How Classes Influence Students Participation in College Classrooms

Summary
In this article, a group of researchers tried to determine what would increase the
classroom participation of college students. Their research was intended to asses which professor
behaviors encouraged the most student involvement in regards to the classroom discussions. The
researchers noticed that past research into classroom interactions showed that projects often
inquired about the professors interpersonal style and teaching techniques in order to gain student
participation. The researchers, Hall and Sandler, also noticed that professors would create
environments which could cause a student who was a Women to be uncomfortable, thus causing
them to struggle academically at times. In Hall and Sandlers research, it is important to notice
that they focus on the individual student to analyze, rather than the classroom as a whole. This
helps them to discover why some students decide to become verbally involved in classrooms,
while others tend to stay silent. They then wrote that their recent analysis of 1,059 liberal arts
students allowed them to see how they focused on the professor, but it did not give them the
opportunity to analyze the classrooms participation as a whole. They then wrote that this would
be the major subject of this coming experiment, for they believed it would be invaluable to their
research because student interaction may be shaped by the environment they are in. In
conclusion, the study of characteristics of classes with higher and lower classroom participation
are compared in order to explore group contexts to promote and inhibit participation in the
classroom.
Rhetorical Analysis
In How Classes Influence Students College Participation in College Classrooms, the
researchers appeal to their intended audience by making their writing sound methodical, and they

support their claim with research. The intended audience of this writing could be a researcher in
the same field, a teacher who may be trying to better understand how to teach his class in order
to boost class participation, or possibly a student who may be trying to discover how an
environment such as a classroom may affect their learning. The platform for their rhetoric is
written in a novel, which portrays the research through artifacts and past discoveries. The
introduction of the novel contains rhetoric which gives the researchers credibility, for it mentions
past research into other researchers discoveries, such as when they discovered that classroom
environments were not places which helped women succeed academically. The layout of their
writing makes them credible researchers, for on two pages, their research and data tables are
displayed above the text. Dialogue is used such as Class dynamics and Interaction Norms
which makes the reader believe that these researchers have been working on this subject for so
long that they have created their own jargon. Their writing is divided up into classroom jargon
slang and under each category the classroom and students are analyzed through this term. In
conclusion, the use of classroom jargon, along with artifacts pertaining to the researchers
experiments make them credible to their audience.

Fassinger, Polly A. "How Classes Influence Students' Participation in College Classrooms." The Journal of
Classroom Interaction 35.2 (2000): 38-47. Web.
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