before enrolling in

their class improves students academic performance. 77 students participated in our online

Google Docs Form survey. We asked students their gender, academic year, and their overall

GPA. We also asked how often they research their professors before enrolling in a class and how

much the professors ratings influence their decision to enroll in that class. We compiled and

analyzed the data we received to conclude if in fact researching faculty improves academic

performance among students. Our intention was to determine if students who researched their

teachers before enrolling in classes resulted in higher GPAs than those who dont.

The first set of factors we evaluated was that of gender with how frequently students

researched faculty and courses. Since there were almost twice as many women as men who took

the survey this chart can be a little bit confusing. The points Always and Almost always are

most significant as most people answering Always are disproportionately female and people

answering Almost always are also disproportional as they are actually mostly male. The rest

of the chart is directly or nearly directly proportional to the distribution of gender in our survey.

This indicates that females are more likely to research their professors than males.
 Next we determined to what extent the research conducted by each student influenced his

or her final decision regarding enrollment. We organized the results by gender in attempt to

identify the significance of the compiled research on each individual group. For this chart there is

no real identifiable pattern other than only point 3 has a proportional number of male and female

participants, the remaining points do not, there is no particular pattern which we can pick out.

And so this may say more about the education majors as a group since our survey takers were

often education majors, who on the whole, check their professors and courses before enrolling.
 Then we looked at the interplay of class and frequency of researching faculty. Here the

overwhelming trend is towards the Always point of frequency for all classes, also the

Sometimes point of frequency has the second highest number of answers. Since the majority of

our participants answered always or sometimes to how often they research their teachers,

combined with the fact that the majority of participants also reported having a GPA between a

3.0 and 4.0, indicates that those who frequently research their professors earn a higher GPA. This

last fact will be illustrated later.

 We also asked our participants to rate (on a scale of 1-10, ten being the most) how much

researching their teachers before enrolling had influenced the decision of students to take a class.

The greater distribution of answers was 6 or higher, while the lower number of answers was 5 or

lower. This indicated that most students who research their teachers took stock in the results they

found.
 Next, we averaged the collective GPA of our survey group. This was a simple breakdown

of our survey population concerning their GPA. In the first chart you can see the percentage of

students taking our survey within each of our GPA brackets, 1.0-2.0, 2.1-3.0, 3.1-4.0 and 4.1-4.5.

This chart indicates that the majority of our participants had GPAs ranging between a 3.1 and

4.0 GPA, with only a small majority falling above and below this level. The second chart

indicates the comparison between the average GPAs of males and females. This chart indicated

no substantial change in the GPAs, which proves that there is no correlation in regards to each
gender researching teachers and increasing their

GPAs.
 Finally, we evaluated the average GPA of participants as they ranked how influential

researching their instructors were in deciding their course schedule. The findings from this graph

indicated that, on average, students GPAs remained steady, with inconsistent fluctuations as

they rated how influential researching their teachers were. However, it could also be interpreted

by the unusually low average GPA for those who indicated 9 could mean that researching faculty

beforehand actually has negative influence, this seems unusual. This also could be the result of

our very specific survey group.

Conclusion

To conclude our research, we found that on average, females are more likely to research their

professors before taking a class than males, and that as a whole, people are more likely to

research their teachers rather than not. The average GPA of our participants was between a 3.1

and 4.0, which indicated that our participants had generally high GPAs, so it could be concluded

that any spike seen in the charts would have a positive correlation to the students GPA. These

spikes included students who typically researched their teachers before enrolling in their classes,

and students who were influenced by the research they found. Therefore, we can conclude that

researching faculty does, in fact, improve academic performance. However, there are some

things to consider when making assumptions about students as a whole based off the findings

from this research. First, in order to get a proper gauge on the trends of college college students,

we would need to have a greater amount of participants. This could create a better pool, and

therefore display a more accurate trend. Another error that could have resulted in the skewing of

our results is people who indicated that researching their professors influenced their decision to

enroll in a class, may not have positively influenced them. This may produce the opposite

outcome than what we had originally concluded about our research.