Session Information
24 SES 01, Mathematics in Transition.
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper presents data gathered from interviews with engineering students during their first year at university who may therefore be described as being in transition from student in sixth form college or college of further education to student engineer in university. These interviews were conducted as part of a larger research project funded by the ESRC into the place of mathematics during this same transition.
By choosing to study engineering, students are selecting courses which are mathematically demanding and subsequently this selection may influence their overall success or failure on the course. The student engineers who were interviewed as part of the project have very different stories to tell about the transition they were experiencing and the ‘obstacles’ they encounter in their journey to become engineers. These interviews reveal their experiences of and their engagement with mathematics and how these shape their disposition towards mathematics in particular and their respective engineering courses in general. Apart from revealing their own attitudes towards the mathematics in their respective engineering courses, their interviews also expose the transitional mathematics practices which take place at the universities involved in the project and, in particular, how these practices help or hinder the mathematically ‘less well-prepared’ student.
There have been various studies into the transfer of specific mathematics skills and/or mathematical knowledge by university students into new subject areas including science (Britton, New, Sharma & Yardley; 2005) and engineering (Hirst, Williamson & Bishop, 2004; Fadali, Velasquez-Bryant & Robinson, 2004; Gynnild, Tyssedal & Lorentzen, 2005) and our students spoke about these processes. In addition, Cobb (1986) and Walkerdine (1990) suggest that many of the factors that influence a student’s ability to transfer mathematical knowledge and skills are in fact social in origin and have very little to do with the student’s mathematical ability. They further propose that the success (or not) of the transfer process is governed by the student’s own goals and beliefs and hence the contexts in which they perceive the mathematics as being useful.
It is these perceptions that are of interest in this paper and, in particular, the ways in which the sociocultural aspects of the practices influence the transfer process. In particular, with our interviewees, the problems seemed most accute when mathematics was taught as a service subject i.e. by mathematicians rather than engineers. These findings are in line with Boaler (1997) who advocated that mathematics should be embedded in the subject being studied since the students do significantly better.
Many of our students talk about feeling insecure about the mathematics in part because they do not know how it ‘fits in’ with their engineering course – the links do not seem to be made explicit. After Cobb (1986) and Walkerdine (1990), these student beliefs may in turn contribute to the high drop-out rate during the transition.
The purpose of this study is therefore to explore how the students overcome the difficulties they encountered in transferring their mathematical knowledge and skills into the context of engineering and how the transitional practices of the institutions help in this process.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Boaler, J. (1997). Experiencing School Mathematics: Teaching Style, Sex and Setting. Buckingham: OUP. Britton, S., New, P. B., Sharma, M. D. and Yardley, D. (2005). A case study of the transfer of mathematics skills by university students, International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 36 (1), 1-13. Cobb, P. (1986). Contexts, goals, beliefs and learning mathematics. For the Learning of Mathematics, 6 (2), 2-10. Fadali, M., Velasquez-Bryant, N. & Robinson, M. (2004). Work in Progress - Is Attitude Toward Mathematics a Major Obstacle to Engineering Education? Paper presented at the 34th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. October 20 – 23, 2004, Savannah, GA. Retrieved from http://fie-conference.org/fie2004/papers/ 1090.pdf Gynnild, V., Tyssedal, J. & Lorentzen, L. (2005). Approaches to study and the quality of learning. Some empirical evidence from engineering education. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 3 (4), 587-607. Hirst, C., Williamson, S. & Bishop, P. (2004). A holistic approach to mathematics support for engineering. In Effective Learning and Teaching in Engineering (p.100-122). Abingdon, Oxon: RoutledgeFalmer Sfard, A., & Prusak, A. (2005). Telling identities: in search of an analytic tool for investigating learning as a culturally shaped activity. Educational Researcher, 34 (4), 14-22. Walkerdine, V. (1990). Difference, cognition and mathematics education. For the Learning of Mathematics, 10 (3), 51-56.
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