High Impact Strategies and the Effect It Has on Students’ Mathematics Attitudes

This study was designed to determine if innovative strategies such as the use of technology and Supplemental Instruction (SI) could have an impact on students in an introductory statistics course. The study describes the use of a reliable instrument to measure students’ attitudes and beliefs about mathematics. Martha Tapia developed the Attitudes Toward Mathematics Inventory (ATMI) instrument in 1996 and later Lim and Chapman further refined a short form in 2012. The purpose of the ATMI was to measure mathematics attitudes in four ways: (1) enjoyment of mathematics, (2) motivation to do mathematics, (3) self confidence in mathematics, and (4) perceived value of mathematics (Lim & Chapman, 2012). Students took the ATMI assessment on the first day of class. Throughout the semester, incorporated technology such as MyStatLabTM, StatCrunchTM, and the online Meta-Calculator were an integral part of the statistics classroom. Multiple SI sessions were held weekly for students to attend. At the end of the semester, the students took the ATMI a second time. The study used the statistical analysis of matched-pairs t-test to show the impact of these strategies on the attitudes of college students towards mathematics. In addition to the ATMI, the study included an additional questionnaire, which showed that a course such as Elementary Statistics, different from other mathematics courses, had a positive impact on the attitudes of students toward mathematics. Students that attended at least one SI session had only positive things to say about how helpful they were. The ATMI results analysis showed significant increases in the enjoyment of mathematics. Furthermore, the attitude of the females in the class showed an increase on 31 of the questions, 25 of which were significant. Overall, there were significant gains from the use of Supplemental Instruction in improving the attitudes of students toward mathematics. HIGH IMPACT STRATEGIES 2 High Impact Strategies and the Effect it has on Students’ Mathematics Attitudes Governors State University (GSU), founded in 1969 was an upper-division public university admitting juniors, seniors, and graduate students only. Starting in the fall semester of August 2014, freshmen enrolled for the first time making GSU a 4-year full-service University, thus requiring newly offered courses. A new set of challenges for providing support for these students emerged, particularly with increasing numbers of mathematics courses moving towards digitally-based textbooks and courses. One solution for providing additional support in mathematics courses involves the implementation of publisher-supplied online teaching tools such as electronic textbooks, computer software, and homework portals. With the increased number of computers and internet-based learning on college campuses in recent years, publishers have created these additional resources. These programs keep up with the ever-improving technology field by offering immediate feedback to students in the form of practice problems, video lessons, and online tutoring. Publishers also provide many electronic resources to teachers such as test generators, homework problems, videos, and power-point presentations. In the field of statistics specifically, technology has changed how statisticians analyze and compute data. Statisticians use software to simulate experiments, test hypotheses, calculate probabilities, and a number of different goodness of fit tests. These methods can be used in the classroom to better explain concepts rather than focusing on data entry and computation (Bratton, 1999). One HIGH IMPACT STRATEGIES 3 goal of this study was to determine how students felt about the incorporated technology. To make sure students received all of the help they needed; the University offered face-to-face tutoring and started a Supplemental Instruction (SI) program. Tutoring had previously been available in the Academic Resource Center; however, more tutors and SI leaders joined to accommodate the anticipated need of freshman students. Studies on other collegiate campuses indicated that the SI program raises grades and lowers the attrition rate (Ogden, Thompson, Russell, & Simons, 2003; Etter, Burmeister, & Elder, 2000). Elementary Statistics was a new course offered with 102 students enrolled across five different sections. Within the student population, 98 agreed to participate in the study. These 98 students, followed through their first semester of mathematics, took the survey explaining how technology and SI affected them in the course. Of these 98 students, 41 completed both the pre and post ATMI assessment. Studying the impact of technology, publisher provided teaching tools, and SI in conjunction with students’ attitudes towards mathematics provided an opportunity for the University to determine if these tools had been useful and should continue for future courses. Literature Review This study combined methods and instructional strategies to measure the effects on students taking an Elementary Statistics course. The two instructional strategies implemented were Supplemental Instruction and technology in the HIGH IMPACT STRATEGIES 4 classroom. A seven-question survey evaluated the students’ thoughts about the course. In addition, the ATMI could measure the level of change in attitude of students enrolled in the statistics course. Statistics is a topic that is becoming more relevant for students to learn in the college setting. More fields outside of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics now require students to take some level of statistics. It also renders a valuable skill for students to be able to gather data and then interpret it rather than just compute numbers. With the focus on reasoning and critical thinking, a course such as Elementary Statistics is one that can provide students the opportunity to grow in this area. This shift in general education requirements has caused some colleges and universities to remove developmental courses and replace them with a pathway called StatwayTM (Asera, 2011). StatwayTM is a yearlong statistics course that integrates developmental mathematics throughout instruction (Merseth, 2011). The Elementary Statistics course at Governors State University uses similar ideas from this program. The first method used in this statistics course was Supplemental Instruction (SI). Supplemental Instruction is a formalized group study session with a scheduled meeting time and location facilitated by a student leader. Weekly SI sessions were open to all students enrolled in the course. Courses with a history of low grades and high withdrawal rates are courses where Supplemental Instruction sessions are used (Odgen, Thompson, Russell, & Simons, 2003). The student leader sits in on all classes and completes all assignments to know exactly what the students enrolled in the course have covered. The leader conducts the HIGH IMPACT STRATEGIES 5 session with the goal of promoting conversation among all in attendance, while also providing extra help in note taking and study skills specific to the course. Another aspect of this study is the use of technology. In this study, technology refers to the statistical computing software StatCrunchTM, calculators, and Pearson’s web-based program MyStatLabTM. Publishers such as Pearson provide web-based programs to promote learning. MyStatLabTM has online textbooks, online tutoring, video tutorials, online statistics software, and online calculators. Computers and statistical software are an integral part of a statistician’s job and should therefore be an integral part in an Elementary Statistics classroom (Bratton, 1999). The use of these tools can increase conceptual understanding by minimizing the time it takes for computation, thus increasing time for discussion and explanation (Mills, 2002). A third part of the study used the Attitudes Toward Mathematics Inventory (ATMI), which is a 40-question assessment, focused on attitudes toward mathematics. In 1996, Martha Tapia created this tool (Tapia, 1996). Since its creation, others such as Lim and Chapman (2013) evaluated the ATMI. This instrument focuses on questions about enjoyment, motivation, self-confidence, and the value of mathematics. Each response has a numeric value, which easily allows statistical analysis of results. The assessment, given at the beginning and end of the semester, used the results and compared them to see if change had