University Mathematics Major Students’ Ratings of Their Lecturers’ Preferred Teaching Methods: A Repeated-Measures Design

Abstract

This study investigates the differences in lecturers’ preferred teaching methods based on the ratings of their students. It employed the repeated measures design, where four separate ratings for each participant were taken. The participants comprise eighty-two (82) university mathematics major students, made up of fifty-five (55) males and twenty-seven (27) females, who were selected from a university in the central region of Ghana, using a non-proportionate stratified sampling technique in two third-year cohort mathematics classes. The results indicated that Mauchly’s test of sphericity was not significant, χ^2 (5)=10.33,p>.05, (i.e., the assumption about the characteristics of the variance-covariance matrix was not violated). Thus, the within-subjects variable of the teaching method was highly significant, F (3, 243) = 468.17, p < .05, indicating that the mean students’ ratings differed significantly as a function of the four teaching methods. This was supported by the decrease in the mean students’ ratings from guided discovery to direct instruction methods. The pairwise comparisons (with Bonferroni adjustment) among the four teaching methods, showed a significant difference between any pair of teaching methods (p < .05). Thus, the students’ ratings for guided discovery were higher than the ratings for cooperative learning (p < .05), ratings for cooperative learning were higher than the ratings for inquiry-based learning (p < .05), and the ratings for inquiry-based learning were higher than the ratings for direct instruction (p < .05). The estimated marginal means for the ratings of guided discovery (M = 8.12; C. I = [7.94, 8.32]) were the highest, followed by the mean ratings for cooperative learning method (M = 6.68; C.I = [6.51, 6.86]), followed by the mean ratings for inquiry-based learning (M = 4 73; C. I = [4.60, 4.87]), and then followed by the mean ratings for direct instruction (M = 3.95; C.I = [3.80,4.11]). The study's implications are that, although many researchers recommend multiple teaching methods for mathematics instruction, lecturers should endeavour to use teaching methods that are popular and acceptable among students. This would enable them to understand the content their lecturers teach. The study concludes that lecturers should focus more on active teaching methods such as guided discovery and cooperative learning and focus less on the direct instruction teaching method.