| This study investigated the effects of personalized instruction on the achievement of fourth-grade Taiwanese students on two-step mathematics word problems. A total of 136 students from four classes in a Taiwanese public elementary school served as subjects.; Subjects initially completed a 20-item Student Survey on which they chose their favorite foods, sports, stores, classmates, and other selections. The most popular items were then used to create personalized math word problems for the pretest, personalized instructional program, and posttest. Subjects were blocked by ability based on their pretest scores and were randomly assigned within higher- and lower-ability blocks to either a personalized or non-personalized version of the print-based instructional program. The two-class-period program contained instruction and practice, in personalized or non-personalized form, on four types of two-step math problems: multiply-multiply, multiply-divide, divide-multiply, and divide-divide. After finishing the program, subjects completed a student attitude survey and the posttest. Both the pretest and the posttest contained 12 items, 6 in personalized form and 6 in non-personalized form.; A repeated-measures univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that subjects in the personalized treatment made significantly greater pretest-to-posttest gains than those in the non-personalized treatment. Subjects also performed significantly better on the personalized pretest and posttest problems than on the non-personalized problems. As expected, subjects scored significantly higher on the posttest than on the pretest, and higher-ability students scored significantly higher than lower-ability students. Personalized subjects and higher-ability students both had significantly more positive attitudes toward the instructional program than their non-personalized and lower-ability counterparts.; The overall results suggest that incorporating the personal interests of Taiwanese students into mathematics instruction improves both their achievement and their attitudes toward the instruction. Explanations for the better performance of subjects in the personalized treatment, based on both cognitive theory and on increased student interest, are offered in the complete dissertation. |
