Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

School of Education

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

According to the Obama Administration, we need a workforce that is going to be STEM ready because this is the only way that the U.S. will be able to compete on a global level with other nations. Louisiana will demand a total of 66,250 STEM jobs by 2018, up from 61,610 in 2008, according to Georgetown University (Carnevale, Smith, & Melton, 2014). By 2020, sixty-five percent of the nation’s jobs will require post-secondary education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the attrition rate between first- and second-year college students is 24.5% (2017).

The purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of computer assisted instruction, MyMathLab, in teaching Calculus I to increase academic achievement for students majoring in a STEM discipline at HBCUs. Research in this study was conducted by a quantitative study quasi-experiment design with one independent variable and one dependent variable. This study investigated the differences in the final course grade of Calculus I students that used the computer assisted instructional tool, MyMathLab and students who did not use the MyMathLab or any assisted instructional tool. For the purposes of this study, passage rate was defined by student’s letter grade. The historical data collected span over a seven-semester period, with a total of six hundred twenty-six participants, at an HBCU in the southeastern region of the United States. The results of the Wilcoxon two-sample test equals 103,064, which is the sum of the Wilcoxon scores for the students who used the MyMathLab. The sum is greater than 90,288, which is the expected value under the null hypothesis of no difference between the two groups of students. The one-sided p-value is less than alpha 0.0001, which shows the students who used MyMathLab are significantly more than those students who did not use the MyMathLab software.

Date

7-9-2018

Committee Chair

Mitchell, Roland

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.4679

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