The Figure of the Day: an in-class activity to improve students’ quantitative literacy and data interpretation skills
Year: 2019
Type: conference-paper
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: Quantitative and scientific literacy skills are important for undergraduate students to develop. Unfortunately, these skills are often given short-shrift in gateway science courses in favour of spending time on disciplinary content. In an attempt to solve this problem, we developed a short ice-breaker activity called The Figure of the Day where students were required to interpret visual representations of scientific data. We tested the impact of this activity in five “treatment” lab sections (81 students) and compared it to the impact of an alternate activity that was implemented in five “control” lab sections (82 students). We collected pre- and post-activity data on student graph-creation abilities, and data on student perception of the activities. Students made significant gains in their figure creation abilities in both the treatment and control sections (effect sizes, r = 0.708 and 0.688, respectively; Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test). In addition, students tended to associate the Figure of the Day activity with an improvement in their figure-interpretation and graphing skills. These results suggest that the Figure of the Day activity has the potential to result in meaningful quantitative literacy skill improvements in students.
Authors: Peter White, Caitlin K. Kirby, Arietta Fleming-Davies
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2953115728