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Vicarious Embarrassment and Reluctant Student Participation in Classrooms

Author
Galeza, Emily
Published
[Erie, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2017.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Additional Creators
Wilson, Carol and Schreyer Honors College
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Open Access.
Summary
The purpose of this study was to examine a group of students who play a largely unknown role in a typical and uncomfortable classroom situation called the Silent Classroom scenario. In this scenario, a professor asks the class for participation through a question and receives no response despite the students knowing the answer and being asked multiple times. Eventually, as the awkward classroom atmosphere grows, a student reluctantly raises their hand to participate and the normal atmosphere resumes. I proposed that the reason these particular students eventually participate is due to feeling vicarious embarrassment, a feeling of personal embarrassment because of the perceived or actual embarrassment of others, on behalf of the professor or ones peers. This study attempted to recreate this Silent Classroom scenario using a first-person choose-your-own-adventure-style story to determine what type of participation a student had. I examined whether the students who are reluctant to participate had the correlates of vicarious embarrassment found in previous research, such as greater empathy and embarrassability, compared to those who participated immediately or never participated, as well as other possible personality factors. ANOVAS were used to compare the three types of students (immediate responders, reluctant responders, and non-responders), as well as the students genders and the gender of the professor in the choose-your-own-adventure-style story. Results showed students who were reluctant to participate in class and those who refused to participate had higher scores of embarrassability, higher scores of chronic shyness, and lower scores on extraversion. Gender differences were evident in multiple areas. There were no significant results pertaining to empathy, however, suggesting that vicarious embarrassment was not the triggering factor in describing reluctant responders behaviors. Future studies should examine other factors that may be influential in describing these students behaviors in the Silent Classroom scenario.
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Dissertation Note
B.S. Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, 2017.
Technical Details
The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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