Your assignment is to create a questionnaire so that you can obtain a profile of students in your class, a male student profile and a female student profile. Your assignment includes obtaining information on attitudes and behavior in relation to alcohol and other drugs. You are also to study drug and alcohol abuse in higher education, in particular at the College of Charleston. You are going to use the data from the class as a (convenient) sample. You will. study the effects as well as propose methods for stopping drug and alcohol abuse on campus. At the least, you want to make some positive recommendation to the administration and students which will decrease substance abuse at the college. Remember to keep the information you generate in a portfolio to be submitted at the end of the semester.

We will go through Steps I through 5 in the class period today. On the next class period Step 6 will be conducted. Copies of the survey will be given back to the student groups in the following class period along with college wide data when steps 7,8, and 9 will be executed. Steps 10 and I I will be done in the following weeks.

Step 0: Please for two minutes relax and write down your reactions/thoughts about this activity. Include in your portfolio any feelings you may have about your capabilities as well as that of your classmates.

Step 1: Form a group of three to four people around you. A group member should write down the names of the group members on a card and return the card to me.

Step 2: Develop a questionnaire. Decide whether you want the survey to be confidential. Make sure you have enough questions to cover both aims, viz., to obtain profiles as well as the drug and alcohol abuse information. Decide whether you are doing an experimental or an observational study.

Step 3: Decide an ordering for your questions. Does it matter in which order you will ask these questions? Process these questions with your group, share your thoughts. Remember that you will need to write all these things in your portfolio.

Step 4: We will combine questions from different groups to form a single questionnaire and distribute it to the class.

Step 5: Decide what kind of data you'll receive (discrete/continuous and levels: nominal etc.)

Step 6: Survey the class (IN THE CLASS PERIOD) to collect the data.

Step 7: Analyze the data and draw conclusions: To analyze the data, use the tools you learn in the class. Draw relevant graphs and obtain statistics.

Step 8: Compare your data with the college-wide data. Calculate any other relevant statistics from the sample. Compare them with the parameters from the college wide data. Draw conclusions.

Step 9: Identify possible sources of effort.

Step 10: Among the groups, decide which groups have the best reports and suggestions, Ask these groups to prepare a poster, and help them with the preparation.

Step 11: Select the best poster, improve and present it at the poster session of the School of Science and Mathematics at the College as an undergraduate research project for the whole class.

Step 12: Write about the changes in the attitude and skills, if any, you observe in yourself or your class.

The work on this project is done for approximately 3 weeks while the class is studying descriptive statistics.

Direct questions are asked in some of the steps which will help students to understand the required material and achieve the objectives for the course. For example, see Steps IO and I I where the whole class seems to come together. The last poster is not for a group but for the whole class. This will help with Objective 7. The following chart explains the correspondence between the steps and objectives.

Step 1	objective 1
Steps 2, 8	objective 2
Step 5	objective 3
Steps 6, 9	objective 4
Step 2, 9	objective 5
Step 7	objective 6
Steps 10, I I	objective 7

 

Steps 10 and 11 empower students by providing a forum to put forward their own ideas and encourages substance abuse prevention as the subject gets a college wide exposure.