You are an upperclassman working with a faculty member in your major discipline. You and

Question

the faculty member have been discussing how to help freshmen succeed in their classes.

One
of the pieces of information that your professor keeps bringing up is that students should
spend at least three hours studying outside of class for each hour they spend in class. This
amounts to nine hours a week for a typical three-hour course. To that end, you decide to
construct a force-field analysis on that idea to see how you might help freshmen improve.
Construct a force-field analysis on the topic described in the story. Once you have constructed
the analysis, write a brief statement explaining what strategies you might take to help
motivate students to study more.
What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The answers will vary; however, the student should divide responses into driving forces
and restraining forces. The driving forces should be those items that would encourage a
student to study nine hours a week for each class. Examples of driving forces might be
improved grades, increased scholarships, better employment opportunities after college,
study hours in Greek organizations. Restraining forces should be issues that would
inhibit a student from studying nine hours. (This list is certainly going to be longer!)
Possible restrainers might be working too many hours, taking too many courses, lack of
a place to study. The last part of the answer should explain that the next step after
generating the list would be to find ways to increase or enhance the driving forces, and
find ways to overcome the restraining forces.