Another project I’ve had floating around in the background was the collection of data that captures student affect in mathematics. The questions are taken from the Short ATMI Survey and we try to collect it on basically the entire body of math students twice per semester. I have the data set for the 2019-2020 Academic Year and am in the process of writing scripts to clean the data and start to dive in a bit into what it says.

There are three categories of affect: perceived value of mathematics, self-confidence in mathematics, and enjoyment of mathematics. Overall, the students are fairly neutral about all of them. I’m able to break it down into different subgroups, and so far there’s not a lot of interesting things to see other than the MATH 95M students being much more confident than the MATH 96A students. So there’s at least something there that’s worth looking into, and potentially trying to create an intervention or writing a paper about. But I’ll need to take more time to analyze the data, and perhaps get a deeper dive into the students to see if there are perhaps age or other background differences that are worth pursuing.