The use of lived experience descriptions in a remedial mathematics classroom

A large number of American college students are placed in remedial, or developmental, mathematics courses, and those same students then go on to abandon or fail those courses at a staggering rate. Research has produced cognitive, affective, socioeconomic, and pedagogical explanations for this phenomenon; several recent studies advocate for a more unified view, emphasizing the interplay between these aspects of experience. In this study, students in a post-secondary remedial algebra class were taught to write lived experience descriptions: first–person, present-tense narratives which describe affective, cognitive, and other aspects of experience. Students were then asked to write about specific mathematical experiences several times throughout the semester. These students’ test scores, test times, and attitudes toward mathematics were compared to those of students in a control group. Over the course of the semester, the students who wrote lived experience descriptions showed a statistically significant improvement in test scores as compared to those in the control group. The students’ writing assignments appear to document the emergence of personal agency in relation to mathematics: as the semester progressed, the students spoke less of themselves and mathematics as separate, fixed entities, and instead described a relationship which they had the power to improve.