During 2011, a team from the Centre for Science Education (CSE) worked with four local schools and five Sheffield city region engineering organisations on a project to identify ways to increase the input into young people's awareness of engineering that comes from activities they do in school science. The project also tested an hypothesis that…

Within the last ten years, there have been international concerns about school science education, in particular in many rich, highly developed countries where there is a decline in the recruitment of students to science and technology. These concerns relate particularly to the uptake of physical sciences, gender differences and students'…

This study looks at the impact of college students' writing on a regular basis about mathematical concepts. Specifically we examine the effect of this practice on performance and attitude while controlling for confounding factors. Two professors and a total of 97 students in four different classes participated in the study. Students in the…

This paper summarizes the evaluation of a project that involved undergraduate mathematics students in the development of teaching and learning resources for statistics modules taught in various departments of a university. This evaluation regards students' participation in the project and its impact on their learning of statistics, as…

FOIL is a well-known mnemonic that is used to find the product of two binomials. We conduct a large sample (n = 252) observational study of first-year college students and show that while the FOIL procedure leads to the accurate expansion of the product of two binomials for most students who apply it, only half of these students exhibit conceptual…

Mathematics has long been known to be problematic for university engineering students and their teachers, for example, Scanlan. This paper presents recent data gathered from interviews with engineering students who experienced problems with mathematics and their lecturers during their transition through the first year in different programme…

The art of teaching freshmen students is undergoing a rapid paradigm change. Classical forms of teaching are not applicable any more and an unmanageable offer of new multimedia tools and concepts is glutting the market. Moreover, compared to previous courses, the class size triples. In view of these challenges, we implemented a new teaching…

College calculus teaches students important mathematical concepts and skills. The course also has a substantial impact on students' attitude toward mathematics, affecting their career aspirations and desires to take more mathematics. This national US study of 3103 students at 123 colleges and universities tracks changes in students'…

This paper explores the ways students perceive the transfer of learned knowledge to new situations -- often a surprisingly difficult prospect. The novel aspect compared to the traditional transfer studies is that the learning phase is not a part of the experiment itself. The intention was only to activate acquired knowledge relevant to the…

Although there is no consensus in regard to a unique meaning for abstraction, there is a recognition of the existence of several theories of abstraction, and that the ability to abstract is imperative to learning and doing meaningful mathematics. The theory of "reducing abstraction" maps the abstract nature of mathematics to the nature…

This qualitative study surveyed 102 differential-equations students in order to investigate how students participating in writing projects in university-level mathematics courses perceive the benefits of writing in the mathematics classroom. Based on previous literature on writing in mathematics, students were asked specifically about the benefits…

Many universities issue mathematical diagnostic tests to incoming first-year students, covering a range of the basic concepts with which they should be comfortable from secondary school. As far as many lecturers are concerned, the purpose of this test is to determine the students' mathematical knowledge on entry. It should also provide an…

This study presents a subset of factors and their association with students' achievement in school algebra. The participants were students who had enrolled in 2007 at the ninth year of Greek public education (third year of middle school). A total of 735 students participated (aged 14-15 years) from 37 public secondary schools. The sample…

We argue that mathematics majors learn little from the proofs they read in their advanced mathematics courses because these students and their teachers have different perceptions about students' responsibilities when reading a mathematical proof. We used observations from a qualitative study where 28 undergraduates were observed evaluating…

With the proliferation of new affordable recording technologies, many universities have begun offering students recordings of live lectures as a part of the course resources. We conducted a survey to investigate why some students choose to attend lectures in person rather than simply watching the recordings online, and how students view the two…