Education Commons^™

Developing Numeracy And Problem-Solving Skills By Overcoming Learning Bottlenecks, Anita Lee-Post

Marketing & Supply Chain Faculty Publications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an educational approach to elevating problem-solving and numeracy competencies of business undergraduates to meet workplace demand. The approach is grounded in the theory of constraints following the Decoding the Discipline model. The authors investigated a cognitive bottleneck involving problem modeling and an affective bottleneck concerning low self-efficacy of numeracy and designed specific interventions to address both bottlenecks simultaneously. The authors implemented the proposed approach in an introductory level analytics course in business operations.

Design/methodology/approachThe authors use an empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in addressing deficiency in …

A Multi-Institutional Analysis Of Instructional Beliefs And Practices In Gateway Courses To The Sciences, Joseph J. Ferrare

Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation Faculty Publications

This paper builds on previous studies of instructional practice in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses by reporting findings from a study of the relationship between instructors’ beliefs about teaching and learning and their observed classroom practices. Data collection took place across six institutions of higher education and included in-depth interviews with 71 instructors and more than 140 hours of classroom observations using the Teaching Dimensions Observation Protocol. Thematic coding of interviews identified 31 distinct beliefs that instructors held about the ways students best learn introductory concepts and skills in these courses. Cluster analysis of the observation data suggested that …