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Keywords

quantitative literacy assessment, basic mathematics, instructional development

Abstract

Deficiencies in education continue to escalate around the world. The focus on outcomes assessment has narrowed instructional research and curriculum evaluation to standardized testing in certain subject areas. A prototype for a quantitative literacy assessment instrument was developed with the goal of diagnosing student misconceptions of basic mathematics content and changing instructional practices to undo the misconceptions by applying cognitive psychological theory. Two hundred thirty-eight basic math high school students and 209 remedial community college students in New Jersey and New York were administered the instrument, which had been based on coded data from think-aloud protocols. The instrument asked students to answer 20 basic mathematics items and, in addition, to evaluate four possible solution strategies. For each item, frequencies of selected solution strategies and the association between strategy selection and performance on the 20-question math test are presented as a means for improving instruction. Follow-up research is proposed for determining whether undoing the student misconceptions first before teaching material on a new unit of instruction may yield more positive student outcomes.

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.9.1.6

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Additional Files
Appendix A.pdf (155 kB)
Items and Solution Strategies
Appendix B.pdf (97 kB)
Detailed Examples
Appendix C.pdf (119 kB)
Logistic Regression Plots
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