How Does a Math Review Impact a Student’s Arithmetic Skills and Performance in First-Semester General Chemistry?

Arithmetic skills are without a doubt integral to a student’s success or failure in first-semester general chemistry. The MUST (Math-Up Skills Test) is a powerful tool for assessing a student’s arithmetic logic and therefore serves as a great predictor for at-risk students. Early math reviews at the start of the semester are thought to help students develop or refresh the necessary skills needed for success in general chemistry. However, the improvement that students gain from such math reviews is yet to be quantitatively assessed. In this study, a math intervention was given to students in the second week of the fall semester. The MUST was administered to the students before and after the 1-week intervention to determine if the students have indeed improved their arithmetic skills. A control group had a similar design except their intervention which was a general chemistry review. The math intervention group had a significant gain in the MUST scores over the gain for students whose intervention was the chemistry review. Students were grouped by their reasoning ability, as measured by the Test of Logical Thinking (TOLT). Students with high or low reasoning abilities did not differ in their MUST gain by intervention; however, students of average logic abilities who also had the math intervention had significantly higher gains than those in the chemistry intervention. Although 33% of a student’s final course average could be accounted for by his/her score on the second administration of the MUST, it was not possible to expect any significant difference in final course averages by intervention, since all subjects were allowed to do both reviews after the study data was collected.