The Math You Need, When You Need It (TMYN): Leveling the Playing Field

Abstract

The Math You Need, When You Need It (TMYN) is a set of online tutorials designed to help students develop and review mathematical skills that are applied in undergraduate geoscience courses. We present results of a three-year study of more than 4000 students in 106 geoscience courses at a variety of post-secondary schools who were assigned TMYN tutorials as supplemental mathematics instruction. Changes in student scores from pre-to post-test suggest that the support provided by programs such as TMYN can begin to reduce the gap between mathematically well-prepared and underprepared students; in essence, TMYN levels the quantitative playing field for all geoscience students. On average, both high-and low-performing students who fully participated in the use of TMYN as a part of their course showed learning gains, although gains were larger for students who performed poorly on the pre-test. Our findings emphasize the conclusion that students who interact with context-specific quantitative problems can potentially improve their mathematical skills, regardless of initial level of mathematical preparation. We suggest that this type of support could generalize to other science courses. KeywordsQuantitative skills, Geoscience, Online mathematics tutorials

A Twenty-Year Look at “Computational Geology,” an Evolving, In-Discipline Course in Quantitative Literacy at the University of South Florida

“…"Integrat(ing) quantitative tasks into courses to illuminate students' understanding of geoscience, as well as to enhance their quantitative skills" (Macdonald et al 2000, as quoted in our Introduction). (For Numeracy papers, see also Wenner et al 2009, Lehto and Vacher 2012, and Wenner and Baer 2015.…”

Chemistry Education for the Geosciences: Perceptions of Importance and Relevant Knowledge

“…We did not analyze participants' discipline of expertise. The findings suggest tutorials focused on improving geoscience students' basic chemistry skills, similar to "The Math You Need" tutorials (Wenner and Baer, 2015), may be useful for topics of high importance but absent from the general chemistry curriculum. Targeted training can alleviate barriers associated with learning chemistry as a geoscience major.…”

Relationships and Gender Differences in Math Anxiety, Math Self-Efficacy, Geoscience Self-Efficacy, and Geoscience Interest in Introductory Geoscience Students

“…Geoscience educators, particularly those who teach introductory courses, have been concerned about their students' quantitative skills and literacy for decades (e.g., [2,3,[5][6][7][8][9]). Despite the public misperception of geoscience as being less mathematically intensive than other sciences [24,25], quantitative skills and topics regularly and recurrently appear in geoscience content [7].…”

“…Many studies have shown that students are more likely to succeed at quantitative tasks when mathematical concepts or statistical approaches have a meaningful context [7,9,29,30]. Providing occasions to apply mathematics to well-conceived contextual examples throughout introductory courses can increase students' motivation and self-efficacy [8,31,32].…”

“…The role that quantitative skills play in students' success in introductory geoscience courses has been the focus of many studies since the beginning of this century (e.g., [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]). Additionally, in the past decade and a half, many geoscience-discipline-based education researchers have focused on the affective domain as an important aspect of teaching and learning [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”