The transition phase is a critical moment to students who have completed their secondary school education and are proceeding to pre-university education in Malaysia. The long duration of exposure to rote-learning and examination oriented education systems at school has somehow shaped these students' perceptions about teaching and learning. Thus, this paper aims to examine the quality of first year students' experiences in constructing their knowledge and skills throughout the Foundation in Engineering (FIE) programme. This experience refers to metacognitive awareness, namely students' learning experience from one mode of thinking to the other to construct meaningful knowledge and skills. The researchers used the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) (Schraw and Dennison, 1994) as a rating tool to trace the students' baseline in metacognition and access their successive levels of metacognitive awareness throughout their first semester in the FIE program. The students showed improvements in a number of metacognitive sub-processes. The findings provided the details of the quality of the program's efficacy and served as a benchmark for future development of effectiveness of teaching and learning approaches.
Students' ability in mathematics mainly relies on their performance in the assessment task such as tests, quizzes, assignments and final examinations. However, the grading process depends on the respective mathematics teacher who sets a marking scheme in assessing students' learning. How do these teachers assign grades to their students' problem solving work? What does it mean by five marks or ten marks for a mathematics problem? How does a teacher evaluate a student's mathematical knowledge and skills based on the grades? These questions address the vagueness of the grading process that gives no concrete evidence about a student's mathematical thinking. Hence, this paper aims to discover the effectiveness of using a marking scheme rubric to assess students' mathematical knowledge. The paper begins by reviewing different types of scoring rubrics in assessing mathematical problem solving tasks. A marking scheme rubric was proposed to assess samples of actual students' problem solving work in an applied algebra test. The rubric serves as an assessment instrument to gather information about students' achievement level in demonstrating both knowledge and skills in the test. Based on the findings, the score reflected the quality of the students' work rather than just a numerical representation. It showed the students' comprehension of adapting the mathematical concepts and problem solving strategies. In a nutshell, the implementation of rubric marking scheme has improved the consistency in grading and made the scoring points as a "meaningful figure" that describes the quality of a students' performance.
Students always use their pens and papers from time to time in their daily routine mathematics lesson to perform activities such as taking notes, performing calculation, doing mathematics assignments or examinations. However, students mainly use writing as a mechanism to demonstrate their computational skills rather than their conceptual thinking. Mathematical writing becomes a powerful learning tool only if it combines language and mathematical algorithm. Thus, this paper intends to explore the impact of mathematical writing on students" metacognition in an applied algebra test. It attempts to examine the metacognitive behavior of three foundation students in engineering and the qualitative data was the participants" take-home test after five weeks of mathematical writing intervention. This paper reports the analysis of these students" writing responses in the test. The findings revealed the quality of the students" metacognition abilities and their mathematical problem solving skills.
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