The Determinants of Mathematics and Statistics Achievement in Higher Education

Abstract

This study uses a standard education production function in order to relate student grades in mathematics and statistics to three factors. The first factor includes teaching practice measures and classroom learning environment. The second factor comprises teacher characteristics and class size. The third factor represents student control variables. The statistical analysis which is based on mixed effect modeling of student marks in mathematics and statistics courses shows that incoming skills, classroom learning environment, support to the students and students attitude toward mathematics and statistics are the most significant predictors of achievement in mathematics. However, teaching practices were not found to be crucial for improving mathematics grades.

Factors Influencing Mathematics Achievement of University Students of Social Sciences

“…Beside descriptive analyses, collected data have been mostly subjected to independent samples t-test (see, e.g., [25]), analysis of variance (see, e.g., [21,31,37,43]), correlation techniques (see, e.g., [22,27,28,33,45]), or to regression (linear, multiple) analyses (see e.g., [2,3,32,34]). Studies which applied factor analysis (see, e.g., [23,30]), principal component analysis (see, e.g., [36]), discriminant analysis (see, e.g., [2,44]), or mixed-effects models [40] are relatively rare.…”

“…Studies relating to the field of Australia are also quite common [20,21,[35][36][37][38]. The territory of the USA and Canada seems to be somewhat less represented [39,40], while studies dealing with mathematics achievement in European higher education are very rare. In this regard, we found a few papers from the following countries: the UK [41], Finland [42], Spain [43], Ireland [44], Germany [22], and Sweden [45].…”

“…The majority of the studies addressed mathematics performance in relation to certain selected factors. As one of the most influential sources and predictors of underachievement in mathematics at the tertiary level of education, the authors consider the insufficient level of mathematical background from secondary education (see, e.g., [2,20,21,[36][37][38][39][40]42,44]).…”

“…Among other influencing factors, the following are also exposed: attitudes toward mathematics and/or self-confidence with regard to mathematics (see, e.g., [25,27,40,43]), mathematical self-efficacy and student engagement [41], academic self-beliefs [42], learning motivation (see, e.g., [22,25]), learning strategies and/or availability of teaching resources (see, e.g., [22,25]), importance of mathematics [23], teaching style ( [31,33]), parent's profile [33], mathematics class size (see, e.g., [2]), gender (see, e.g., [2,28,32]), and age [32].…”

“…The background knowledge of secondary mathematics is usually measured by achievement in the secondary school leaving qualification. A significant positive correlation has been revealed between students' grades of the secondary school leaving qualification and their performance in mathematics at the university level (see, e.g., [2,37,40]). Furthermore, some studies report positive and facilitative effects of prior knowledge on learning (Dochy, Segers, and Buehl (1999), as cited in [42]).…”