To: Justin Atwell

From: Adam Boole, Ryan Callahan, Kristen Carroll, Abby Zikmund

Topic: Factors Contributing to College Students and Their Habits of Skipping Class

Background
This research seeks to understand students behaviors in skipping classes at North
Dakota State University. An email-based survey will be sent to students in order to collect
information. Students will be asked to provide information such as their grade level and major to
determine if there is a correlation between either of the two factors and frequently skipping
class. Students will also be asked how frequently they skip class, why they skip class, the
approximate size of the classes they skip, and their grade point average.
A secondary goal is to examine this research data and look for other interesting
correlations that may contribute to the research. We will be performing research on a relatively
small sample size, but hopefully large enough to observe some patterns and trends which either
supports our hypothesis or takes evidence away from it.
Another important goal is to ensure the validity of our research by removing any bias.
This also includes taking the data at face value and not altering it to fit our narrative. If there is
evidence that provides a different story we will be sure to cite it and include it as a part of our
project.
Completed Research
We are in the early stages of our research. A research proposal has been selected by
the members of the group. Survey questions in the format of multiple choice questions have
been prepared. A couple of the questions also include the likert scale as a measure of
evaluation.
Most of the questions are not open ended, rather the survey taker is offered discrete
multiple choice answers. This is to avoid the ambiguity of open ended questions and filter the
data down into concrete evidence. The only open ended questions are questions about GPA
and majors, these questions are not likely to have ambiguity or personal bias that will influence
results.
One challenge was to survey people on the factors causing them to skip class. Rather
than make this question open ended (and possibly dilute the evidence) we decided to compile a
list of common reasons for people to skip and use a likert scale to find out how likely each
reason is to cause someone to skip. One of the disadvantages to this is the possible omission of
any other reason why someone might skip class. This is necessary though, because it not only
fits the necessity of receiving specific answers, but it also allows us to compare the different
factors which might cause one to skip class. Other than this, we have not had many problems
come up during this project.

Future Research

For further completion of this research, the surveys created on Survey Monkey will be
distributed through the North Dakota State University email system prior to the end of this week
(April 1st, 2016). As surveys are completed by the research participants, we will be collecting
them for further evaluations. Analyzing the results will be completed by taking averages and
percentages of each individual question. Further assessments will be determined for questions
that are formatted in a fill-in-the-blank style.
Currently, our research group has followed our timeline originally indicated on the
research proposal. The collection of surveys will end on April 11th to allow adequate time for
evaluating the results of our desired research. Moreover, we will begin working on the research
report after we have analyzed the data collected from the survey.