Leveraging Student-Written Chapter Summaries to Assess Understanding and Motivation in an Introductory Statistics Course

Abstract

Instructors often assign students to write summaries of what they have learned. Beyond being a helpful learning exercise, written summaries can reveal latent models of what students do and don’t understand about the instructional content. Drawing on data from an introductory statistics course, the current study assessed the relationship between written summaries and student understanding and motivation in the course. Findings revealed significant associations which can inform support for struggling learners.