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.

Keywords

• higher education
• mathematics instruction
• success rate in calculus
• formative assessment
• feedback delivery