Article

Patterns of student engagement within an online supplemental mathematics curriculum

This paper describes how students, especially those with learning disabilities, interact with an online supplemental mathematics curriculum. It seeks to understand to what extent, and with what strategies, do students engage in reading, comprehending, and learning from such multimodal mathematical texts. Thirty students in grades 3, 4, and 6 worked in an online lesson on fractions. A keystroke monitor created a database of student/lesson interactions, which formed the data analyzed. The database records where organized and coded to allow types of student interactions with the curriculum to be tabulated and for the identification of cycles of student behavior. Of particular interest were quiz cycles, which were defined as the events leading up to and the taking a lesson quiz. Analysis of these quiz cycles showed students initially engaging with the lesson with strategies expected by the curriculum developers. However, those students who failed the quiz on their first attempt, adopted different interaction strategies, often at lower levels of engagement. This preliminary analysis supports four general observations: students will interact with lesson elements at different paces, they will choose where in a lesson to work, at what level of engagement, and they will set their own learning goals.

Items in ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.