Student Attitudes Toward Listing as a Strategy for Solving Counting Problems

While researchers have found that students at a variety of levels struggle to solve counting problems correctly, listing has been shown to be a potentially effective remedy to student difficulties. Motivated by its importance in helping students solve counting problems, this presentation describes a research study conducted to investigate attitudes that undergraduate students have about listing. This study found that undergraduate students seem to agree that listing is a useful activity, but they may not have a strong understanding of how to productively use a list of outcomes to solve counting problems. Implications for pedagogy and future research directions are discussed.