A study of the effects of student -made manipulatives, behavior, ethnicity and gender on low -income students' mathematics performance

Mathematics teaching with the application of student-made manipulatives has not received the attention it deserves from mathematics teachers. Most middle school students who are classified as "racial minorities" are alienated from mathematics classrooms because of an Euro-centric approach to teaching it. This study attempted to find out the effects of student-made manipulatives, behavior, ethnicity and gender on the mathematics performance on the mathematics section of TAAS of students in a Southeast Texas school district. The result of this study is significant for instructional planning, and also, engage middle school students in the use of student-made manipulatives in mathematics problem-solving situations. A sample of 36 students was randomly selected from a list of 200 students from a five-strata school district. The researcher, having asked for and been granted permission commenced this study by metering mathematics instruction to 18 seventh- and eighth-grade male and female students. The 18 remaining students in the control group did not receive a placebo. At the end of the six-week period and after the treatments were metered to the experimental group, all of the 36 students were given a forty-item questionnaire to respond to and a forty-item TAAS Exit Examination. Both tests were collected from the examinees at the end of the time allotted to the tests. All students adhered to the strict guidelines given to them by the examiner. Conclusions and recommendations were made based on the findings of the study. There was a statistically significant difference between the mathematics scores of seventh- and eighth-grade students who used student-made manipulatives and the mathematics scores of seventh- and eighth-grade students who did not use student-made manipulatives in solving mathematics. Furthermore, the variables, attitude towards mathematics, ethnicity and gender did not influence the mathematics performance of the seventh- and eighth-grade students who used student-made manipulatives or the mathematics performance scores of the control group that did not use student-made manipulatives, but received only a placebo. In addition, many of those variables also did not have any significant interaction effect on the mathematics performance scores of the seventh- and eighth-grade students who used or did not use student-made manipulatives.