Task One - Identify Research Topic and research questions

Research topic :

Our group would like to study whether hall life will affect academic results of undergraduate students. Educators have discussed a lot about the educational values of living in halls, that it helps students in their personality development and interpersonal skills. However in recent years, there are also comments that students who lived in hall spend most of their time playing RPG games and other activities and hence have negative impact on their academic results.

Hence our research question is : A study of the causal relationship between students’ active participation in hall life and their academic results.

This research is a casual comperative research. It belongs to the category of quantitative research, with relationship prediction. We will study if students with higher participation in hall activities get higher marks or lower marks.

Methodology :
1) Data collection : first identify two groups of Year 1 students. One group is the control experiment where the students are living in their own residence. The other group is the students with active participation in hall activities, e.g. executive members of certain student societies.

2) Collect data regarding students academic results, the IELTS for testing English standard and the GPA scores.

3) Ask the 2 groups of students to take the IELTS at the beginning of the semester in Year 1. Compare with the IELTS results of the same students at the end of the semester in Year 3. A comparison of the average score of the students will be used for analysis.

4) By the same token, we will compare the average score of GPA of the 2 groups of students for each semester from Year 1 to Year 3.

5) It is hoped that using some statistical package like SPSS, we can find the relationship between academic results and hall life.