- Thursday, March 10, 2022
- 3:30 PM–4:30 PM
- Meeter Center Lecture Hall
The School of Education and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics are jointly hosting a special Colloquium that features two speakers, who are father-and-daughter math professors, Dr. David Klanderman and Dr. Sarah Klanderman.
Dr. David Klanderman is a mathematics professor at Calvin University, and Dr. Sarah Klanderman is a mathematics professor at Marian University. They will be making a presentation entitled "Factors that Motivate Middle School, High School, and University Students to Learn Mathematics." Join us on Thursday, March 10 at 3:30 in the Meeter Center Lecture Hall (near the third-floor entrance to the Hekman Library), and enjoy light refreshments before and after the lecture.
What motivates some students to want to learn mathematics while others do not share similar motivation? Are these factors intrinsic, extrinsic, or a combination of both? To answer these questions, we adapted a survey originally developed by Tapia (1996) and later shortened by Lim and Chapman (2015). We administered the survey in multiple middle schools, a high school, and multiple colleges and universities. We obtained over 100 completed surveys for each of these educational levels. This presentation offers an analysis of these data, including descriptive statistics and confidence intervals for each educational level. For the college and university sample, we also provide comparisons among students majoring in mathematics or mathematics education, those majoring in elementary education, and those with a variety of other majors. In addition to the Likert scale items from the original survey, we explore qualitative data from a free response item. Join us to learn more about why students enjoy learning mathematics and later choose undergraduate majors in the discipline.
Location details
Meeter Center Lecture Hall
