Contributed paper list
(Wednesday 5th, 11:00-12:30)
Reading ability as a predictor of African-American graduate students’ writing proficiency in the context of statistics courses
Authors
Kathleen M T Collins, Anthony J Onwuegbuzie
Presenter
Abstract
Assessing technical writing skills, such as writing results stemming from statistical analysis of real data, is considered by some statistics instructors as a viable way of providing authentic assessment. Unfortunately, many students find such technical writing extremely difficult. Because writing result sections of quantitative studies involves the ability to receive, to encode, to translate, and to reproduce material presented in statistical textbooks, it is likely that reading ability plays an important role in the technical writing process. This study’s purpose was to examine this link among 115 African-American graduate students. A canonical correlation analysis revealed that reading ability significantly predicted students’ abilities to write the results of the following four statistical analyses: correlation analysis, independent samples t-test, dependent samples t-test, and chi-square analysis.
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