With the increasing stress on teachers and students to meet and raise mathematics
standards in schools, especially in the secondary level, the need for strong curricula and
supporting materials for teachers has grown. A good curriculum, however, must do
more than align with state standards and teach to the state exams; it must encourage
students to enjoy mathematics. In an effort to help ease the plague of math anxiety, this
thesis presents an eighth grade curriculum, called MathTAKStic, not only directly
aligning with the Texas state standards, the Texas Essential Knowledge Skills (TEKS),
but also encouraging students to pursue higher level thinking through active learning and
logical thinking. To test the curriculum and find out its usefulness, several lessons were
taught at a middle school. Although the scores of those learning with the curriculum
were not always better than others, MathTAKStic led to a greater increase in studentsâÂÂ
performance compared to those who were not exposed to the lessons, an increased
interest in math and a plethora of ideas for the future. These results were concluded
based on a comparison of studentsâ scores from the previous year to the current year on
the Texas standardized test. Overall, the increase in passing scores of MathTAKStic
students preceded other classes in the same school.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4234 |
| Date | 30 October 2006 |
| Creators | Kobiela, Marta Anna |
| Contributors | Yasskin, Philip |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 2955871 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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