The University’s Role in Promoting its Students’ Social Awareness from the Students’ Perspective at Balqa Applied University

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the university’s role in promoting social awareness of Balqa
Applied University’s students from the perspective of the students themselves, and to identify
the impact of some demographic variables as gender, type of college and the academic year
on this role. To achieve the study’s objectives, the researcher presented a conceptual frame
about the students’ social awareness and the university’s role in this awareness, and applied a
field study on Al-balqa Applied University’s students in three colleges that represented
Jordan’s three provinces. The questionnaire which consisted of 37 items was distributed into
three fields, and applied after checking its acceptable degree of reliability and validity. Data
were analyzed using the appropriate statistical tests.
The results revealed that the university’s role in promoting the students’ social awareness
was high in the field of the academic staff’s role, while it was moderate in the fields of the
university and curriculum, and methods of teaching plus evaluation’ roles, and in the total
degree of the instrument as well. The results also revealed that there were no statistically
significant differences attributed to the gender and faculty’s variables, whereas the academic
year variable was statistically significant, and the differences were in favour of the freshmen
students in the field of university administration, and the fourth year students in the field of
academic staff’s role. Based on these results, the study recommended the necessity to
reconsider the roles of university, curriculum, and methods of teaching and evaluation in
promoting the social awareness by preparing programs which promote the social awareness,
and to design university courses that enrich the students’ humanistic knowledge in different
fields that suits their social status.