Poster #73 - Content Coverage, Computer-Based Instruction, Students' Math Interest, and Math Performance among Middle Schoolers

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Educational researchers, focusing on classroom instruction, have conceptualized “opportunity to learn” (OTL) as specific topics covered in a curriculum, which is referred to as content coverage (Schmidt, Cogan, Houang, & McKnight, 2011). Having different opportunities to learn various math content can lead to students’ different math performance. In the modern classroom, computer-based instruction has been highlighted as it is found to be influential in students’ math learning experiences (Li & Ma, 2010). Students tend to exhibit stronger engagement in class assignments and mathematically achieve higher if teachers incorporate computers into instructions by having students to access to digit resources (e.g., online math activities and games) and hands-on experiences (e.g., data analysis using statistical package) (Shapley, Sheehan, Maloney, & Caranikas-Walker, 2011). Additionally, students’ learning characteristics, for instance, math interest, is an internal learning motivation that determined their math achievement (Yu & Singh, 2018). Although classroom instructional factors and students’ learning interest are crucial factors in contributing to students’ math performance, these factors have rarely been examined among middle schoolers. This study attempted to inform math educators how math teachers’ in-class practices affect students’ math learning by investigating the associations between content coverage in class, computer-based instruction, students' math interest, and performance among middle schoolers. The data for this study was drawn from eighth-grade data of TIMSS - the US of 2011. The participants include 3,398 eighth graders with 183 math teachers. Measures in this study were aggregated from student level to measures based on teachers due to the fact that students’ math performance is affected by individual teacher’s instructions. Detail information on students' background characteristics, including gender, age, parents’ educational attainment, and family income, were presented in Table 1. Structural equation modeling method was used to estimate the associations among variables. Figure 1 presented the standardized coefficients for the associations among study variables in the hypothesized model.
The results first confirmed prior research findings that math interest and content coverage were positively associated with math performance. Students’ SES was positively associated with content coverage and math performance. However, in contrast to prior finding, the current study found computer-based instruction was non-significantly associated with math performance. Second, the findings further revealed several essential associations. Content coverage and math interest fully mediated the association between computer-based instruction and math performance. Content coverage was indirectly associated with math performance through math interest. The computer-based instruction was indirectly associated with math interest through content coverage. The findings suggested that effort to promote math performance by largely adopting in-class computers may not be effective if teachers fail to successfully connect the computer use with what is covered in class. Additionally, the findings in this study indicated that when teachers integrate computers into math instruction, apply digital resources, and make math class fun, students are more likely to be interested in learning mathematics and achieve higher performance.

Authors

• Yue Zhang, Syracuse University
  Presenting Author

• Lei Jin, Syracuse University
  Non-Presenting Author