COM hold Brown Bag Research
0By Callisha Johnson
On Wednesday, April 8, there was a brown bag meeting held in the conference room on the third floor of Record Memorial. This was an informal meeting that took place over lunch. This type of meeting is called “brown bag” because participants provide their own lunches. In the business or communication world, a brown bag meeting would take place in the office, probably in the conference room.
The communication department hosted this meeting as a part of the communication week on campus. Alexis Vescovo and Danielle Smith, whom are both seniors, were the speakers at the meeting. They were informed the attendees about a research project they had conducted in one of their classes. They researched the effects of social media in the classroom and if it affected student’s grades. There were 107 students on campus that participated in the research project.
Those students tend to be on their phones or the computers while the teacher was lecturing were shown to have a lower GPA, than those who were actually paying attention in class.
During the research, they found out that women are more likely to admit that social media affects their grades. Although the research was conducted through a survey, Vescovo plans to follow up by sitting in a few classes this semester and observe students who aren’t paying attention to vthe professor and how long they are distracted by social media.
These two presented their research at the Blue Ridge Undergraduate Research Conference earlier in the semester.
Smith is currently working on another research study about how the media portray women’s bodies.