Topic 1. Your Topic.
We will begin by reflecting on a topic. It will be several weeks before you make a final decision about your topic, and it is time to think about it and get feedback from your peers and me. I am interested to know what you are thinking at this point. Please post a paragraph or two (click on comment below) by August 20. Comments on other posts are welcome.
I am considering using/modifying my qualitative model assignment from EDU 721 as my research question. I am really interested in understanding students’ perceptions of math, namely those who do not like math. One of the reasons that I like math is because I use it every day. I use it to estimate my total bill at the grocery store, to determine how much a sale item that is 20% off actually costs, etc. However, I know there are students who believe that math isn’t a useful life skill, and I want to understand how they perform in math class and why they think this way.
ReplyDeleteThe 2 paragraphs below come from my qualitative assignment:
Introduction:
This study aims to understand the perspectives of ninth grade students who have math aversion and their perception of math in an academic setting and also a useful life skill.
Research Questions:
What are ninth grade math-averse students’ attitudes towards math taught in the classroom?
What are ninth grade math-averse students’ attitudes toward math in their daily lives?
How does presentation of math concepts influence ninth grade math-averse students’ perception of math?
I am also considering adding how math-averse students’ attitudes change as they see application of math in real life settings. Perhaps I will try to also measure if their performance changes as their attitudes towards math change.
My study doesn’t have to be ninth grade students, but will be some form of high school students.
I am looking forward to your comments!
Heidi
I really do not know what specific research topic I want to explore. There are so many choices and I am still not sure what kind of topics will be practical within the setting of our student teaching. However, I know that I want to research something that will truly have a practical application in my teaching. Specifically I want to find a way to research strategies for teaching math that are interactive.
ReplyDeleteSo many of the other subjects have obvious ways to lead in discussion and class interaction, while so frequently math is taught solely in lecture style. It is more obvious to me how class interaction can be incorporated into the elementary levels of math, but algebra and above seems to require a good deal of direct instruction which I believe probably contributes to the math-averse attitudes that Heidi discussed. So I really want to find ways in which math can be made interactive, and perhaps see the effect that this has on performance in mathematics.
I have been very interested in exploring differentiated assessment techniques. Just like there are different types of learners, there are also different ways students can show what they have learned. In math classrooms, I have observed that some students thrive on completing homework and do some of their best work in their homework, yet do not do as well on tests. On the other hand, there are students that perform extremely well on tests without the daily practice that homework provides. I am trying to find a way to research this idea. The main problem I keep running into is how to group the students so that each type of assessment style is tested. If I give the students the option of more homework or more heavily weighted tests, it is likely that many students will choose less homework, regardless of what is best for them academically. If I assign a particular assessment style to the students, I fear that I will inevitably incorrectly assign a student to an assessment style that put the student's grade in jeopardy.
ReplyDeleteP.S.- Really Dr. McCoy? Pink?
Similar to Heidi, I'm interested in modifying my qualitative study so it is applicable to my student teaching experience.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in the feelings and perceptions of girls in an advanced math class. Do they like math? Do they feel confident in their math skills? How do their feelings of math compare to other classes? What past experiences influence these perceptions?
Although I first considered this question related to a qualitative study, I am interested in approaching it from a quantitative angle. I will need to do a lot more readings into previous research. Either way, I am interested in how girls perceive their math abilities.
Ideally, I'd like to do something to do with investigating the effects of different mathematics curriculums. In particular, there are the NSF-funded mathematics curriculums, and then there are non-NSF-funded curriculums. Since the National Science Foundation is a rather large body with a rather large budget, I'd like to see if the research and money that has been put into improving math curriculums has had any effect, by comparing data from different treatment groups.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, this seems like a pretty unrealistic kind of experiment to be carried out by a student teacher in one semester. So, I have been thinking on ways to simplify and make possible something similar. Maybe I could try using a curriculum supplement, and still compare groups receiving different treatment. There are ample technology-based learning aids to choose from, for example. So maybe something like that?
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ReplyDeleteAs Heidi and Chloe have mentioned, I am very interested in exploring my proposal from earlier this summer. And after reading Heidi's proposal, I discovered that we think a lot alike-too alike actually. My proposal is slightly different though. Its basis is the same-anxiety/aversion to mathematics-but I am particularly interested in the origins of these feelings. I want to know more about why students don't like or are afraid of math and I strongly feel that in many situations it has much to do with previous experiences and teachers.
ReplyDeleteLast spring I did a simple study on the origins of math anxiety in female high school and college students, but I was not satisfied with the results. I had designed a survey, but due to time constraints, was not able to tailor and adapt it in order to glean stronger conclusions from my data. While Heidi described her study as qualitative, I would like to focus on the quantitative side and time permitting, include a qualitative portion. I would like to develop a more thorough survey exploring previous experiences and current perceptions of mathematics that hopefully will allow me to draw specific conclusions about students' perceptions of/feelings toward math. I am also curious to see if there is a link between gender and like/dislike of mathematics.
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ReplyDeleteThrough my short experience I have observed that students can usually solve simple problems such as "find the area of a square with sides 5 cm in length" but when they are faced with applicable word problems they struggle to find a solution. So I have thought about conducting qualitative research to learn more about why students struggle with word problems. This is as far as I have got.
ReplyDelete(I'm really good at blogging - hence the post 10 days late.)
ReplyDeleteSomething I've always been interested in how the type of test affects students (i.e. open ended questions as opposed to multiple choice). It will take some developing, but I would like to study how students perform on a test with both multiple choice questions and open ended questions. I've thought about possibly doing this buy using the same problem structure with different values in an Algebra or Algebra II class to see if students perform better on one type of question. Some problems I see with this could be that students are more likely to take a random guess on multiple choice questions when they get stumped and there is really no way to "guess" on an open ended question.
I'm really interested in the performance of students in Algebra and Algebra II classes and I think this is because I find problems to be like puzzles in a way. It is interesting to see how different students construct answers to the same problems and how this structure may even be different from the way the teacher taught to solve the problem.