Often times in class, I find my eyes wandering and not paying attention to the professor, so I am creating an exhibit to help me quit these bad habits. I will test both sides of this, with one side being me going in and keeping up with my normal routine of pulling out my laptop to take notes and sitting towards the back of the class, which I feel leads to me being lazy and distracted, and the other side being me pulling out a notebook to take notes on while not having my laptop or any other distraction on my desk, all while sitting closer to the front of the classroom to make it easier for me to see and hear my professor. My goal for this experiment is to increase my confidence in my ability of knowing the materials being taught, not necessarily seeing an improvement in a grade or letter grade, although I will include classwork and quiz grades as data to show how my confidence is effecting my status in the class. I will be setting this experiment up by following the scientific method with my results being towards the end

Question: Can my confidence level in my understanding of the material in my Business Calculus class increase if I better my in class habits?

Hypothesis: If I better my in class habits by doing things such as sitting closer to the front of the classroom, taking handwritten notes, and asking questions when I'm not sure of what is going on, then my overall performance in the class will go up, causing my confidence level to rise.

Experiment: For this experiment I will be sitting in the front of the classroom for a week straight while preparing for a quiz and class assignment we will be receiving to do in class and report the grade back while comparing those grades to similar assignments I received back while I was sitting towards the back of the classroom and taking notes on my laptop. The class is held on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and I will log how many times I am distracted this week as well to compare it to before I started these in class habits.

Monday: Today in class I focused extremely hard on not getting distracted and just trying to let the course material sink in to my brain since we have been learning this material for almost a week now. I only got distracted once by my phone during class and that was by a butt dial from my dad (Thanks dad!).

Wednesday: Today in class I am proud to say I wasn't distracted by anything except the girl sitting beside me crunching on her chips pretty hard (the class ends around lunch time so I don't blame her for eating in class).

Friday: Today in class we started preparing for the quiz and class assignment we have lined up for Monday and I must say that I am feeling pretty confident sitting more and more each day I try to kick my old habits! We will see how it goes on monday.

Data: The verdict is in! I made a 90 on my class work and an 85 on my quiz which is a pretty decent performance considering how difficult this material can be. Now lets compare those results to some similar assignments from a few weeks before...80 on my class work sheet and a 63 on my quiz. Looks like an improvement to me, and my confidence in my ability to learn the material is up higher than ever.

Analyzing the data and drawing conclusions: I think overall better in class habits definitely helped boost my grades, which in turn has helped my confidence in a major way. As we all know, the scientific method calls for me to state some things that may cause this experiment to be falsified, so I have a few of them. One being that the material being learned in the comparison grades is different material, so an exact comparison in the grades cannot be made because one material could be more difficult to learn than the other, resulting in a lower or higher grade. Another could be my desire to learn the material during each week that was tested in this experiment, I could have tried harder in the week that I was trying to not be distracted, which could in turn lead to having higher grades and confidence. Overall, I feel as if kicking my old habits and starting new, better habits has helped my grades and confidence in a major way, as you can see in the experiment. I will continue to use my new strategies in class and hopefully I will see my grades and confidence soar!