Supporting engagement or engaging support?

The need for learning support in first year mathematics subjects in universities in Australia is increasing as student diversity increases. We studied the use of two modes of learning support in a first year mathematics subject for which there is no assumed mathematics knowledge. Many students in this subject have a poor mathematics background, noticeably worse than five years previously. Students were offered both online support and face-to-face workshops. Student use of support was tracked for a semester, along with some measures of engagement: tutorial attendance and use of the learning management system. The interplay between learning support and engagement was found to be significant and the use of support can be used as a measure of engagement. The success of support is intertwined with the success of engagement, making it difficult to measure the success of learning support. Hence, if we want to measure the success of support we somehow have to disentangle the effect of learning support from that of student engagement. However, student outcomes appear to be substantially improved through engagement with any learning activities. Engagement with both online support and face-to-face support was generally very poor, however the groups that utilised each mode were largely distinct. This indicates that a variety of support mechanisms, both face-to-face and online, are necessary to maximise the engagement with support. The poor engagement with learning support presents us with a huge challenge for the future, a challenge seen by many others: getting more students engaged in learning support. Though support is generally seen to be successful, few students engage with the support available and so many students are performing far worse than they could be. This has a serious effect on pass rates and can be detrimental to mathematics departments as mathematics academics could be seen poor teachers who are unable to motivate their students

On the number of minimal completely separating systems and antichains in a Boolean lattice

An (n)completely separating system C ((n)CSS) is a collection of blocks of [n] = {1,..., n} such that for all distinct a, b ∈ [n] there are blocks A, B ∈C with a ∈ A \ B and b ∈ B \ A. An (n)CSS is minimal if it contains the minimum possible number of blocks for a CSS on [n]. The number of non-isomorphic minimal (n)CSSs is determined for 11 ≤ n ≤ 35. This also provides an enumeration of a natural class of antichains

Nurse education leaders' perspectives on the teaching of numeracy to undergraduate nursing students : a qualitative research study

Aim The aim of this study was to explore the perspectives of nurse education leaders of Australian undergraduate nursing degrees on the teaching of nursing numeracy and how the Australian Nursing & Midwifery Accreditation Standards influence curriculum development. Background Nurses’ numeracy skills are reportedly deficient worldwide, posing a significant threat to patient safety. This is an issue for the education of undergraduate nurses and thus for the nursing profession. The international literature reveals a heterogeneous blend of learning approaches, but it is unclear which approaches are best suited to improve the numerical calculation ability of nurses. In the Australian context, there are no accreditation standards referring to numeracy, therefore, it is important to discover how nurse education leaders’ design and implement the teaching of numeracy. Design A qualitative approach using thematic analysis was employed. The setting was Australian universities that delivered an accredited undergraduate nursing degree leading to nursing registration. Methods Purposive sampling was used to recruit 17 nurse education leaders of Australian undergraduate nursing degrees. Individual, semi-structured virtual interviews were conducted between November 2022 and January 2023. Interview data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phases of thematic analysis. Findings Five themes emerged from the analysis: (i) indistinct accreditation standards, (ii) teaching basic maths for clinical applications, (iii) a range of bespoke teaching approaches (iv) we’re nurses, not numeracy educators and (v) assumptions about an unprepared cohort. Conclusion The leaders of undergraduate nursing degrees assumed that nursing students would have proficiency in numeracy skills on entering university. However, this was not the case, hence numeracy was an essential skill that needed to be taught to the undergraduate nursing students. Lack of direction from the accreditation council led to the existence of various curricula and an array of approaches to teaching numeracy and medication calculations, which challenged nursing academics who did not consider themselves numeracy educators. This study makes a novel contribution to knowledge, teaching and practice in undergraduate nursing numeracy curricula

Mathematics is different : student and tutor perspectives from Ireland and Australia on online support during COVID-19

From March 2020, the Mathematics Support Centre at University College Dublin, Ireland, and the Mathematics Education Support Hub at Western Sydney University, Australia, moved wholly online and have largely remained so to the point of writing (August 2021). The dramatic and swift changes brought on by COVID-19, in particular to fully online modes of teaching and learning including mathematics and statistics support (MSS), have presented students and tutors with a host of new opportunities for thinking and working. This study aims to gain insight both from students and tutors about their experience of wholly online learning and tutoring in the COVID-19 era. In this sense, it represents a ‘perspectives’ study, the idea being that before we examine specific aspects of this experience, it would be best to know what the issues are. Employing a qualitative analysis framework of 23 one-on-one interview transcripts with tutors and students from both institutions in Australia and Ireland, we identified five key themes as central to the shared experiences and perspectives of tutors and students. In this study, we discuss three of these themes in relation to the new normal with the intention of supporting MSS practitioners, researchers and students going forward. The themes describe the usage of online support, how mathematics is different and the future of online MSS

The rapid move to online mathematics support : changes in pedagogy and social interaction

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 statistics support. The interviewees were from University College Dublin, Ireland, and Western Sydney University, Australia. Utilising thematic analysis, five themes around online mathematics and statistics support common to both universities were identified. In this paper the three themes related to connection are explored; they are pedagogical changes, social interaction, and appreciation of mathematics and statistics support. These themes highlight the need felt by both students and staff for mutual connection. The paper concludes with a discussion on the repercussions of this study for future considerations of effective online mathematics and statistics suppor

Protecting private information for two classes of aggregated database queries

An important direction of informatics is devoted to the protection of privacy of confidential information while providing answers to aggregated queries that can be used for analysis of data. Protecting privacy is especially important when aggregated queries are used to combine personal information stored in several databases that belong to different owners or come from different sources. Malicious attackers may be able to infer confidential information even from aggregated numerical values returned as answers to queries over large collections of data. Formal proofs of security guarantees are important, because they can be used for implementing practical systems protecting privacy and providing answers to aggregated queries. The investigation of formal conditions which guarantee protection of private information against inference attacks originates from a fundamental result obtained by Chin and Ozsoyoglu in 1982 for linear queries. The present paper solves similar problems for two new classes of aggregated nonlinear queries. We obtain complete descriptions of conditions, which guarantee the protection of privacy of confidential information against certain possible inference attacks, if a collection of queries of this type are answered. Rigorous formal security proofs are given which guarantee that the conditions obtained ensure the preservation of privacy of confidential data. In addition, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the protection of confidential information from special inference attacks aimed at achieving a group compromise

Mathematics and ocean swimming

Mathematics is often taught in first year as a service subject. It is important that mathematics academics provide a good service to those whose students they teach. The income of many mathematics groups in universities in Australia largely depends on this teaching. At times mathematics academics are seen as not succeeding in this teaching and are blamed for the lack of skills of the students taught, or blamed for not being able to pass more students. It is claimed here that mathematicians are often given a very difficult task, that learning mathematics has some aspects of what has been called “complex learning” and that some mathematics students are involuntary learners. It is up to mathematicians to educate those whom we serve about the challenges faced and about what is realistic for their students. An analogy which might assist in this is presented

Performance of students with weak mathematics in first-year mathematics and science

In recent years, significant numbers of academics from the science and health disciplines at our institution have found that their students lack the appropriate 'mathematical' background to cope with first-year science subjects. Consequently, failure rates are on the increase in these subjects. The mathematical background of students entering university has been found to be a problem in other universities in Australia, as well as in the UK, Ireland and the US. In this report, the authors analyse data on current students' performance and present suggestions for addressing the problems found. The performance of first-year students in four different mathematics and mathematically related subjects is compared to the level of their secondary school mathematics and performance, and to their tertiary entrance score. We conclude that a student's secondary school mathematics background, not their tertiary entrance score, has a dramatic effect on pass rates. On the basis of our findings, a way forward is suggested

Mathematics learning support and engagement in first year engineering

This paper considers the effects of both free optional mathematics learning support and engagement on the mathematics performance in a foundation mathematics subject of a cohort of engineering students entering university with poor mathematical skills. New engineering students were directed to either a foundation or standard mathematics subject based on the results of a placement test. For students in the foundation subject, it was found that high levels of learning support were associated with greater improvement over the semester. Some form of learning support was used by 57.9% of the students, a reasonably high proportion of the cohort. Some factors for this high level of use of learning support are considered. One possible factor, the placement test, appears to have had a positive effect. Engagement in the subject activities as measured by tutorial attendance and learning management system use was found to have a positive association with final mark. Students who utilized a high level of learning support were more likely to be more engaged with the subject, making it impossible to draw conclusions about improvements being solely due to the use of learning support