Integrated technologies instructional method to enhance bilingual undergraduate engineering students

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonMathematics permeates almost every aspect of human life and it is a skill much needed by the increasingly complex technological world. It is necessary that this essential skill must be properly developed among students to prepare them for future academic and professional careers. An assessment of the research-based instructional strategies blending with old traditional methods with the modern technological development is a must. Due to the complexity of mathematics learning and the varied learning styles of learners, an integration of appropriate multiple instructional strategies into mathematics education will positively impact mathematical achievement of students. The purpose of this research was to examine the effects of the use of Integrated Technologies Instructional Method (ITIM) as a supplement to the traditional lecture method on mathematics achievement of the Integral Calculus students at the College of Engineering, University of Ha'il, Saudi Arabia. The ITIM includes the four instructional strategies such as the use of the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, the collaborative learning, the bilingual support and the study support. Different types of academic supports have been used to examine their effects on students achievement in mathematics. Mathematics, the bedrock of science and engineering, is considered a very important indicator of a student's academic success in professional higher education. Undergraduate engineering students' low achievement in the first year mathematics is an issue demands much attention. The study was undertaken to address students' weak background in mathematics and particularly their high failure rates in this particular course. A total of 218 undergraduate engineering students, comprising of both the experimental and the control groups, were involved in this experimental design study. The control group was taught by the traditional lecture method whereas the experimental group was exposed to the ITIM as a supplement to the traditional lecture method. Apart from the effects of the use of ITIM, students' performance in the previous courses (covariates) such as mathematics, computer, and the English language were compared with their final grades of the Integral Calculus course. The final grades of students were taken as the dependent variable and the ITIM and students' scores in the previous courses as the independent variables. It has been noticed from the literature review that the application of only one instructional strategy does not address the needs of the diverse learning styles of students. A mixed mode method, quantitative and qualitative, was used to collect and analyse data. The quantitative data instruments included students' final exam grades and the student questionnaires. Interviews with students were used as qualitative tools of data collection. An independent t-test, ANOVA, univariate analysis and the stepwise multiple regression analysis were performed to determine the overall statistical significance. The study concluded that there was a statistically significant difference in the performance of the experimental group of students' in terms of their end-of-course grades compared to that of the control group. The regression model revealed significance of covariates on the dependent variable. However, no significant relationship was found between the mathematics achievement and attitudes towards the use of ITIM. The study was an attempt to demonstrate the suitability of the instructional strategies on the bilingual Arab undergraduate engineering students; however, they can probably be applicable to other bilingual students

A Survey of User Interfaces for Computer Algebra Systems

AbstractThis paper surveys work within the Computer Algebra community (and elsewhere) directed towards improving user interfaces for scientific computation during the period 1963–1994. It is intended to be useful to two groups of people: those who wish to know what work has been done and those who would like to do work in the field. It contains an extensive bibliography to assist readers in exploring the field in more depth. Work related to improving human interaction with computer algebra systems is the main focus of the paper. However, the paper includes additional materials on some closely related issues such as structured document editing, graphics, and communication protocols

An approach to teach Calculus/Mathematical Analysis (for engineering students) using computers and active learning – its conception, development of materials and evaluation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Ciências da EducaçãoThis thesis reports a new approach to the teaching of Mathematical Analysis 1/ Calculus (AM1) to students of engineering, applying results of research on the use of computers and active learning with the aim of enhancing understanding. The main goal of the new approach is to reduce the known problem of failure and superficial understanding in introductory college mathematics in Portugal (and other countries). This researcher created the approach named ActivMathComp where: - Students are active and collaborate with colleagues during classes; - Computer is embedded as a communication, interaction and computational tool; - Students use interactive digital learning documents; - Students explore concepts in order to develop a deep understanding of them; - Students contact with mathematical applications; - Students have frequent short quizzes with immediate feedback on a Learning Management System; - The teacher/student relationship is grounded on trust, on mutual understanding and on students’ involvement on their own learning. The interactive digital documents were created assuming principles such as the zone of proximal development and multiple representations. Towards its comparison with the traditional approach, the ActivMathComp was implemented in a group of 16 AM1 students at the Civil Engineering Undergraduate Program of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa. The participants freely chose to enrol in the group and were required to bring their own laptop to classes. Took place a quasi-experiment where all the other seven classes following AM1 were taken as a comparison group. The participating students got significantly higher grades than the other students and had a higher success rate. Data gathered from questionnaires and tests were screened to identify possible bias. The participating students evaluated ActivMathComp as highly positive in nearly all aspects

Human-machine communication for educational systems design

This book contains the papers presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on the Basics of man-machine communication for the design of educational systems, held August 16-26, 1993, in Eindhoven, The Netherland

How complex is professional academic writing? A corpus-based analysis of research articles in 'hard' and 'soft' disciplines

This study focuses on the analysis of linguistic complexity in professional academic writing in light of the empirical evidence provided by a 1,597,000-word corpus of ‘hard’ (life and physical sciences) and ‘soft’ (arts and social) scientific research articles published in leading peer-review journals. Specifically, this investigation aims both to describe the complexity features of texts written by professional authors and to test the hypothesis that linguistic complexity varies across disciplines. Since previous studies have revealed that automatic complexity indices do not sufficiently succeed in providing a comprehensive description of complexity of texts, in this paper complexity has been measured in two ways: quantitatively through the indexes provided by Lu’s (2010) L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyser, and through the more qualitative analysis of a selection of metrics associated with clausal and phrasal complexity in seminal studies. The data show, first, that syntactic complexity indices (basically, strategies of coordination and subordination) are statistically relevant to the characterisation of specifically the soft-science disciplines; second, that there is a continuum across subdisciplines within the broad distinction of soft versus hard genres; and, third, that the soft genre demonstrates a more stable productivity of clausal-complexity strategies, while phrasal-complexity features are more pervasive in the hard-science subcorpus.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. PID2020-117541GB-I00Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431C 2021/5