Effects of innovative science and mathematics teaching on student attitudes and achievement: A meta-analytic study

By Elwin R. Savelsbergh, G. T. Prins, C. Rietbergen, Sabine Fechner, Bram E. Vaessen, J. Draijer, Arthur Bakker. 2016

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many teaching approaches have been tried to improve student attitudes and achievement in science and mathematics education. Achievement effects have been synthesized, but a systematic overview of attitude effects is missing. This study provides a meta analytic review based on 56 publications (1988–2014), reporting 65 independent experiments that investigated the effects of teaching approaches on student attitudes in primary or secondary science or mathematics education. Five types of teaching approaches were distinguished: inquiry-based, context-based, computer-based, collaborative learning strategies, and extra-curricular activities. Since many different attitude outcomes were distinguished and attitudes were assessed at different levels of granularity, we did separate analyses for specific and more global outcomes. Outcomes were not significantly different for different educational approaches. When taking all interventions together, significant effects were found for General Attitude (n = 60; d = 0.35), General Interest (n = 20; d = 0.22), and Career Interest in Science (n = 4; d = 0.40). The effects were significantly weaker for studies with older students. Analysis of achievement outcomes yielded a significant and large overall effect (n = 40; d = 0.78), again with no significant differences between teaching approaches. Although the positive effects might be partly due to novelty, the current findings do counter skepticism about the learning outcomes of interest-oriented teaching approaches.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b7a860419a08fa3a77b35c85e51cbef1955de0a

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Effective Programs in Elementary Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis (2021, methodology): “We investigated citations from previous reviews of elementary mathematics programs (e.g., Dietrichson, Bøg, Filges, & Klint Jørgensen, 2017; Gersten et al., 2014; Jacobse & Harskamp, 2011; Kulik & Fletcher, 2016; Li & Ma, 2010; Lynch et al., 2019; Nelson et al., 2019; Savelsbergh et al., 2016).”
Emotions and motivation in mathematics education: theoretical considerations and empirical contributions (2017, background): “The studies that we identified investigated effects of treatments including (a) self-regulated and cooperative learning, (b) feedback, and (c) problems with multiple solutions (for motivational intervention studies in education more generally, see Lazowski and Hulleman 2016; Savelsbergh et al. 2016)”