Major and Classification
Psychology
Faculty Mentor
Dr. Stanley Huey
Department
Dornsife: Psychology
Research Gateway Project
“Encouraging Classroom Attendance and Engagement in College Students: the effect of Cognitive dissonance intervention”
Project Abstract
Dissonance-based interventions have been applied successfully to alter behavior and attitudes in broad domains of health-related and social behaviors. Such domains of health-related behavior include weight loss, condom use, cessation of adolescent smoking, water conservation, energy conservation, and snake phobia (Dickerson, Aronson et al., 1992). In the current pilot study, the area of focus is classroom attendance (truancy), and student course engagement, which are issues of concern and have proportionate amount of social significance. Research indicates that class attendance and academic course engagement are strong predictors of academic course outcome and performance (Crede et al., 2010). One of the goals is to try and find characteristics associated with class attendance and student engagement. The second goal is to prove that no matter the different characteristics, both student course engagement and class attendance have strong correlations to student course outcome. The sample is composed of 109 undergraduate students, who reported being enrolled in an undergraduate course over the summer and who had attained a high school diploma. The primary hypothesis is that despite participant’s different characteristics, class attendance and student course engagement will be strongly correlated to student course outcome (grades).