Elizabethtown College Associate Professor of Mathematics Leyla Batakci recently presented her research, “Measuring Student, Instructor Attitudes and the Learning Environment,” at the 2022 Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME) in February.
Batakci and her research team are examining student and faculty motivation in teaching and learning statistics and data science. The research, which is sponsored through a National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant, has been presented at multiple national conferences
“Attitudes matter in mathematics education, especially in fields like statistics which sometimes suffer from a poor reputation,” Batakci said. “Understanding the relationship between both student and instructor attitudes and student achievement is crucial for improving mathematics education.
“Our research team is developing a new set of attitudinal instruments, the Student and Instructor Surveys of Motivational Attitudes toward Statistics (S- and I-SOMAS), to quantify these attitudes. Additionally, we are developing instruments to measure the learning environment and an analogous set of instruments to measure attitudes toward data science.”
The research team is encouraging statistics and data science instructors and educational researchers who are interested in being involved with data collection in future phases of the project to contact the authors.