Why am I giving this information?
It is election season, and as a teacher, I realized I had some data that could give some insight into what students care about.
Set up
I will give you some data based on the classes I taught between 20, 2023, and 2024 in public speaking specifically. The focus is on the final speech.
Schools
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- The College where I had 12 classes and 168 students completing the final assignment.
- The university had four classes, and 50 students had completed the final assignment.
Demographic
I teach students who are 15 years old and up. My mom started at both schools when she was over 70.
Both schools are Hispanic-serving institutions, and the College has international students from various countries.
Assignment
A call-to-action speech is designed to provide evidence and information to convince the audience to do something once the information is presented. Some examples of calls to action would be to vote, contact a representative, and sign a petition.
The students are instructed to find a topic that interests them and develop three main ideas. They should then apply research that includes at least five peer-reviewed journal articles and three outside sources.
Methods/Analysis
The assignment required a complete sentence outline, which I used for the analysis.
I analyzed the main ideas by putting them into a spreadsheet and included the three main ideas for each.
I analyzed the data to create logical categories. This process was not clean because some topics overlapped.
Results
I created 11 categories where five or more students had a related topic. To make this fun, I will discuss categories 8 – 11 tomorrow and then move from 7 to number 1 in the following seven days.
I would not say this data is generalizable to the larger population, but there were enough students that we might look at what students care about in Denver, Colorado, from the Spring of 2023 to the summer of 2024.
What do you think are the top issues?