Masters Thesis

A personal story of a Hmong student's learning of mathematics in school: a case study

This thesis examines the process of a Hmong student learning mathematics on the community college level. The researcher selected a Hmong student from Butte College to conduct an interview regarding his educational experience but focused mainly on mathematics. The interview took approximately eight weeks, and each interview took about an hour with three interviews performed each week. The researcher also interviewed the participant’s parents to gather information regarding their family background to support this Hmong student’s learning experience. The results indicated that this Hmong student learned mathematics in school by examples provided by the instructor. He relied on his memorization abilities to remember the mathematical-solving procedures. He practiced diligently to prepare himself to solve problems for in-class tests. The results also revealed that motivation was the key to inspire this Hmong student to go to school and to study. The participant identified five roots of motivation that inspired him to continue his education, especially in mathematics such as parent’s support, people’s admiration, desire to compete successfully in the classroom, interest in assisting others, and the desire to be a role model for younger siblings. This study showed that 78.97% of all mathematical word problems were translated into the Hmong language before translated into algebraic symbols. The other 21.03% was translated straight from the word problems written in English to algebraic equations by the participant. In addition, 81.48% of all the word problems, regardless of the English language structure, were translated word by word from left to right. The remaining18.52% of all the word problems was not translated from left to right due to the same English language structure. During the interviews, the researcher provided 31 word problems that came from four different types of mathematical word problems for the participant to solve. The accumulative percentages from all mathematical word problems performed by the participant were 64.5% correct vs. 35.5% incorrect. Moreover, this study revealed that the participant was able to get 1) 100% of all mathematical word problems written in Hmong language correct; 2) 80% of the mathematical word problems that the participant had correct was coming from left to right translation; 3) 20% was coming from basic English sentence structure; and 4) 0% correct from mathematical word problems written in English complex language structure. Accordingly, the translation of the written word into algebraic language created most errors due to language barriers for the participant.

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