Positive Impact of Activities
According to (Zacherman and Foubert, 2014)when students are engaged in university activities, they are trained on techniques of critical thinking and innovation. Skills of critical thinking are gained through students' involvement in activities resulting from their own desires to do this activity that raises their readiness for engagement with others in doing specific tasks and in operations that need team work and cooperative work. The interaction that occurs during university activities raises the student liability to share in social events and provide the expected tasks by the society elements. College students' development is encouraged when they do various activities either within the curricular environment or outside it as this leaves great impact on the performance of students. Activities can be curricular or co curricular and each activity can measure specific strengths in the student. Time management skills are approved to be enhanced by the college activities as there are start and finish timing and the importance of doing the tasks by themselves in specific periods of time and according to a deadline, all these factors can help the student to raise his or her performance. Activities provide students with the chance to make friends within the university as the interaction that happen through mutual cooperation within doing an activity encourages building positive relationships with other students which leads them to be friends. This enables student to have social adjustment that helps students in their academic performance by exchanging the important information about the subjects and studied modules with other friends easily and get more information about methods to study. Students feel more integrated with the society of the university, its rules, its main culture and this helps them a lot in dealing with the way exams and tests go on which also helps in raising their adherence to university classes and raises their performance.
Mull, (2014) referred to physical activity and how it affects students' performance in universities as he asserted that voluntary activities which are done using the body such as sports and competitions that involve body exercises encourage students on doing more hard work and reducing their levels of stress, anxiety and worry through affecting the body muscles as they help the body relax its muscles and this then help the mind to think better and provide effective solutions for different problems. Physical activities such as sports activities are better in achieving results when they are done voluntary and not to be forced on students, they also should be timed and assessed before applying as not all students can practice physical activities especially when they are hard. Hard sports such as athletics require students to be healthy and have no health problem that may be affected by these difficult sports. They shouldn't be intensive to the extent that they may negatively affect the health and the time of students. Exercise was found to affect cognitive abilities positively and lead to students' fitness and makes them achieve more classroom success. It was affirmed that the student who spends some time exercising, achieves better results in exams. Yet exercises should be regular and estimated in time in order to achieve the required results. He added that many researchers found a correlation between physical activities and success in classrooms as there are factors that are connected with exercise and can raise the students' classroom success such as muscular strength, cardicrespiratory endurance and the ability to sleep well. Health of students who don't at all follow any physical activity such as sports usually suffers things such as obesity or diabetes and then such students should be educated by teachers regarding how to engage within the physical activities in order to be better in sport and in achieving high performance level in all university subjects.
According to Franz and Feresu, (2013). physical activity is related to academic success as sport activities lead students of colleges to have adequate and suitable body mass index which results in their fitness and not suffering any diseases related to obesity such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension or fatigue resulting from any physical effort. When students' health are sable and fit, they are more active and they can be organized in the way they study and attend lectures at the university. Students then don't waste a lot of time going to clinics and following strict diet which may affect their concentration and in turn their academic performance. Healthy students who follow organized physical exercises usually feel more satisfied with the food they eat as they eat the main required food elements and this provides their bodies with all needed vitamins, protein and minerals needed for making their minds more energetic and more able to perform well in tests, quizzes and examinations.
Mental activities are also important to be done especially before exams as according to Rhoads and Healy, (2015), mental activities that university students do before exams can help a lot in raising the readiness of the mind to answer questions easily and quickly as the answer is in a place which is reachable by the memory which has been activated by the activities. Mental activities can be either involved with the subject curriculum such as the exercises and practices teachers involve students within or to be outside the classroom such as chess competitions and mathematics competitions. Instructors, teachers and tutors are responsible to some extent for encouraging students to use their minds in doing the activities related to the college subjects as these activities are moving the mind towards better thinking. Prior to exam activities are found by the researcher to enhance the ability of the mind to remember information and relate them to each other. Cognitive abilities are awakened by such activities that the university students can do before the exams so they can choose the most suitable exercises according to the college subject and then apply them before the exam. The researcher found out that the exams that are in subjects that depend mainly on activities in laboratories or on computers are better to be studied using activities that urge the mind to work in order to reach solutions for the difficult problems instead of rehearsal exercises that exhaust the mind and lead the students to have poor performance and achieve less than expected. Activities that are related with the university subjects can lead students to achieve high marks in exams, in experiments and in online examinations that depend on mind tools in solving various problems which require creativity and innovation in relating ideas and processes with each other.
According to Parikh, (2008), students who engage in university activities are developing their cognitive growth easier and quicker than others who are not well engaged within university activities such as intellectual activities associated with some subjects as these activities are provided within the university seminars and they are intensive and require students to cooperate with their mates in order to produce a project or a research that depend on deep understanding for a problem, applying a theory and make personal critical thinking in order to analyze the problem and reach a reasonable conclusion or a solution to it. Such activities develop the students' skills of mind and abilities to analyze and deduct. Another thing is the team work principles involved within these activities as the group of work has to have a level of mutual understanding and awareness of roles and responsibilities. Competency is also involved within these activities as they motivate groups to compete in order to get better results and higher marks. There are many factors that determine students' attraction to such activities such as the teachers' roles in encouraging the students to work and the environment such as family encouragement as the lack of two factors such as the previously mentioned can lead to negative effects of activities and low academic performance.
Negative Impact of Activities
According to Shiveley and Wang, (2015) students activities in universities may have positive effects and at the same time they may affect students negatively as some students suffer fatigue and tiredness from the physical exercises they do and waste a lot of time doing sport which makes them. Students who spend long hours in athletic exercises are found to be more violent within the university and not accepting any direction from their teachers and they may have social interaction within the sport teams they are engaging with but outside the sports team, they have poor social interaction and they neglect attending their lectures and forgetting some quizzes or providing their assignments later than the due dates of them. Students who are more engaged in sports activities than others usually show low class attendance and low adherence to orders and rules of the university. This refers to the need for having a balance between following university activities and university courses and classes in order to achieve good level of academic performance. Although such students are fit and more energetic then others. This sometimes leads them to be conceited and forget that they have to act as students and not as sports champions. Students who always follow physical activities programs tend to be isolated from everything but sport as they are only interested in news relevant to such sports and how to upgrade their level in a special game or in a certain sport which makes it important to study how to follow university sports activities and not to be away from other important activities. Engaging in university activities sometimes force students to have more work in these activities than they can bear as their schedules become overloaded with activities especially when these activities are imposed on them by their teachers and they feel that they have to do them, then the main aim of having university activities which is enjoying the subject disappears as students lose the enthusiasm needed to begin such activities. Students who are having many activities neglect their main studying and in turn achieve poorly in their tests and exams which results in a decline in their academic performance. Some students who are forced to follow a physical spots program which involves lots of exercise may cause themselves to have injuries in order to take a rest for mind and body relaxation even if this period was at home or in hospital under special nursing care. Intense athletic training can also cause students to have injuries which lead them to be deprived from taking their exams or attending their class lectures and the important discussions with teachers and then their academic performance becomes poor and they also may fail at all. This means that university students need to be discussed about the type of activity they have to be engaged in and not to be threatened with marks if they don't join a sports program or any other activity that they may feel boring or not interesting. Joining activities must be a loved thing by students who will perform them or they will be an extra burden over students. (Wilson, 2009)
According to Stuart et al, (2011),some universities add extra fees over activities if students need to join them as they try to make financial revenues out of these activities and when the activities are compulsory, then activities become a burden over students and their families and this also affects students' performance as the students bear passive feelings towards the university and towards the educational process as a whole then their performance is negatively affected by following unwanted activities or paid activities and then marks become lower and students' class involvement decreases till students get bored of the university system and this also can affect the general performance of the university students' who will not share in most activities as a result of this aggressive act practiced by the university. When university activities are compulsory, they lose the real intention from involving them within university programs as they become no different from any other subject as they then represent an obstacle against students' fun and entertainment within the university. Students at the university are completely different from students at school as activities in the university shouldn't be compulsory because the nature of the university students and the age stage they are in requires higher levels of treatment and more options to choose from.
CHAPTER THREE ( THE THEORICAL FRAMWORK)
This chapter is made for purposes of declaring how this research is going on and what theories are used to interpret the used literature within it as the research is discussing the impact of activities on university students' performance with reference to students of Sohar university as activities have been discussed to be of great importance in universities as international universities use them in order to achieve many goals and reach specific results regarding the students' performance. Activities were found highly in the literature to cause positive results which can be easily measured through the high development in students' performance but they are said also to cause defects in the students character if they were misused, overused or used in the improper time. There are many factors that affect activities and challenges faced by universities when enrolling students within their activities and there are many relevant theories that discussed the relationship between activities and students' performance.
There are many involved variables that affect students' activities such as the environments where activities are going in regarding the country, the family, the university and the community, other variables are the amount of activity, timing of doing the activities, types of activities, those who provide the activities to students such as teachers and tutors, the physical condition of the student and the student's desire in taking an activity. All these variables affect the level of success with using activities to enhance university students' academic performance. Among these variables there are dependent variables such as people who provide the activity, students' desire in taking the activity and the physical condition of the students taking the activity. Independent variables are the environments of the activity, types of activity, amount of activity and timing of the activity. According to (Zacherman and Foubert, 2014) when students have the desire for taking an activity, they are involved within it and this helps them to cooperate with others in order to perform a task, this in turn can affect their performance and lead them to be more socially engaged within an environment that encourages taking activities with good teachers who help students to take activities.
Mull, (2014) asserted the importance of assessing the students' physical condition before engaging them within a physical activity as physical activities are a special type of activity that depends on engaging the proper students in the proper sport as, for example, sick or very weak students cannot be enrolled within hard physical activities such as athletics. He also referred to the timing variable which is important for raising the students' performance, for example, it is not a good idea to provide students with sports activities during examination period as this will never raise their academic performance so timing is a very important variable too. Franz and Feresu, (2013) referred to the physical conditions of students after having sports activities and how they help students be fit more in order to have self confidence that can help them achieve higher performance levels, Healy, (2015) asserted that the teachers and tutors in the university are responsible for students enrollment within activities, those teachers are considered a very effective variable that lead to results which can be good or bad according to the methods and types of activities they choose for each student as the type of activity is another important variable that can be changed according to each student and what suits him or her of activities.
Performance theories deal with the factors that affect performance such as any collaborative effort exerted by a person or a group of people, for example, the university activities students follow as they can be considered among these factors. According to Elger, (2015), humans can do many extraordinary tasks that are not expected by them and they can face any challenges if they want to. Performance can be enhanced and improved according to what a human being is able to do for improving this performance. He added that there are many areas for performance such as the cognitive area, the social area, the affective area and the psychomotor area. A human being can work on a specific area and raise his or her performance. Parikh, (2008) refers to cognitive growth and university activities as he correlates them to each other which provides a result of raised performance through this cognitive growth associated with activities. He refers to the type of activity as a main variable that controls the cognitive growth of university students as those intellectual activities can directly lead the students to have raised performance.
Shiveley and Wang, (2015)referred to how the type of activity can affect students' performance and how this can be a negative effect when they do something by force but what if students are really forced by their universities to do certain activities they don't like? Is the answer that they have to get low performance and bad marks? According to the performance theory, a person can deal with such a problem by working on his affective area of performance in order to confront such a difficult situation and not to fail in dealing with it. A student then may find something interesting in the activity to enjoy it or to refuse taking the activity at all or to do the activity in a new way which means to create something new while doing the activity. Improving the performance using the activity is a very crucial matter that is connected with many variables such as choosing the time for the activity, students should choose the activity according to their own desires, ambitions, feelings or any other relevant factors and then they can choose its time and its program from the beginning of the year with the help of teachers who are another important variable that should be carefully chosen in order to raise the students' performance by choosing the most suitable activity for each student, then discussing it with the student and after that evaluating the students' level of performance after having these activities and measure if the performance has really improved or not.
