Student Performance and Attitudes Using Personalized Mathematics Instruction

This study investigated the effects of personalized instruction on the achievement and attitudes of Taiwanese students on two-step mathematics word problems. A total of 136 fourth-graders in a Taiwanese public school participated in the study. Subjects initially completed a Student Survey on which they chose their favorite foods, sports, stores, classmates, and other selections. The most popular items were then used to create personalized math word problems for the pretest, personalized instructional program, and posttest. Subjects were blocked by ability based on their pretest scores and were randomly assigned within ability levels to either a personalized or nonpersonalized version of the print-based instructional program. After finishing the program, subjects completed a student attitude survey and the posttest. A repeated-measures univariate analysis of variance revealed that subjects in the personalized treatment made significantly greater pretest-to-posttest gains than those in the nonpersonalized treatment. Subjects also performed significantly better on the personalized pretest and posttest problems than on the nonpersonalized problems. Personalized subjects and higher-ability students both had significantly more positive attitudes toward the instructional program than did their nonpersonalized and lower-ability counterparts. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (1992a, 1992b) indicate that mathematics word problems are difficult for students at all age levels in elementary and secondary schools. A major cause of the difficulty appears to be student inability to convert the problems into the math operations that must be performed to solve them (Hart, 1996). Some researchers have also noted that lack of familiarity with word problem structures may also contribute to poor student performance (Mayer, 1982; Rosen, 1984).