Reforming the Teaching and Learning of Foundational Mathematics Courses: An Investigation into the Status Quo of Teaching, Feedback Delivery, and Assessment in a First-Year Calculus Course

Abstract

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 universities, to transform the teaching and learning of mathematics to more student-centred approaches that engage the students mathematically and enhance their success rates. We approach this transformative effort by investigating students’ perception of teaching, feedback, and assessment as a first step in reforming the teaching of a first-year mathematics course at a Norwegian university. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data generated using a questionnaire from 107 (80 men) engineering students show that the status quo of teachings offers little support for learning. The teaching is dominated by teacher-led instruction, note-taking, and large pieces of proof which make learning difficult for students during class activities. The results also show that the current structure of the course offers limited formative feedback to students and that the assessment tasks require restructuring to capture students’ time and effort. We discuss the implications of these findings and make some recommendations for improvement.

Approaches to learning mathematics: preliminary evidence of a concise, valid, and reliable instrument

“…Mathematics for first-year undergraduate students otherwise called foundational mathematics courses is crucial not only in bridging pre-university and university mathematics experience but also in shaping higher courses in mathematics-intensive university programmes. However, an accumulation of evidence suggests that students following mathematics-intensive university programmes, e.g., science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) courses find it difficult to pass foundational mathematics courses around the world ( Ellis et al, 2016 ; Bigotte de Almeida et al, 2021 ; Zakariya et al, 2022a ). This poor performance in foundational mathematics courses has many consequences in higher education such as increased absenteeism, non-completion of degrees, change of majors (usually from STEM to non-STEM programmes), and development of negative attitudes towards mathematics ( Ellis et al, 2016 ; Bigotte de Almeida et al, 2021 ).…”

Reducing the influence of perfectionism and statistics anxiety on college student performance in statistics courses

“…Some studies were dedicated to improve statistical education, mainly centering on the use of technology, teaching method, and teaching content (Smith, 1998;Bordley and Robert, 2001;Mills, 2002;Zakariya and Bamidele, 2016;Zakariya et al, 2021). The prior researches have played an important role in improving the effectiveness of statistics teaching.…”

“…In addition, these courses will also contribute in quantitative research and comprehension of empirical study. However, many higher education institutions have to cope with high failure rates in statistics-related courses ( Smith et al, 2021 ; Zakariya et al, 2022 ). This poses a severe challenge to teaching and learning for these courses in higher education.…”

“…The prior researches have played an important role in improving the effectiveness of statistics teaching. However, these teachings were dominated by teacher-directed instruction and note-taking, resulting in learning difficulty for students during class activities ( Zakariya et al, 2022 ). Additional investigations have been focused on non-cognitive characteristics of college students, and showed that attitudes and beliefs toward statistics play an important role in the success or failure of the learning process ( Gal and Ginsburg, 1994 ; Seipel and Apigian, 2005 ).…”