Classroom Behavior (New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge)

Cristina Villa and Nayeli Ramirez, Artesia High School (New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge)

TITLE: Classroom Behavior

ABSTRACT: The issue of high school student behavior and discipline is a very under-studied area within the world of education. Virtually all of the reputed research amounted to a little more than anecdotal stories. In our first stages of research, there were almost no articles available that could be regarded as serious research efforts dealing with student behavior in the classroom. While this lack of research data would normally bring the doom of a computational science project supporting to study the phenomenon of student behavior, this project actually focuses on the means by which behavior is transmitted from one student to another. We wish to model what could happen were student behavior in the classroom an epidemic. Research in the area showed that students were greatly influenced by their peers. These findings lead us to conduct a survey aimed towards our fellow senior class. We asked questions pertaining to the number of friends they had and exactly how much influence they had on them. After further analysis, we used this data to apply to our model to justify our conclusions. Classroom behavior takes into account certain characteristics that define the effects and results of a certain behavior. Level of strictness of a teacher is one example; susceptibility of a teacher and/or student is another crucial factor. What is the infection rate and other factors in which these behaviors are spread?

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