Yusuf F ZakariyaUniversitetet i Agder | UIA · Department of Mathematical Sciences
Yusuf F Zakariya
PhD in Mathematics Education
About
49
Publications
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380
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Yusuf is a card bearer of causal revolutions in the field of mathematics education. He has interests in mathematics teaching and learning following an overarching philosophy of developmental research in which an observed practice is examined, changes are proposed, implemented, and evaluated to improve the practice. He does research with both qualitative and quantitative methods, causal modeling with observational data, and cross-country comparisons using international datasets
Additional affiliations
January 2014 - present
Publications
Publications (49)
This chapter reports from the early development of a Norwegian centre for excellence in (higher) education that was initially proposed to promote a vision of improved learning experiences in service-mathematics for students of other study programmes such as engineering, economics and science. The chapter considers the initial focus of the Centre’s...
Critiques of coefficient alpha as an estimate of scale reliability are widespread in the literature. However, the continuous overuse of this statistic in mathematics education research suggests a disconnection between theory and practice. As such, this article argues, in a non-technical way, for the limited usefulness of coefficient alpha, its over...
Self-efficacy is an integral part of personal factors that contributes substantially to students' success in mathematics. This review draws on previous intervention studies to identify, describe, and expose underlying mechanisms of interventions that foster mathematics self-efficacy. The findings show that effective mathematics self-efficacy interv...
The utility of students' approaches to learning (AL) has evolved from a simple act of academic monitoring to a systemic process of continuous improvement of teaching and learning in higher education. Research on the careful development of measures for AL is consequently crucial. The purpose of this research is to develop and validate a brief measur...
The purpose of this study is to analyse relations between students' attitude towards mathematics, prior knowledge, self-efficacy, expected grades, and performance in mathematics among 115 first-year engineering students. We combine two statistical techniques to analyse the data we generated by questionnaires and two tests. First, item-level modelin...
Several universities are witnessing an increase in students' enrolment in mathematics-intensive programmes over the last decades. This increase has come with the price of high failure rates in foundational mathematics courses, which poses challenges to mathematics teaching and learning in higher education. It is therefore inevitable, for some unive...
The purpose of this study is to analyse relations between students' attitude towards mathematics, prior knowledge, self-efficacy, expected grades, and performance in mathematics among 115 first-year engineering students. We combine two statistical techniques to analyse the data we generated by questionnaires and two tests. First, item-level modelin...
Using the Biggs' 3P learning model and correlational design, this study explores the relationship between students' individual characteristics and course perceptions, approach to study, and academic outcomes, which account for the differences in academic achievement and student delay. 612 Italian students of a master's degree in psychology particip...
Approaches to learning have been identified as crucial factors that
influence students’ mathematics performance. However, there have
been mixed findings on which of the different approaches improve
performance in undergraduate mathematics. Thus, this study aimed
to unravel the specific effects of prior mathematics knowledge and
approaches to learni...
Teacher self-efficacy is a crucial personal characteristic that is important not only for teachers’ well-being but also for the overall teaching and learning. However, the difficulty to ascertain scalar invariance in the measurement of the construct has beset previous attempts of cross-cultural comparisons. This study implements an alignment optimi...
Here is the Norwegian validation of the revised two-factor study process questionnaire. It is available here in the Norwegian language.
Using the Biggs' 3P learning model and correlational design, this study explores the relationship between students' individual characteristics and course perceptions, approach to study, and academic outcomes, which account for the differences in academic achievement and student delay. 612 Italian students of a master's degree in psychology particip...
Researchers across the world have focussed attention on the relationship between students' attitude towards mathematics and learning outcomes in the subject. There seems to be a scarcity of careful studies on the psychometric properties of attitude towards mathematics scales. The available studies are limited to establishing factor structures of th...
With the technological improvements of innovative portable recording gadgets, augmented researchers' interest in exploring students' visual attention in their natural and normal occurring classrooms. The purpose of this study was to gauge students' visual attention in their Mathematics and English classrooms. This article reports on a study conduct...
This dissertation concerns an exploration of factors that affect the learning outcomes of students in higher education mathematics. It is framed within a quantitative research paradigm in which the existence of personal factors such as prior knowledge, self-efficacy, and approaches to learning are assumed and that these factors may be operationalis...
Barely 1 year after severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first reported in China, the virus has infected approximately 120 million people, caused around 3 million deaths, and adversely affected the global economy. Despite stringent measures to flatten the epidemiologic curve of the pandemic, there have been spikes and wa...
The motivation for learning mathematics is an essential factor in predicting the performance of secondary school students. Students who are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to learn mathematics generally demonstrate higher performance than others who are not motivated. However, a properly designed instrument for the measurement of this cons...
The motivation for learning mathematics is an essential factor in predicting the performance of secondary school students. Students who are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to learn mathematics generally demonstrate higher performance than others who are not motivated. However, a properly designed instrument for the measurement of this cons...
Purpose: Self-efficacy has been argued theoretically and shown empirically to be an essential construct for students’ improved learning outcomes. However, there is a dearth of studies on its causal effects on performance in mathematics among university students. Meanwhile, it will be erroneous to assume that results from other fields of studies gen...
Ever since the index case of COVID-19 was announced in Nigeria, the number of confirmed cases has gradually increased to 46,140 (about 4.5% of total confirmed cases in Africa) as the time of writing this article. This seemingly low number of confirmed cases has provoked heated debates among researchers. This cross-sectional study explores the Niger...
This study aims at validating an attitude subscale of a national mathematics test that has been repeatedly used for over two decades and to expose the relations between students' attitude towards mathematics and their approaches to learning mathematics. A sample of 196 year-one engineering students completed two survey instruments used for the stud...
The importance of students' prior knowledge to their current learning outcomes cannot be overemphasised. Students with adequate prior knowledge are better prepared for the current learning materials than those without the knowledge. However, assessment of engineering students' prior mathematics knowledge has been beset with a lack of uniformity in...
There have been perennial concerns on the low academic performance of students among researchers and other education stakeholders. Innovative teaching strategies have, therefore, gained prominence in the field of mathematics education. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of a social constructivist instructional strategy on studen...
Theories of self-efficacy and approaches to learning are well-established in the psychology of learning. However, studies on relationships between the primary constructs on which these theories are developed are rarely reported in mathematics education research. Thus, the purpose of the current study is to provide empirical evidence for a potential...
The purpose of this study is to compare latent means of job satisfaction across participating countries in the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey. The mean comparison of this nature is sparse in the literature due to lack of cross-cultural construct validity of job satisfaction scales. We applied an alignment approach that can optimize...
The credibility of findings ensuing from cross-sectional survey research depends largely on the validity and reliability of the research instruments. Critical attention to the quality of such instruments will ensure logical and valid results. The purpose of this article is to provide evidence for two methodological issues observed that are potentia...
Background
Identification and retention of effective teachers in STEM education play cardinal roles in teacher recruitment exercises worldwide. Studies on factors that characterize effective teachers have therefore gained popularity in recent times. Teacher self-efficacy, job satisfaction and school climate are among other factors that have attract...
The final English version of the calculus self-efficacy inventory developed by Zakariya, Y. F., Goodchild, S., Bjørkestøl, K., & Nilsen, H. K. (2019). The instrument is recommended for assessing first-year university students' perceived self-efficacy on calculus tasks.
Zakariya, Y. F., Goodchild, S., Bjørkestøl, K., & Nilsen, H. K. (2019). Calcul...
This article describes a quantitative research project with the sole aim of exploring the factors affecting learning outcomes of students in higher education mathematics. The chosen factors are mainly from students' personal constructs which are approaches to learning, self-efficacy and prior knowledge. Results of analysed two sets of data consisti...
This paper reports a Norwegian validation study of a widely used instrument to measure students’ approaches to learning, namely, Bigg’s revised two-factor study process questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F). Its cultural sensitivity and psychometry evaluations have provoked rigorous discussion among educators in different languages. A survey design was adopted...
The revised two-factor study process questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F) has widely been considered valid and reliable in many contexts for measuring students' learning approaches. However, its cultural specificity has generated considerable discussion, with inconclusive results when translated to different languages. This paper provides more insights into th...
This study was framed within a quantitative research methodology to develop a concise measure of calculus self-efficacy with high psychometric properties. A survey research design was adopted in which 234 engineering and economics students rated their confidence in solving year-one calculus tasks on a 15-item inventory. The results of a series of e...
With the current raised issues on the new conformable fractional derivative having satisfied the Leibniz rule for derivatives which was proved not to be so for a differential operator to be fractional among others; we in the present article consider the fractional heat diffusion models featuring fractional order derivatives in both the Caputo's and...
An extended fifth order Korteweg-de-Vries (efKdV) equation is an important equation in fluids dynamics for the description of nonlinear wave processes, and contains quite a number of KdV-type equations including the Sawada-Kotera equation, the Caudrey-Dodd-Gibbon equation, the Lax equation, the Kaup-Kuperschmidt equation and the Ito equation among...
The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument for measuring students’ mathematics anxiety scale (MAS) with high psychometric property. A survey research design was used involving 510 students randomly selected from secondary schools. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was carried out to determine the number of factors to be retained in the...
In this paper, we provide solutions to the general fractional Caputo-type differential equation models for the dynamics of a sphere immersed in an incompressible viscous fluid and oscillatory process with fractional damping using Laplace transform method. We study the effects of fixing one of the fractional indices while varying the other as partic...
This work develops a hybridized support vector regression (HSVR)-based model for accurate estimation of melting points of fatty acids using their molecular weights and the number of carbon–carbon double bond as descriptors. The development of HSVR-based model is characterized with two stages. The first stage involves training and testing SVR using...
Educational research can be seen as an activity that is motivated by perceived problems in education in which the challenge of finding the solution is taken up by the researcher and the findings are communicated to the target population for implementation. Research in mathematics education in particular requires a strong effort to bring it to a str...
This study was aimed at the development of an instrument for measuring students' attitudes towards mathematics. A survey research design was adopted involving 510 students randomly selected. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was carried out to determine the number of factors to be retained in the ATMS. The adequacy of the sample was confirmed by me...
Let (Γ, *) be a finite group and S a possibly empty subset of Γ containing its non-self-invertible elements. In this paper, we introduce the inverse graph associated with Γ whose set of vertices coincides with Γ such that two distinct vertices u and v are adjacent if and only if either u * v ∈ S or v * u ∈ S. We then investigate its algebraic and c...
This study was embarked upon to investigate the impacts of PBL on academic performance and
retention in mathematics among junior secondary school students in Sabon-Gari local government area of
Kaduna State, Nigeria. The research design adopted was pretest, posttest and post-posttest quasi-
experimental non-equivalent control and experimental gro...
This article gives an overview account of graphs associated with finite groups. After extensive and exhaustive search of the literature for more than a period of one year, the author merged several researches on graphs associated with finite groups. The aim of this article is to create a mega reference material for future researches on graphs assoc...
It is very clear to all stake holders that one of the major challenges bilingual Arab University students are facing in learning mathematics in English is lack of proficiency in the new language of instruction. As part of a larger ongoing project that is looking at the language issue as they relate to mathematics teaching and learning in this conte...
In this study, the author examined the validity of MATH 105 as a prerequisite to MATH 201. The data for this study was extracted directly from the examination results logic of the university. Descriptive statistics in form of correlations and linear regressions were used to analyze the obtained data. Three research questions were formulated and the...
This study was aimed at investigating the causes of poor academic performance and to establish the strategies that can be adopted to improve performance in Mathematical Methods I among undergraduate students in Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Descriptive research design in form of an ex post facto approach was used. Sample was randomly selecte...
Questions
Questions (10)
My idiosyncratic thought, lately!
First name: Yusuf
Middle name: F.
Surname: Zakariya
Author's citation: According to Zakariya (2020), ...
Me: Hang on a minute, Yusuf wrote the paper and not Zakariya, so why does the author give the credit to Zakariya and not Yusuf?
Ability and effort are important ingredients of students' success in a learning activity. I hold that teachers should encourage students to attribute their success more to effort than to ability. What do you think?
Dear researchers,
Kindly share your experience during an encounter with a "nasty" reviewer.
In my case, I wrote an article in which a reviewer insisted that I must include citations from only 2019-2020 articles in my introduction section. I was like, dear anonymous reviewer, the dearth of recent studies on the topic was a motivation for my study, as mentioned in the manuscript. The manuscript was resubmitted for a second round of the review process and the reviewer still insisted on the 2019-2020 articles. It got a stage that I politely challenge him or her to suggest examples of such articles he/she was requesting for its inclusion in my manuscript. In the end, he or she did not endorse the manuscript for publication but other reviewers did so and the manuscript was published.
Projects
Projects (5)
Link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/education/special_issues/STEM_empirical
Dear Colleagues,
Numerous theoretical and empirical studies on the effective approaches to teaching, learning, and assessing in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education have produced various results. However, the potential of some of these results in alleviating the problem of poor performance and implementing designs that support envisioned STEM education is not fully harnessed. Over the last few decades, there have been some attempts to connect theory with practice and translate research findings into designs that enhance the teaching and learning of STEM students. This Special Issue provides a platform for researchers around the world to report and share their efforts in transforming the teaching and learning of STEM subjects with an international audience. At the heart of this Special Issue is an invitation for studies that investigate the effectiveness of interventions and practices geared toward transforming the teaching and learning of STEM subjects at all levels of educational institutions. Thus, I welcome original (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods) research articles and reviews of intervention studies on (but not limited to) research that focuses on:
Effective curriculum changes in STEM education;
Implementation of effective classroom instructional practices that include discourse, norms, and tools in STEM education;
Implementation of inclusive out-out-school instructional practices in STEM education;
Use of digital tools to enhance STEM teaching and learning.
I look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Yusuf F. Zakariya
Guest Editor
The motivation for the TIP - Calculus (Towards Improved Performance in calculus) project is the recurrent poor performance in a first-year calculus course among engineering students in a Norwegian university. As the name suggests, the overarching goal of the project is to improve students’ performance in the course. The project focuses on teaching methods (i.e., use of innovative teaching approaches e.g., inquiry-oriented approach), assessment criteria (i.e., alignment between exams, intended learning outcomes, and teaching-learning activities), and evaluations of interventions on students' factors such as self-efficacy as tools to improve students’ performance in the course. The research approach is mixed methods involving both qualitative and quantitative methods of data generation, analysis, and interpretation.
The goal of this project is to investigate the contributions of learning approaches, self-efficacy and prior knowledge to undergraduate students' performance in year-one mathematics. The interrelatedness of these factors as well as their combined effects on performance are also being investigated.
