Factors That Influence Classroom Participation

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2.2.1 Overview and Definition
Fassinger (1996) defined class participation as the questions or comments raised by the students in class. The participation from the students must be voluntary and not be forced by the professors or instructors. The motive of the class participation should be genuinely to obtain knowledge and voice out the problems that the students are facing. The term classroom participation also refers to the interaction between the teacher and learners, and amongst the learners, specifically in the classroom (Tsui, A. B., 2001).
Active classroom participation is one of the elements that leads to the effective learning and knowledge retention (Tatar, 2005; Tsou, 2005). Without active classroom participation, instructors cannot evaluate or determine whether the students understand and retain the knowledge that are delivered to them. In order to promote and encourage class participation, some instructors make it compulsory for the students to involve in classroom discussion actively by including the class participation as one of the components of the course grade (Bean & Peterson, 1998). In fact, studies found that most of the students did not participate actively as expected (Caspi, et. al., 2006; Crombie, et. al., 2003). Gopinath (1999) suggested that instructors can actually adopt peer assessment and …show more content…

The key factors of student’s traits, lecturer’s traits and socio-cultural norms are selected as the independent variables for our research. Other than the three factors which are selected as the independent variables, commonly, determinants of factors that affect the class participation of students can be classified and divided into two dimensions namely the formal structure of the classroom and the informal structure of the classroom (Weaver & Qi, 2006). The determinants in both the dimensions critically influence the classroom

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