Date of Award

2012-01-01

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Mathematical Sciences

Advisor(s)

Lawrence M. Lesser

Abstract

English language learners are a rapidly growing population in the United States colleges and schools. There have been research studies about accommodations and resources for Spanish-speaking English language learners in subjects such as reading, writing, and mathematics, but little has been researched on introductory statistics courses. Introductory statistics courses are challenging to students because aside of handling words that have lexical ambiguity, students also go into the classroom having misconceptions. Some of the misconceptions of probability occur because the students do not have prior knowledge of the mathematical rules of probability and other misconceptions of probability are psychological. The purpose of the study is to investigate how a bilingual applet might help (Spanish-speaking) English language learners with probability concepts in their introductory statistics courses. The results showed that English language learners say they benefit and appear to benefit from using a computer simulation applet in English and Spanish. The results also showed several instances where language plays a factor when English language learners explore probability concepts.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

148 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Berenice Salazar

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