Research Experience and Mentoring

Background: Anxiety and stress associated with math exams discourages many students from following STEM careers. We hypothesized that if math exam questions were formulated in relatable and humorous video form (akin to TikTok clips), this might ameliorate the problem. Per an institutionally approved experimental protocol we collected data from n=40 sophomores, who took math exams containing both classic and TikTok styled questions.

Research Plan: The aim of the REM project is to analyze the collected data to determine if the TikTok intervention ameliorated math exam stress. Should this proves to be true on average, the second step would be to develop a machine learning (ML) method to precisely predict which students would benefit from such an approach, based on their psychometric and other characteristics.