The influence of teaching styles on students’ math score

Abstract

There is a researching that three teachers with two different teaching methods in a junior high school, where students came from four different ethnic groups. Ruger and Smith used the standards-based method and Wesson used the traditional method, they were suggested to use the same teaching approach and the same textbook. The study aims to understand fully which teacher is best fitted for which ethnic group and which teaching approach is better. This research used statistical methods such as pie charts and bar plots to analyze data and used linear regression to investigate the relationships between the teaching methods and the students’ performance. The results showed that students who were taught by Ruger achieved the lowest math scores across all ethnics; Smith's teaching method suits Caucasian students; the traditional method resulted in higher math scores for students of African-American, Asian and Hispanic; and students who learnt using traditional method got higher scores compared to students learnt using standards-based method in average. Although each method has its own benefit, these results suggest that the traditional method is better than the standards-based method and these teachers should use the same teaching approach.