Students thrive in learning environments where they are able to remain engaged, interested and motivated. A new digital learning tool, MindTap Math Foundations, claims to transform learning by bringing elements from the interactive, gamified world so that students stay engaged, persist through challenges, feel more supported and connected with instructors, other students and their own learning experience. A South African university was the first higher education institution in South Africa to make use of this personalised learning system. A survey was employed to assess the effectiveness of MindTap Math Foundations as a digital learning tool. The focus of the article is on the analysis of the open-ended questions in the survey. The findings of this research support the claims Cengage make regarding the platform's benefits. Participants' responses revealed that the new digital learning tool is generally perceived as positive and beneficial for learning numeracy. Students' feedback also provided ideas and proposals for potential enhancement. Through students' experiences shared it was possible to pinpoint the strengths and challenges regarding aspects needing consideration and improvement.
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about graphs? Although graphs have the potential to bring data to life, numerous studies show that learners struggle with graphical comprehension. Furthermore, many textbook examples on graphs are boring and appear meaningless to students. Students want to know more about something which is interesting, meaningful, and worth knowing, in other words, something relevant. With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in December 2019, COVID‐19 is dominating the news worldwide, and the internet is flooded with visual presentations about the virus. To make statistics more fascinating and exciting, relevant and real‐world data such as these can be used in the classroom to stimulate the learning of important statistical concepts such as graphs. Curcio's three levels of graphical comprehension were used as a framework in this study, while the importance of developing a global view on distributions was also emphasized.
A strong foundation in early number concepts is crucial for students’ future success in statistics. Despite its importance in statistics, many first-year students struggle to comprehend the normal distribution due to a lack of basic number sense. Students get confused about the order and magnitude of negative z-scores on a standard normal curve or when problems about normally distributed random variables are presented in word questions which involve phrases that indicate inequalities. As a result, students shade wrong areas on the bell-shaped curve when they have to calculate probabilities for normally distributed variables. Visual representations such as the number line can support students’ development of quantitative literacy or number sense by helping them create a mental representation of the order and magnitude of numbers as well as inequalities. Based on a comprehensive investigation of evidence demonstrating this weakness, this experienced-based perspective proposes a framework that demonstrates how the number line can be used as a powerful teaching tool to promote students’ conceptual understanding about the normal distribution. The framework illustrates with authentic examples how the number line relates to the horizontal axis of the normal and standard normal curve and how it can be used to address erroneous quantitative reasoning when students are required to calculate probabilities for normally distributed variables. To determine if the number line teaching intervention affects student performance, the researcher adopted a non-equivalent pretest-posttest design with two intact classes. The results of the analysis show that students who received the intervention performed significantly better in the posttest.
Real-world data are fundamental to modern teaching methodologies that aim to improve statistical knowledge and reasoning in students. Statistical information is encountered in everyday life, such as media articles and involves realworld contexts. However, information could be biased or (mis)represented and students should be concerned about the validity of such articles, as well as the nature and trustworthiness of the evidence presented, while considering alternative interpretations of the findings conveyed to them. Statistics educators could make use of media articles to create opportunities for students to reflect on such (mis)representations and build statistical literacy. The purpose of this article is to show how information and data on the Omicron COVID-19 variant have been (mis)represented in the media and by government entities. I also demonstrate how these examples may be utilized in the statistics classroom as they relate to concepts covered in most basic statistics courses.
WhatsApp has been favoured by many educators and students as an online learning tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its’ popularity in educational settings, the flooding of messages on group chats remains a challenge for teachers as well as students. Currently there is a gap in research when it comes to investigating the types of conversations that students have on such groups which is intended for teaching and learning purposes, as well as a possible solution with regard to the flooding of messages. The purpose of this study is to investigate the chats that make up redundant posts that are often experienced on WhatsApp groups as well as to see whether multiple WhatsApp groups for a subject may reduce the flooding of messages. For the purpose of this study, the conversations on WhatsApp of a complete online first-year statistics course at a South African university will be analysed by making use of a WhatsApp chat analyser app, ChatChart. The findings of this study revealed that students flooded groups mostly with university-related matters, for example test dates, learning material, WhatsApp links to other subjects at the university, lecturer information, as well as important information that was posted on the student portal and test marks. The creation of two additional WhatsApp groups reduced message flooding within the content group where subject content was posted, while the other two groups served as a “place” where students were allowed to interact with their statistics lecturer as well as each other to discuss university-related matters.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.