Table 1. Details of Item Analysis for Reasoning Ability Scale
To enhance the reasoning ability successfully in a classroom the author implement the new technique. For that the investigator uses the Multimedia package to improve the Mathematics student-teachers in reasoning ability. Multimedia improves the effectiveness of teaching learning process in formal or informal setting and utilizing scientific principle. Multimedia is characterized by the presence of text, pictures, graphics, sound, animation and video; some or all of which are organized into some coherent Program. A primary application of the interactive multimedia for instruction in an instructional situation where the learners is given control so that he/she may review the material at his or her own pace and in keeping with his/her own individual interests, needs, and cognitive processes. The objectives of the study is to measure the effectiveness of the Multimedia Approach in reasoning ability among Mathematics student-teachers and the experimental research is essential for finding out into effective from the population of student-teachers, the investigator selected 24 students from a college of education in Tamil Nadu. Tools used were Multimedia package to improve reasoning ability developed by the investigator and Reasoning Ability scale developed by the investigator. In the experimental group, student teachers were taught the subject Mathematics by using this Multimedia package to improve reasoning ability. The control group student teachers were taught traditional method to improve reasoning ability. Findings of the study shows that Control group and Experimental group do not differ significantly in their pre-test scores. Control group and experimental group students differ significantly in their post-test scores. Control groups students differ significantly in their pre-test and post-test scores. Also Experimental group students differ significantly in their pre-test and post-test scores. The conclusion of the study is that the experimental group student teachers have achieved high in post- test than the control group student-teachers. So that the reasoning ability was enhanced in the student teachers of experimental group than control group.
To enhance the reasoning ability successfully in a classroom the authors implement the new technique. For that the investigator uses the Multimedia package to improve the Mathematics student-teachers in reasoning ability. Multimedia improves the effectiveness of teaching learning process in formal or informal setting and utilizing scientific principle. Multimedia is characterized by the presence of text, pictures, graphics, sound, animation and video; some or all of which are organized into some coherent program. A primary application of the interactive multimedia for instruction is an instructional situation where the learners is given control so that he/she may review the material at his or her own pace and in keeping with his/her own individual interests, needs, and cognitive processes.
Multimedia integrates video, animation, audio, graphics, and test resources to develop effective presentations. It allows sort out the information, analyse and make meaning for conceptualization and applications which is suitable for individual learners. Only limited studies have been undertaken on multimedia approach particularly for Mathematics. A primary application of the interactive multimedia for instruction is an instructional situation where the learners is given control so that he/she may review the material at his or her own pace and in keeping with his/her own individual interests, needs, and cognitive processes.
“Mathematics is an expression of the human mind reflects that active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire of aesthetic perfection is its basic elements are logic intuitions analysis and construction generally and individually.
Reason or "reasoning" is associated with thinking, cognition, and intellect. Reason, is like habit or intuition, it is one of the ways by which thinking comes from one idea to a related idea. For example, it is the means by which rational beings understand themselves to think about cause and effect, truth and falsehood, and what is good or bad.
Specific meaning of this term varies, depending upon the manner in which a given test measures this ability; generally it refers to non-verbal, deductive, inductive, analytical thinking.
Multimedia is the exciting combination of computer hardware & software that allows you to integrate video, animation, audio, graphics, and test resources to develop effective presentation on an affordable desktop computer.
Student-Teachers refer to the B.Ed. students in kanyakumari district.
The aim of the study is to measure the effectiveness of the multimedia approach to improve reasoning ability for Mathematics Student Teachers, the experimental research is essential for analysing the facts or information. From the population of Mathematics Student teachers, the investigator selected 30 student teachers from a college of education. For this research, the investigator prepared slides in the form of a package to improve reasoning ability as the instructional purpose. In the experimental group, student teachers were taught the reasoning ability problems by using this package. In the control group, student teachers were taught using traditional method which is the present method of teaching. Before and after this treatment, pre-tests and post-tests were conducted for both the groups and marks were scored and tabulated. The pre-tests and post-tests were conducted using the Reasoning Ability Scale. The investigator find out the mean score differences for the control and experimental group using 't' test.
Saranya. M,(2013) conducted a study on “Application Of Live Streaming Video In Multimedia Technology”.
Streaming video from the server is being an everlasting problem for all of us till now. The videos cannot be seen from the server so easily by the user. The user has to wait for the videos to buffer, which is the streaming process. If more than two persons are watching the same video at the same time, user may face so much of buffering problem, clarity in the video content also. The problem occurs because each individual user does not have their individual path to the server, which they use. This problem can be overcome by the concept of subway tunnel. “Subway tunnel” which means that a secondary path is created to the user from the server they use. So if the bandwidth of the user's path cannot withstand with the content, the user can take the subway path to transfer the video content. Bit streaming method is used for streaming the video content from the server. This method helps us to stream the video content without any loss in the content of the video & quality. By this way the users (i.e., multiple users) can able to overcome the problem of streaming videos from the server.
G. Rexlin Jose, B. William Dharma Raja (2012), conducted a study on “Multimedia Modular Approach for Augmenting the Speaking Skill of the Student-Teachers”. Language is the most important instrument for communication. It enables and facilitates both the speaker and the listener to exchange their thoughts and feelings. It is the basis for social, cultural, aesthetic, spiritual and economic development and growth of every human being. Unless the spoken language is free from errors and barriers, it can never be recognized and comprehended properly. Broadly speaking, the usage of contextual vocabulary, correct pronunciation, stress, intonation and other elements is essential for cultivating the speaking skill. Skill of speaking is very vital as it plays a pivotal role in each and every field, especially in education. This skill of speaking must be developed among the student community, particularly the student-teachers. Schools and colleges for years together follow various techniques and approaches in teaching English, but students in large number struggle to communicate in English as their of regional vernacular interrupts or throttles their flow of the alien language. Why is this problem? Who are responsible for it? How can it be rectified? What are the solutions to it? This research paper throws lights on these interrogations and finds answers for them. It also highlights the importance and effectiveness of multimedia in offering practice to develop the speaking skill of the student teachers who are going to be the teachers in the future and carving their wards in developing this skill. The investigators have employed experimental method using Pre-test — Post-test Equivalent Group Design. The selection of 70 student-teachers from one of the colleges of education of Kanyakumari District, Tamil Nadu, has served both the sample groups. They have used two tools namely S. Jalota's Test of Intelligence for College Education Adults (JTICEA) and ReWi's Achievement Test in English Language Skills (RATELS) for the experiment. The multimedia module consisted of 30 units was prepared. The collected data were analysed by employing t-tests for dependent and independent variable and ANCOVA. It proves that the Multimedia Modular Approach is statistically more effective than the traditional method in developing speaking skill.
Milovanovic, Marina; Takaci, Durdica; Milajic, Aleksandar (2011) conducted a study on “Multimedia Approach in Teaching Mathematics--Example of Lesson about the Definite Integral Application for Determining an Area”.
This article presents the importance of using multimedia in the math classes by an example of multimedia lesson about definite integral and the results of the research carried out among the students of the first years of faculty, divided into two groups of 25. One group had the traditional lecture about the definite integral, while the other one had the multimedia method. The main information source in multimedia lectures was the software created in Macromedia Flash, with definitions, theorems, examples, tasks as well as in traditional lectures but with emphasized visualization possibilities, animations, illustrations, etc. Both groups were tested after the lectures. Students from the multimedia group showed better theoretical, practical and visual knowledge. Besides that, survey carried out at the end of this research clearly showed that students from multimedia group were highly interested in this way of learning.
Reis et al. (2010) conducted a study on “Using Information Technology Based Exercises in Primary Mathematics Teaching of Children with Cerebral Palsy and Mental Retardation: A Case Study”. Technology has profoundly changed the way we learn and live. Indeed, such relationship appears to be quite complex, within IT contexts, and especially in socially and technologically rich learning environments, where related skills and learning are progressively required and fostered. Thus, if a satisfactory level of intellectual performance and social competence of a primary school pupil is indeed highly dependent on the type of participation that parents offer their children, IT, in general, and Internet, in particular, may well provide a new paradigm, setting forth that education and communication approach is truly more complex than ever before. It is on the basis of such paradigm that we therefore present a case study where a set of multimedia exercises were used in order to possibly improve the mathematical skills of pupils, one with mental retardation and another with cerebral palsy. Being part of a Web-based system to support students' learning, the referred set of multimedia exercises proved to be the children's favorite, rather than exercises in paper form, which also led the children to show a fair more positive attitude towards learning. Also, we observed that through the mentioned multimedia exercises, the children became far more autonomous, interested, persistent, happy, and able to easily absorb the material as well as more willingly to continue on working.
Joubert, Marie (2013) “Using Digital Technologies in Mathematics Teaching: Developing an Understanding of the Landscape Using Three Grand Challenge Themes”.
This paper develops an understanding of the issues, interests and concerns within the mathematics education community related to the use of computers and other digital technologies in the teaching and learning of mathematics. It begins by arguing for the importance of understanding this landscape of interests and concerns, and then turns to the theoretical and methodological choices made in this study, explaining how it has drawn on the approach developed by the STELLAR European Network of Excellence. By analysing the titles and abstracts of a conference chosen to represent the mathematics education community, it maps out the landscape framed by three "Grand Challenges", finding that an understanding of orchestrating learning is at the heart of the interests of the community, and that the community is interested in exploring new and different contexts for the teaching and learning of mathematics. However, there is currently less interest in investigating and exploiting the increasing connectedness of learners within this community. Further, while the "Grand Challenges" framing is useful in mapping the landscape, it fails to take into account both the personal concerns of teachers and students, such as attitude and confidence, and issues related to doing research and understanding research concerns.
The experimental method was adopted to compare the effectiveness of Multimedia approach over the traditional Method.
The experimental design employed in this study was the randomized pre-test post-test design. Teaching strategy is the independent variable which has two levels, viz., the Multimedia approach and traditional Method of teaching.
In this study the experimental group improves the reasoning ability through Multimedia approach and the control group improves the reasoning ability by traditional Method. The result was calculated by the scores obtained in the pre-test and post-test scores of Reasoning Ability Scale in control group and experimental group.
The population for the present study was all the Mathematics Student-Teachers of Kanyakumari District.
Sample of the study consists of twenty four (24) student teachers selected from a College of Education in Kanyakumari District. The group was divided into two. One is the experimental group and the other is the control group. Each group consisted of 12 students.
The tools used in the present study were
The Multimedia package was prepared as questions related to improve reasoning ability of the student teachers. It consists of 30 slides with pictures.
Investigator should follow certain steps to develop the concept, here the investigator teaches the reasoning ability concept and problems through traditional Method.
Suitable descriptive and inferential statistical techniques were used in the interpretation of the data such as Arithmetic Mean, Standard Deviation and 't' test.
The collection of data is an important part of research. For collecting the data, the investigator needs a tool. A tool is a data gathering device or procedure used for research investigation (Best & Kahn,2006). Tools are used to collect relevant information for a research problem. They can be used for gathering both quantitative as well as qualitative data.
Validity is defined as the extent to which a test measures what it is intended to measure. It is used to determine whether the inferences about test scores are accurate.
What has been called as “Content Validity” is employed in the selection of items in educational achievements and in many trade tests (Garrett,2009).For establishing the content validity of the tool, it was given to three experienced professors. With the help of them, the coverage of the content was checked. On the basis of their suggestions, corrections and modifications were made in the tool in the construction of questions. Thus the Content Validity of the tool was established.
For establishing the item validity of the tool, it was administered among 60 student teachers in a college of education selected from Kanyakumari District for item validation. The answer sheets of all the 60 student teachers were evaluated.
Item analysis is an important phase of test construction. Through this, items can be analysed qualitatively in terms of their content and form, and quantitatively in terms of their statistical properties. Qualitative analysis includes the consideration of content validity and the evaluation of items in terms of effective item writing procedure. Qualitative analysis, on the other hand, includes principally the measurement of item difficulty and item discrimination. Both the validity and reliability of any test depend ultimately on the characteristics of its items. High validity and reliability can be built into a test in advance through item analysis. The items included in the draft scale were analyzed quantitatively by using the procedure narrated by Anastasi and Urbina (2009).
The Procedure of Validating the Items of Reasoning Ability Scale is given below
Item analysis was done as mentioned earlier by considering discriminative index and difficulty level were calculated as follows: the response sheets were arranged in the descending order. The top 20 (33%) were taken as upper group (U). The next 20 (33%) were considered as medium group (M). The remaining 20 (33%) belonged to the lower group (L).
For each item, the number of students who marked the 'keyed' response (those getting a score of 4 or 5) was counted. Similarly, the number of students marking the keyed answer was counted in the other groups also.
As a measure of difficulty index, a total number of students marking the keyed answer in the total sample of 60 (U+M+L) was taken. (U-L) was considered as the discriminative power for each item. The details of item analysis is presented in Table 1.
Table 1. Details of Item Analysis for Reasoning Ability Scale
The items having average difficulty index and high discriminating power were selected, and included in the final scale. Thus out of 24 items, 20 were selected for the final tool. Selected item for final tool of Reasoning Ability Scale are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24. The positive items are 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, 19, 21, 24 and the negative items are 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, and 22.
Reliability is based on the notion that there is some sense of uniformity in what is being measured and that methods need to consistently capture what is being explored. It is thus the extent to which a measure, procedure or instrument provides the same result on repeated trials.
The reliability of Reasoning Ability Scale was established by split-half method. Split-half reliability refers to the correlation within a single test of two similar parts of the test (Jain,2003).
In the split-half method, the whole items are divided into two sets by considering all the odd numbered items as a set and the even numbered items as a separate set. If the two sets of scores were highly correlated with each other, this can be taken as the evidence of the index's reliability. Thus the test was divided into two equivalent halves and the correlation (r) was found for this half-test using Karl Pearson's formula and the value of r was found to be 0.82.
From the self-correlation of the half-test, the reliability coefficient of the whole test (r') is given by the Spearman- Brown prophecy formula (Garrett,2009).The value of r' was found to be 0.90 which indicates that the tool is highly reliable (Best & Kahn,2006).
Each item had given responses, viz., Strongly Agree (SA), Agree (A), Undecided (U), Disagree (D), and Strongly Disagree (SD). For the purpose of scoring, numerical values were assigned. For each positive item, the assigned score was 5 (SA), 4 (A), 3(U), 2 (D), and 1(SD). For a negative item, the score was reversed as 1(SA), 2(A), 3 (U), 4(D), and 5(SD). For each student, scores were found out.
The final tool of Reasoning Ability Scale had 20 items. The items were neatly printed and administered to the student teachers to record their opinion. Thus the final tool is done for the present study.
There exist significant difference between the pre-test scores of the control group and experimental group in their Reasoning Ability.
Table 2 shows that the Mean and Standard Deviation for the control group (N= 12) is 60.42 and 10.78 respectively. The Mean and Standard Deviation for the experimental group (N=12) is 60.08 and 6.33 respectively. Here the calculated 't' value (0.09) was found to be less than the table value (1.96) at 0.05 level of significance. The 't' was not significant statistically. Therefore, the Hypothesis-1 that, “There exist significant difference between the pretest scores of the control group and experimental group in their Reasoning Ability” was rejected.
Table 2. Data and results of t- test for the comparison of pre-test scores of control and experimental group
There exist significant difference between the post-test scores of the control group and experimental group in their Reasoning Ability
Table 3 shows that the Mean and Standard Deviation for the control group (N=12) is 71.00 and 11.39 respectively.
The Mean and Standard Deviation for the experimental group (N=12) is 81.75 and 7.40 respectively. Here the calculated 't' value (2.74) was found to be greater than the table value (1.96) at 0.05 level of significance. The 't' was significant statistically. Therefore, the Hypothesis-2 that, “There exist significant difference between the posttest scores of the control group and experimental group in their Reasoning Ability” was accepted.
Table 3. Data and results of t- test for the comparison of post-test scores of control and experimental group
There exist significant difference between the pretest and post-test scores of the control group in their Reasoning Ability.
Table 4 shows that the Mean and Standard Deviation for the pre-test of control group is 60.42 and 10.78 respectively. The Mean and Standard Deviation for the Post- test of control group is 71.00 and 11.39 respectively.
Here the calculated 't' value (2.33) was found to be greater than the table value (1.96) at 0.05 level of significance. The 't' was significant statistically. Therefore, the Hypothesis-3 that, “There exist significant difference between the pretest and post-test scores of the control group in their Reasoning Ability” was accepted.
Table 4. Data and results of t- test for the comparison of pre- test and post-test scores of the control group
There exist significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group in their Reasoning Ability.
Table 5 shows that the Mean and Standard Deviation for the pre-test of experimental group are 60.08 and 6.33 respectively. The Mean and Standard Deviation for the post- test of experimental group is 81.75 and 7.40 respectively. Here the calculated 't' value (7.71) was found to be greater than the table value (1.96) at 0.05 level of significance. The 't' was significant statistically. Therefore, the Hypothesis-4 that, “There exist significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group in their Reasoning Ability” was accepted.
Table 5. Data and results of t-test for the comparison of pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group
The results of the study proved that Multimedia based teaching is more effective than the traditional way to develop the reasoning ability among the student teachers. The present study revealed that the experimental group is better than the control group in their achievement. This may be due to the fact that multimedia package with pictures animation and explanations of the concepts will develop the reasoning ability among the student teachers. The teachers of schools and colleges can be given orientation on how to develop multimedia packages for their classes
Every school can use the multimedia package for teaching. The teachers are trained to prepare multimedia package and trained their students and student teachers. The school library may provide opportunity for the students to read computer journals. Parents may find time to take care of their children for the proper use of multimedia with regard to their education. The students will be given training for using better method of study.
Control group and experimental group do not differ significantly in their pre-test scores. Control group and experimental group students differ significantly in their post-test scores. Control groups students differ significantly in their pre-test and post-test scores. Also Experimental group students differ significantly in their pretest and post-test scores. That is experimental group student teachers have achieved high in post- test than the control group