Students Skipping School Essay Example

Students Skipping School Paper Truancy has been a problem since the first schools. In the past, students were punished by parents and their schools for skipping. Today however, with many human rights laws and rules against punishing children (Parliament of Canada), truancy comes with almost no consequences and has grown in popularity (The Independent). Truancy is often caused by the students family problems, abuse and neglect, mental and physical health issues, drug and alcohol abuse, low self esteem, lack of friends, safety concerns and a number of other reasons. Some effects of truancy on students include involvement in crime, more likely to be unemployed, decreased academics, and risk of not obtaining a higher education (GTC Michigan). Truancy not only effects the truant student itself, but also an entire class, when a teacher slows down to help him catch up. Theory  B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) was only concerned with observable behaviors, not the mental processes behind them. Skinner used animals to study how the use of rewards and punishment can influence behavior, which became known as operant conditioning. He performed the Skinner box experiment, where a rat in a cage must press a button for food to be released into the cage. After the food has run out, the rat stopped pressing the button after a few futile attempts. This is called extinction. We will write a custom essay sample on Students Skipping School specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Students Skipping School specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Students Skipping School specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) studied â€Å"self actualizing† people, which is reaching ones full potential, only after basic needs are met. Maslow created his Hierarchy of Needs, it explains that basic needs must be fulfilled before higher order needs become important.  Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987) developed client-centered therapy. This approach focuses on the potential of each person to realize his or her own growth in self-awareness and self-fulfillment. I think B.F Skinners research could be applied to the issue of skipping school the best. Although therapy is important for truant students, rewards and punishments are more important. School is a place that teaches discipline, and Skinners idea demonstrates just that.  Solutions  The following are some possible solutions to dealing with truancy in the classroom.  1. Make students feel needed at school. To do this, teachers can assign certain responsibilities to the students, such as group projects. This way, the students will feel a responsibility to others and may be less likely to skip because they will feel guilty. 2. Use a reward system (operant conditioning). Offer truant students a reward for perfect attendance for a certain amount of time. This may encourage them to attend school for the reward.  3. Make students feel liked at school. To do this, teachers can display students work, be supportive of students, and engage students in group activities and clubs where they can be social and do work at the same time.  4. Work together with the truant students families. Find out why the student skips school and figure out a solution to prevent or change this behavior. This is an effective method because the families know the students the best and can find productive solutions together with the school. 5. Find out why the students skip school and figure out a solution. Counseling groups and guidance counselors are very important for this role, but they must respect the students opinions and statements and work with them to fix their problems (client-centered therapy).  6. Some students skip school because they are failing and see no point of returning to school. Teachers should give these students an opportunity to make up for their missing work and provide extra help at lunch or after school.  7. Make sure that the school is a safe and positive atmosphere for all students. Teach students to respect each other through assemblies and in class work. Increase teacher supervision. Conduct student surveys to find out how they feel about the school environment. Be open to suggestions from students on how to improve the school environment.

The Solar System essays

The Solar System essays The Solar System consists of the Sun, the nine planets and their satellites; the comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and interplanetary dust and gas. It is composed of two systems, the inner solar system and the outer solar system. The inner solar system contains the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The outer solar system contains Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The inner planets are relatively small and made primarily of rock and iron. The asteroids orbit the sun in a belt beyond the orbit of Mars, tumbling and sometimes colliding with one another. Made mostly of rock and iron, the asteroids may be the remnants of a planet that never formed. The outer planets, with the exception of Pluto, are much larger and made mainly of hydrogen, helium, and ice. Many astronomers believe that Pluto was and interstellar wanderer that was captured by the Suns gravity and was not an original part of the solar system. The orbits of the planets are ellipses with the sun at one focus, though all except mercury and Pluto are very nearly circular. The orbits of the planets are all more or less in the same plane that is called the ecliptic. The ecliptic is inclined only seven degrees from the plane of the ecliptic with and inclination of seventeen degrees. Again with the exception of Pluto, the planets all orbit the sun in almost the same plane. The average distance of the earth to the sun is used as a standard for measuring distances in the solar system and is called an astronomical unit (AU). One AU is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. Mercury the planet closest to the sun is at about 0.387 AU. Pluto is the outermost planet, and it is 39.44 AU from the sun. The heilopause is the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space, and it is about 100 AU from the sun. The comets, however, achieve the greatest distance from the Sun; they have highly eccentric orbits ranging out to 50,000 AU or mo...

Analysis of previously gathered individual presentation data Statistics Project

Analysis of previously gathered individual presentation data - Statistics Project Example Part of the test statistics were to compare the performance of females versus males, the correlations amongst different types of presentation. Another test of interest was to ascertain whether the score in body language and voice of presenters displayed a difference in their mean. Generally, with regard to the performance of presenters in scope and Research of presentation, there was no much difference as displayed in Figure 2. However, female presenters registered poor performance (below a score of 2) in the scope presentation. From Table 1 and Figure 3, mean scores for presentation with regard to body language, visual aids and timing parameters were 6.8, 7.1 and 7.1 respectively across gender. There were little deviations from the mean performance across the board with the highest deviation from the mean being 1.62 for the â€Å"timing† parameter. As an assessor, I registered a mean score of 6.22 on body language and 6.45, my highest mean score, on the scope of presentation. My minimum score and maximum score, as reveled in table 2 and Figure 4, on scope and research were 4 and 8 respectively. Looking at Figure 5, my performance as a presenter was not that good compared to my performance as an assessor. This because I only scored 8 points, a presenter, on the scope of presentation compared to as an assessor where I scored 8 points on several occasions: both in scope and research. With regard to the different presentations, representation on technical literature review was on the lead with 58%. It was followed closely by presentation on international business at 41%. The least presentation was on any other test presentation that come a distance at 1%. Borrowing from Boslaugh (2012), we needed to test whether there was mean difference between body language (coded as sample b) and voice (coded as sample v) across gender. As such, we needed to formulate our