Dissertation Defense Announcement Ed.D. Program: Cristhian C. Altamirano “Graph Comprehension Among Developmental Mathematics Students Through A Sociocultural Perspective”
This study explored how students enrolled in the developmental mathematics sequence differ from their peers in college-level math courses in graph comprehension performance across various graph levels. The study also examined to what extent do background factors and graph context (i.e., academic, every day or specialized content) influence these differences in graph performance between both groups.
A between-subject experimental design was employed for the study, with 114 students enrolled in developmental math courses and 144 students enrolled in college-level math courses. Participants completed a graph comprehension assessment with graphs embedded in one of three distinct contexts: everyday activities, academic mathematics, or specialized health profession content. Statistical analyses revealed that college-level math students significantly outperformed their developmental math peers in both overall graph comprehension and across three levels of graph comprehension. Notably, college-level math students also significantly performed better when the context of the graph was specialized and marginally significantly performed better in the academic context, compared to their developmental math peers; whereas the performance gap between the student groups was non-significant in everyday context.
However, underrepresented students in developmental math are found to have a performance gap consistently across all three graph contexts in comparison to their non-underrepresented peers in college-level math. The disadvantages of students from underrepresented minority groups and students with disabilities in graph comprehension proficiency was discussed. We also discussed on the importance of providing cultural-responsive assessment to reduce assessment bias for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Keywords: graph comprehension, developmental math, sociocultural perspective, bar graphs