Carl Ahrsjö och Tommy Roshult
With many different elective courses to choose between, a lot of students experience anxiety over deciding which courses to study next semester. The choice of a specific course can have a big impact on the students future studies and/or employment. Therefore the anxiety is justified. At the same time the number of students applying for a course often vary from year to year. This creates issues for the responsible teachers because of the ever-changing resource requirements.
There are several different theories on decision making, addressing the different time related states as well as the different habitual styles. With help of theories on these styles and time states, which were investigated with two surveys and a focus group, and statistical data mining from a database consisting of former course decision data we have studied how the students reason when it comes to selecting courses and which aspects that influence their choice. This gave us a better insight and understanding of the students’ situation and what the varying of applicants to different courses may depend on.
The results of this study show that the students at media technology often have issues choosing between the elective courses. Many students experience that the available information on the corresponding course homepages is brief and therefore they call for a clarification of the course information. Because of this, the majority of the students in the lower grades often rely on the advice that the students in the higher grades provide. The database analysis shows that the grades in the mathematics courses have an effect on which track (and its corresponding elective courses) a student will choose.