Individual Differences Related to College Students’ Course Performance in Calculus II

Abstract

ABSTRACT. In this study, we explore student achievement in a semester-long flipped Calculus II course, combining various predictor measures related to student attitudes (math anxiety, math confidence, math interest, math importance) and cognitive skills (spatial skills, approximate number system), as well as student engagement with the online system (discussion forum interaction, time to submission of workshop assignments, quiz attempts), in predicting final grades. Data from 85 students enrolled in a flipped Calculus II course was used in dominance analysis to determine which predictors emerged as the most important for predicting final grades. Results indicated that feelings of math importance, approximate number system (ANS) ability, total amount of discussion forum posting, and time grading peer workshop submissions was the best combination of predictors of final grade, accounting for 17% of variance in a student's final grade. The point of this work was to determine which predictors are the most important in predicting student grade, with the end goal of building a recommendation system that could be implemented to help students in this traditionally difficult class. The methods used here could be used for any class.Keywords: Math performance, calculus, flipped classroom, math attitudes, cognitive performance, student engagement INTRODUCTIONOver the past few years, the attrition of STEM-focused undergraduates in the United States has become a critical national concern, with "a substantial number of undergraduate students initially enrolled in STEM degree programs [dropping] out in the first two years" (PCAST, 2012). In order to maintain highquality instructional practices in the face of STEM undergraduate attrition, growing demand for large (2017 130 numbers of graduates, and diminishing financial and human resources, many colleges and universities are turning to technologically aided teaching practices. This technological shift aims to integrate the traditional classroom environment with online course resources to enhance, replace, and supplement face-to-face instruction to reach more students in a cost-effective way (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004).To accommodate this shift toward technologically aided teaching methods, schools have implemented campus-wide Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Moodle and Blackboard. These web-based management systems provide data related to the "user," with every action of the student tracked and recorded online. The underlying advantage of these LMS data is that they unobtrusively record individual student activity and interaction with course materials in real-time, providing a lens into traditionally unobservable learning-related behaviours and silently tracking individual students' learning progression (Macfadyen & Dawson, 2010; Gašević, Dawson, & Siemens, 2015). In traditional college courses, many performance measures, for example midterm or final exams (Lee, Speglia, Ha, Finch, & Nehm, 2015;Macfadyen & Dawson, 2010), are taken too late in the semester to identify st...

Flipped Classroom Strategy Based on Critical Thinking Skills: Helping Fresh Female Students Acquiring Derivative Concept

“…The findings were matched the findings of the following authors; Buch and Warren (2017), Carter andFos (2018), Hart, Daucourt, andGanley (2017), Renfro ( 2014),…”

“…In light of this, the participants in the third annual meeting of university teaching that was held at King Saud University from 4-7 April 2016 also confirmed on the necessity of employing educational technologies through blended learning, the most prominent of which is the flipped classroom. Studies by Buch and Warren (2017);Carter, Carter and Fos (2018); Hart, Daucourt and Ganley (2017); Renfro (2014); Sahin, Cavlazoglu and Zeytuncu (2015); Zengin (2017) have shown a positive effect on students' achievements in the Calculus course when applying the Flipped Classroom Strategy (FCS). Other researchers studied the effect of this strategy on other mathematics courses (Khan and Watson, 2018;Ramaglia, 2015).…”

“…It also found that there was imbalance in the ability to employ learned thinking skills (Al-Bajalani, 2019;Alzahrani, 2016). It also found that teaching at the university level was still largely dependent on the traditional lectures according to the researchers' experience of teaching Calculus despite the increasing number of studies on the use of the (FCS) verified that they had a big impact on students' learning Calculus (Buch & Warren, 2017;Hart & et al, 2017;Renfro 2014). The researchers are convinced that there is a necessity to update university teaching strategies to the current developments based on integrating technology and implementing it in the educational process.…”

Predictive analytic models of student success in higher education

“…Among the articles we reviewed, only a few studies briefly discussed their variable selection techniques. Hart et al (2017) used all-subsets regression to reduce the total predictor variables that would be entered into their final analysis, dominance analysis, which is computationally intensive and limited to a maximum of ten predictor variables. Badr et al (2016) and Ibrahim and Rusli (2007) used the rankings of the correlation coefficients to select variables.…”

Shapes of Educational Data in an Online Calculus Course

“…The literature on the subject is vast, and at the beginning of this project we decided to include measures of attitudinal and cognitive skills at the beginning of the course, similar to what was suggested by Niemi (2012a;2012b), along with some demographics data. The results of the analysis of these psychological predictors correlated to the log data of the online calculus course and performance in the course are described in Hart, Daucourt, and Ganley (2017). To further our understanding of student learning in the course, a continuous task has been deciding and mining data to derive additional indicators for describing the student activities from the information implicitly stored across multiple tables in the underlining database.…”