Exploring undergraduate students’ productive struggles in a quantitative literacy course: Implications for the development of tutoring

This article focuses on a shift in the author’s approach to teaching a literacy course to a coaching-based model after observing pre-service teachers “struggle” to implement the teaching practices during on-site fieldwork with a kindergarten, first-, or second-grade child partner. The author discusses how she provided more timely feedback and instruction by coaching the undergraduate students who were taking a course she taught while the students were working with an elementary child partner and preparing a running-record assessment. Coaching provided the pre-service teachers with a deeper level of understanding of specific literacy practices in the early childhood classroom, and it afforded them the opportunity to reflect on the objective of the literacy practice in a way that let them better use it during their own teaching.

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Sense of belonging and first-year academic literacy

Canadian Journal of Higher Education ◽

10.47678/cjhe.v42i3.2044 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 42 (3) ◽

pp. 116-142

Author(s):

Steve Marshall ◽

Mingming Zhou ◽

Ted Gervan ◽

Sunita Wiebe

Keyword(s):

Undergraduate Students ◽

Mixed Method ◽

Sense Of Belonging ◽

Academic Literacy ◽

Mixed Method Study ◽

First Year ◽

Language And Literacy ◽

Writing Courses ◽

Literacy Course ◽

The University

In this article, we analyze a broad range of factors that affect the sense of belonging of undergraduate students taking a first-year academic literacy course (ALC) at a multicultural, multilingual university in Vancouver, Canada. Students who fail to meet the university’s language and literacy requirements are required to pass ALC before they can enrol in writing courses across the disciplines. Consequently, many of those students feel that they have yet to be accepted as fully legitimate members of the university community. We present data from a two-year, mixed-method study, which involved asking students in surveys and interviews about their sense of belonging, as well as analyzing their reflective writing samples for issues related to their sense of belonging. We found that the participants’ perceptions of sense of belonging are multilayered and context-dependent, relating to changes in time and space, classroom pedagogy, and other social, cultural, and linguistic factors. Implications for higher education are discussed.

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Students' difficulty with proportional reasoning in a university quantitative literacy course

South African Journal of Higher Education ◽

10.20853/28-3-372 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 28 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Vera Frith ◽

Pam Lloyd

Keyword(s):

Proportional Reasoning ◽

Quantitative Literacy ◽

Literacy Course

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Investigating Alignment in a Quantitative Literacy Course for Social Sciences Students

Numeracy ◽

10.5038/1936-4660.14.2.1384 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Vera Frith ◽

Pam Lloyd

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Learning Outcomes ◽

Student Performance ◽

Quantitative Information ◽

Quantitative Literacy ◽

Literacy Course ◽

Course Outcomes ◽

University Of Cape Town ◽

The University ◽

Ongoing Monitoring

The Numeracy Centre at the University of Cape Town has taught a one-semester quantitative literacy course for social sciences students since 1999. This study aims to provide an example for how the design of such a course can be assessed for alignment with quantitative reasoning goals. We propose a framework of learning outcomes for the course and use that framework to analyse the assessments and student performance on them. We find that just under half of the overall mark for the course was devoted to the interpretation and communication of quantitative information (our “main” outcomes), and about a quarter was devoted to the performing of calculations. The analysis revealed that statistics outcomes were under-represented in the make-up of the overall course mark, and assessment of these outcomes was restricted almost entirely to the two final examinations. The results of the analysis of the alignment between outcomes and assessment are useful to inform discussions about changes to the course curriculum. The analysis of student performance on the different outcomes provides insights which are useful for informing improvements to our teaching approach. The analysis demonstrates a relatively straightforward procedure that can be used or adapted by researchers in other institutions for ongoing monitoring of alignment between course outcomes, teaching, and assessment.

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Teaching Introductory Statistics to Meet Undergraduate Students' Quantitative Literacy Requirements

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e512872017-001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Robert A. Terry

Keyword(s):

Undergraduate Students ◽

Introductory Statistics ◽

Quantitative Literacy

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Citizenship education: A media literacy course taught in Japanese university

Citizenship Social and Economics Education ◽

10.1177/20471734211061487 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 204717342110614

Author(s):

Van Thanh Nguyen

Keyword(s):

Media Literacy ◽

Undergraduate Students ◽

Curriculum Design ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Evaluation Study ◽

First Year ◽

Learning Program ◽

Literacy Curriculum ◽

Propaganda Model ◽

Literacy Course

This case study documents the effort to prototype a media literacy curriculum based on Herman and Chomsky (2010)'s Propaganda Model as well as the target students’ environment and need analysis. The course is implemented under a Content and Language Integrated Learning program for 30 first-year undergraduate students in Sophia University, Japan. The objective is to develop students’ awareness of issues facing society they live in, along with the capacity to think critically about media information, deliberate in public discourse via expression of individual opinions, and exchange with others. Evaluation study is conducted upon completion of the course to examine whether, or to what extent, that objective is realized, using qualitative method. Results show positive impacts on students’ learning, providing valuable inputs for further iterations of curriculum design in citizenship and media literacy education.

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