This study aimed to adapt the Get Set2 quiz and design a diagnostic quiz for implementation under assumed knowledge admissions into university science degrees. The GetReady Quiz that was designed, comprised five modules benchmarked against the high school curriculum in Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology. The significance of this study stems from…

Mathematics is traditionally considered necessary for engineering courses. Over the last three decades, the mathematics requirements for entry into engineering programmes has steadily weakened in Australia. Further, the mathematics component of engineering programmes has progressively decreased. This research aims to investigate the following two…

The dramatic changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have changed the way in which mathematics and statistics support is offered. Students and staff have been presented with new opportunities and challenges. One-on-one interviews were conducted late in 2020 with 23 students and staff who had experience with fully online mathematics and…

This study examines undergraduate student attitudes to acting as peer-leaders in Applied Mathematics computing workshops. Through the use of data from end-of-trimester surveys and an on-line reflection worksheet, it is shown that students had positive attitudes to being leaders and were engaged in the experience. Benefits mentioned by students…

First-year undergraduates may be particularly prone to experiencing difficulties with facilitating feelings of relatedness, due to the recent shift in educational environments (i.e. from high school to university), which may be unfamiliar. Therefore, the current study aimed to determine whether the implementation of a single pedagogical strategy,…

This paper explores analysis of feedback data collected from student consultations at two mathematics support centres at universities in Australia and Ireland. Unstructured text data was collected over six years and includes qualitative data on student queries collected during the consultations from mathematics and statistics related subjects.…

Epidemiology is the study of the distribution of disease in human populations. This means that authentically teaching primary data collection in epidemiology is difficult as students cannot easily access suitable human populations. Using an action research methodology, this paper studied the use of a virtual human population (called "The…

Many approaches to make mathematics relevant to first-year engineering students have been described. These include teaching practical engineering applications, or a close collaboration between engineering and mathematics teaching staff on unit design and teaching. In this paper, we report on a novel approach where we gave higher year engineering…

Finance threshold concepts are the essential conceptual knowledge that underpin well-developed financial capabilities and are central to the mastery of finance. In this paper we investigate threshold concepts in finance from the point of view of students, by establishing the extent to which students are aware of threshold concepts identified by…

Rarely do university departments of mathematics redesign their basic mathematics courses. Through developing an online version of our associate degree in engineering in collaboration with Open Universities Australia, we redesigned the first in a sequence of five engineering mathematics courses. The online cohort proved different to our…

Graduates with well-developed capabilities in finance are invaluable to our society and in increasing demand. Universities face the challenge of designing finance programmes to develop these capabilities and the essential knowledge that underpins them. Our research responds to this challenge by identifying threshold concepts that are central to…

Students who are studying introductory statistics units but are enrolled in non-statistics majors often struggle with the content, and do not stay engaged. Support structures are in place at many Australian universities to help these students. Most of these are face-to-face support centres that the students can visit during opening hours. To…

This study seeks to bring the discipline of exercise science into the discussion of Quantitative Skills (QS) in science. The author's experiences of providing learning support to students and working with educators in the field are described, demonstrating the difficulty of encouraging students to address their skills deficit. A survey of…

Compulsory mathematics service units for the life sciences present unique challenges: even students who learn some specific skills maintain a negative attitude to mathematics and do not see the relevance of the unit towards their degree. The focus on authentic content and the presentation and teaching of global or qualitative methods before…

Using a Classroom Response System (CRS) has been associated with positive educational outcomes, by fostering student engagement and by allowing immediate feedback to both students and instructors. This study examined a low-cost CRS (VotApedia) in a large first-year class, where students responded to questions using their mobile phones. This study…