Learning Development in Higher Education

Peter Hartley, John Hilsdon, Christine Keenan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780230241480
• eBook ISBN: 9781350306271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book shows how Learning Development enhances the student experience and promotes active engagement. Written by staff from the UK's largest collaborative Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), the book includes important insights for everyone interested in supporting student retention, progression and success.

Section C

Developing Effective Academic Practice

10 Building Student Confidence in Mathematics and Numeracy

Mundeep Gill and Martin Greenhow

Summary

This chapter demonstrates how we can build students’ confidence in mathematics and numeracy, starting with a brief review of key issues that students face and examples of strategies and resources that have been used in response.

The following questions arise:

• How can we identify and access ‘at-risk’ students?

• How can we make effective provision for such students?

• How can we get students to engage with such provision?

• How can we measure, however imprecisely, the efficacy of such provision?

Using Brunel University as a case study, we advocate a blended use of resources, including: diagnostic tests, confidence logs, existing and bespoke computer-aided learning (CAL), ‘topic of the week’ tutorials, one-to-one drop-ins, the Maths Café and computer-aided assessments (CAA). Student feedback demonstrates their popularity, whilst subsequent examination performance provides a measure of their (joint) effect.

We then focus on our Mathletics CAA system. Our experience demonstrates that correctly implemented CAA benefits students not only by building confidence via repeated practice but also by filling knowledge and expertise gaps in rather elementary mathematics that lecturers generally, but sometimes erroneously, take for granted. In our view, learning developers need to introduce and integrate this type of support as well as more traditional resources.

Introduction

The decrease in the numbers of students taking Mathematics post-16 has led many UK universities to change their entrance requirements. Students can now undertake even highly quantitative degree courses, such as Economics and Physics, without completing an AS-level or A-level in Mathematics. For students with Mathematics A-level, not only has there been a steady decline in the grades (Smith, 2004) but the quality of the students is also questioned; students can now achieve a relatively good grade and yet still be unprepared for the mathematics covered in their degrees (Hawkes and Savage, 2000). Lecturers must tailor content and delivery to student cohorts with diverse mathematical backgrounds, while at the same time meeting the mathematical needs of the course as a whole. Other issues, such as students entering higher education (HE) via non-traditional routes and those with mathematics anxiety, have been discussed at length in a previously published literature review (see Gill, 2007).

It is therefore important to help students not only to bridge any skills gaps but also to build their mathematical confidence. This should encourage students to engage with the material and motivate them to overcome their difficulties and hence to progress (Moxley et al., 2001).

Resources and mechanisms

Whilst a wide range of resources and mechanisms can be used to help students, time, and hence cost, greatly influences what can be offered to them. One well-established mechanism is ‘pre-degree’ courses such as summer schools or foundation programmes (see Gill, 2007, for an overview). These are successful but expensive. Although they help some students to bridge knowledge gaps and build confidence, they do not meet the mathematical needs of the whole student population.

Trying to support this wider population, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) have funded the development of freely-available resources ranging from generic resources, such as mathcentre (mathcentre, 2009) and Mathematics Hyper-Tutorials (McDonald, 2009) that can be used across disciplines, to more subject-specific resources such as the Metal Project (Metal, 2009) and HELM (HELM, 2009). However, simply telling students that these resources are available and expecting them to embrace them in their own learning is not realistic. Many students do not possess the study and/or manipulative skills to build up new skills independently, regardless of the sophistication of the resources. Moreover, lecturers and teaching staff do not usually have the time to provide students with extra support. Hence some universities have introduced Mathematics Support Centres (Pell and Croft, 2008), which range from large-scale centres, such as Loughborough University’s Mathematics Learning Support Centre (2009) and Coventry University’s centre (Coventry University, 2009), to smaller-scale support services, such as at Brunel University, described below.

Support at Brunel

At Brunel University, a Maths Support Tutor was appointed to help embed widely available resources in undergraduate courses for a range of departments and to give extra support to students who needed to overcome underlying mathematical difficulties/issues of confidence before they could access the material taught in regular lectures. Support included one-to-one sessions, drop-ins and the maintenance of a web portal (LearnHigher, 2009), which directs students to online resources. We here discuss the weekly workshops and the Maths Café; both were aimed at those reading degrees other than mathematics (here termed ‘non-mathematicians’) to help them bridge the gap between GCSE and undergraduate mathematics and to help build confidence.

Weekly workshops

Weekly two-hour workshops are scheduled during term time. Since they are available to all non-mathematicians, they are generic. However, the last part of each session gives students the opportunity to apply the skills they have learnt to discipline-specific questions.

The workshop room only has seating space for 30 students, but when there is a high demand repeat workshops are advertised. Workshops are run as small group sessions to encourage students’ active involvement (Griffiths, 2003; Cannon and Newble, 2000). Sessions are designed to give students ample opportunity to ask questions, and to help them identify and overcome any misconceptions (Biggs, 2003).

Whilst much preparatory work is put into designing and delivering the workshops, there is still a need to be flexible with the material covered since the student cohort attending the session is not known until the workshop takes place. To get an idea of students’ level of understanding of the workshop topic(s), confidence logs are used (Figure 10.1 shows a typical log). Students are asked to complete a log when they arrive at the workshop. The log asks students to rate their confidence with each of the skills that will be covered in the session. This helps the tutor to get a better understanding of the level of students’ competence with the topic area at the start of the session. Since students are asked to complete the same log at the end of the session, it also enables the tutor to assess whether the small group workshop has helped students build confidence. Students themselves can use this as an opportunity to assess which skills they are now confident with and which still need further development.

Figure 10.1 Confidence log
An example taken from the workshop Algebra 1.

Once students have completed the ‘after’ log at the end of the workshop, students and tutor discuss which areas of weakness remain and require further help. At this point students are given extra resources, and directed to online resources. The confidence log also monitors whether the structure of the workshop and material covered has helped students develop skills and confidence. Figure 10.2 shows aggregated results for the 2007/8 academic year.

Figure 10.2 Bar chart of confidence logs
The results from all confidence logs that were completed for the weekly workshops in 2007/8.

Figure 10.2 shows that, for many students, initial confidence in the skills being covered is low. A small percentage of students (8%) did not even have any previous knowledge of some of the skills. Only 13% of students stated initially that they were either very confident or confident. Although the workshops were aimed at non-mathematicians, of the students who declared their previous grades, 21% had previously completed an AS-level or A-Level in Mathematics. Their objective in attending the sessions was mainly for revision.

The striking feature of Figure 10.2 is the shift from the low end of the confidence scale at the start of the session to the higher level of confidence at the end of the session. By the end of the workshops, 78% of students felt they were very confident or confident with the skills that were covered. This shows a very positive change in attitude, which encourages them to engage with and overcome the mathematical difficulties they are having in their lectures.

The use of confidence logs in the small group workshops has shown that this environment can build confidence with mathematics and fill knowledge gaps. These logs can be adapted and used in other situations; they can also be given to students to use independently to identify their own areas of weakness and hence seek out further support.

Maths Café

Since 2007/8 we have successfully run a Maths Café during the Easter revision period. This is a two-week event (again aimed at non-mathematicians) where students

• can receive one-to-one support on a drop-in basis;

• collect paper-based resources; and

• have access to online resources.

Approximately £5000 was used to pay for

• initial planning and advertising;

• tutors to provide the one-to-one support;

• paper-based resources printed in bulk (mainly from mathcentre, see mathcentre, 2009);

• light refreshments provided throughout each day;

• data collection and analysis, reporting and dissemination (internally and externally).

One of the main reasons for the Café was to meet the demand for one-to-one sessions prior to the examination period; this required two tutors permanently on duty.

We felt it was important to get an understanding of the types of problems students were having. It was hoped that information collected could lead to developing an integrated approach to supporting students from the different courses across the university. We collected data on the students’ gender, level of study, course, and the mathematical topic/skill they needed help with.

This event attracted similar numbers of student visits in its first two years (325 in 2008/9 and 352 in 2007/8). Although absolute numbers of students attending are important, it is equally important that the target groups are making use of this extra revision resource. Table 10.1 summarises data from the Maths Café for the two years.

The Maths Café is clearly appealing to the target groups of students from the Foundation Level and from Level 1 who are studying quantitative modules but did not undertake any post-16 mathematics qualifications. Feedback collected from the students indicates a high satisfaction rate, with 63% of students in 2008/9 (and 98% in 2007/8) finding the support given very useful or useful.

Considering the time of year, we expected a positive impact on students’ examination marks, ideally moving them from a fail to a pass in their quantitative methods modules. However, it is difficult to determine this impact since the Café was an optional resource for students and was not designed and set up in a way in which control groups could be used (or identified). The first year the Café took place (2007/8), 55% of students who were enrolled on a Level 1 quantitative methods module attended to get help with a final piece of coursework and to prepare for the end-of-year examination. Hence the exam results for the academic year 2007/8 for this module have been compared with results from the previous two years to determine any impact. From the analysis it was found that students from 2007/8 had done worse than the cohort of the previous two years. It is difficult to establish if there were any confounding influences acting, such as a change in teaching or admissions policy (Gill and Greenhow, 2008). In our opinion, these students knew they were poorly prepared for thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Section A Defining Learning Development
• Section B Supporting Students in Transition
• Section C Developing Effective Academic Practice
• Section D Students and technology
• Section E Looking Into the future
• Index