This paper highlights the pilot of an online diagnosis of the mathematics knowledge of secondary school graduates enrolling in a tertiary institution. Most institutions miss identifying the knowledge gaps and differences between students from different curriculum and backgrounds, hence fail to factor these in their at-risk intervention programmes. While such issues are addressed in the retention crusades, they may be arriving a little too late to curb and curtail the attrition rates. This newly developed online mathematics diagnostic tool (OMDT) provides an early indication of the varying mathematics knowledge students bring from their secondary school and the inbuilt system intelligence directs the individual students to relevant online remediation based on their performances. This new cutting-edge ICT tool hosted on Moodle, has built-in certification, rewards through gamification, surveys and analytics, support mechanisms, and online remedial modules crafted into a complete package

Bali, Akeshnil

Kumar, Bijeta

Sharma, Bibhya N.

University of the South Pacific Electronic Research Repository

13th International Congress on Mathematical Education  Hamburg, 24-31 July 2016  1 - 1 ONLINE MATHEMATICS DIAGNOSTIC TEST AND REMEDIATION FOR NEW ENTRANTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE PACIFIC REGION Bibhya Sharma, Bijeta Kumar and Akeshnil Bali The University of the South Pacific  This paper highlights the pilot of an online diagnosis of the mathematics knowledge of secondary school graduates enrolling in a tertiary institution. Most institutions miss identifying the knowledge gaps and differences between students from different curriculum and backgrounds, hence fail to factor these in their at-risk intervention programmes. While such issues are addressed in the retention crusades, they may be arriving a little too late to curb and curtail the attrition rates. This newly developed online mathematics diagnostic tool (OMDT) provides an early indication of the varying mathematics knowledge students bring from their secondary school and the inbuilt system intelligence directs the individual students to relevant online remediation based on their performances. This new cutting-edge ICT tool hosted on Moodle, has built-in certification, rewards through gamification, surveys and analytics, support mechanisms, and online remedial modules crafted into a complete package.  INTRODUCTION It has been widely accepted that universities and colleges have to channel more resources in the recruitment of new students compared to retention of the existing ones. Therefore, it comes without any surprise to find that numerous nurture and nourishing efforts, strategies, and interventions in education have been introduced to address the retention rates of the first year students. Historically, most of these corrective and remedial work including grade retention (Jimerson et. al, 2002), intensive boot camps and flexi-courses (Dobele, 2013; Derezinski, 2014, Rivera, 2015) are normally restricted to the end of an academic year, or through intervention programs institutionalized during the semester itself. While convincing arguments have come from both categories, higher education institutions have recently favored hybrid models which include tools from each, customized and contextualized.  The literature highlights these tools as, eMentoring, peer mentoring, mobile apps, virtual classrooms, flexible and online learning, automated academic advise, at-risk interventions, freshmen seminars and workshops, yourtutor, academic and social integration programmes which higher education institutions have included in their own annualized intervention programmes. It is worth noting that most of the interventions and nurturing systems are heavily leveraging on ICT and, in particular, herald a seamless integration of the mobile devices. As the saying goes “education is broken, technology can fit it”. The assistive technologies play a crucial role in delivering just-in-time, just-enough and just-for-me learning regardless of the diversity of learners (sharma et. al, 2015). The ICT tools and platforms also enable measured interventions through built-in analytics. Nonetheless, we see that one important piece of the puzzle still missing. There seems to be a dearth of tools for students who are yet to begin their college or university journey. Notwithstanding, there has been pockets of nurturing sprout sparsely in this potentially new category of interventions. However, to unveil these complexities, the authors use an analogy of racing cars.  Sharma, Kumar and Bali 1 - 2   ANALOGY – RACING CARS AND RACE COURSE Akin to the incoming first year students, the racing cars embark on a journey, racing against other cars to the finishing line, where some cars even form (implicit or explicit, short term or long term) alliances and race as a team against other teams or individuals, we recall bump and run cars taking one for the team. The race begins when the flag is waved or a race-gun is fired. The race cars take-off and race to the finishing line, at least a majority of them. We consider a snapshot (Figure 1), this time from the balcony which showcases the race with the positioning of four different categories of racing cars after a period of time. Some cannot complete the race, some cannot even start. Figure 1: A final snapshot of the race and the positions of the cars from the balcony. Now let us compare this to a student’s entry into a higher education programme and its completion in the mandatory period of time. The authors are heavily inclined to diagnose the same for the freshmen. While the racing cars take-off in the race from the starting line, the freshmen also take-off in their prescribed programmes in the academic year barring any setbacks. The two systems are operating with the same parameters and ideologies. In short there is always problems before a journey is made, with racing cars and our students. While we may be activity addressing the case where the students face problems during the course or programme by including remediation for at-risk students, we fail to address problems permeating before the take-off stage.  We now propose an important numeracy tool which needs to be considered in the at-risk intervention programmes. This tool is called the online mathematics diagnostic tool (OMDT) which has an online mathematics test, an in-built intelligence to direct students to relevant remedial and a newly designed online remediation using gamification and associated certifications. We reiterate that OMDT needs to be offered to students even before they are enrolled in their programme of study. This will help them prepare and upskill themselves before they enter the university environment.    The diagnostic test is offered for four main reasons: to help the students measure their competencies and review their readiness to university mathematics, to help the undergraduates choose course best suited to their abilities before they complete the enrolment process, offered essentially as a prerequisite alternative, and finally as resource tools for the placement tests.  Online Mathematics Diagnostics Tool (OMDT) at USP The University of the South Pacific (USP) is a regional multi-campus institution operating since 1968 populating its 14 campuses and 10 centres spread in its 12 member countries over an area of 30 million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. The university is constituted to make premium higher Sharma, Kumar and Bali  1 - 3 education available to all its member countries. However, together with factors such as the geographical spread of the member countries and English being the 2nd or even 3rd language, the non-uniform secondary school education of its students heavily impact the university’s aspiration of quality education for all. The latter invariably affects the student retention which currently averages around 70% at the first year level. To address this issue the university works to include effective and efficient pedagogical tools and technologies, mostly designing in-house so that these are customized and contextualized for its unique eduscape in the Pacific region. One of its recent most success stories has been the design of OMDT to bring students to the same level of mathematics before they begin their academic journey at the university. The following are the new contributions made in OMDT:  The test questions are randomized and the tools is responsive  There are online remedial modules targeting specific topics in mathematics   There is an automated pathway for the relevant remediation.   The randomized tests and remedial topics can form weekly assessed activities  RESULTS Figure 4 shows the student performances in the online diagnostic test piloted for all first year students joining Science programmes in semester 1, 2015. It shows that out of 1844 students who took the diagnostic test, 1483 students failed. This was consistent for all the five major topics in mathematics.   Figure 2: Student performance in five major modules of mathematics.    Analysis of student feedback Question 1: How would you rate the difficulty of the test questions?  A 5-point Likert scale was deployed to obtain the difficulty level of the test questions. A mean of 3.53 and SD of 0.97 Indicated that the questions were quite challenging for the students. This invariably shows that most incoming AttemptedPASSStatsFAILStatsPASSIntegrationFAILIntegrationPASSDifferentiationFAILDifferentiationPASSAlgebraFAILAlgebraPASSFunctionFAILFunctionValue 1844 580 1264 589 769 381 769 500 663 394 7280200400600800100012001400160018002000NO OF STUENTSMODULE ANALYSIS Sharma, Kumar and Bali 1 - 4  students had either forgotten the concepts during their school holidays or they did not cover the relevant topics adequately in their secondary schools. Question 2: Did you prefer this online-based test over normal paper based tests? Only around 30% of the students still preferred to use the print-based tests. Though some students don’t get along with computer and equations in it, but still they find the computer based test are easier then print test.  Question 3: Were the online remedial activities helpful?  The data collected from 40 students who took this 5-point lickert scale gave a mean= 3.07 and standard deviation = 0.89, showing the students buy-in and appriciation of the online remedial.  CONCLUSION This new cutting-edge pedagogical tool designed in the University of the South Pacific timely diagnoses knowledge gaps of its first year university students which come from different countries in the Pacific region, and based on their individual performances, it automatically directs students to relevant remedial and corrective measures. The tool has built-in certification, rewards through gamification, surveys and analytics, support mechanisms, and online remedial modules crafted into a complete package. The tool is to be implemented university wide from 2016 and is proposed to be made available to the rest of the world as an OER. A number of the countries in the region do not have the face-to-face Year 13 level studies in schools and hence have to resort to print based distance education which greatly affects the student performances. There is a cascading effect at the first year studies as well. Adding to that we have a lack of qualified teachers who teach mathematics is senior secondary schools. Consequently, students are deprived of good mathematics and sometimes certain mathematics topics are compromised.  All the above clearly show that the students are at-risk even before they join the university, and hence are set to fail in their programmes right from the start. It shows the need for at-risk intervention programmes before the beginning of the academic journey. They need OMDT.   References Derezinski, J. (2014, February 25). Newest Retention Tool: Freshman Boot Camp. Retrieved from http://commercial.bmoharris.com/resource/educational-institutions/business-strategy/colleges-newest-retention-tool-freshman-boot-camp/ Dobele, A.R., Gangemi, M., Kopanidis, F. and Thomas, S. (2013),"At risk policy and early intervention programmes for underperforming students", Education + Training, Vol. 55(1), pp. 69 – 82.  Jimerson, S. R., Anderson, G., & Whipple, A. (2002).  Winning the battle and losing the war: Examining the relation between grade retention and dropping out of high school.  Psychology in the Schools, 39 (4), 441-457. Sharma, B., Jokhan, A., Kumar, R., Finiasi, R., Chand, S. and Rao, V. 2015. “Use of Short Message Service for Learning and Student Support in the Pacific Region.” In Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning. Rivera, E. (2015, January). Boot Camps Train, Prepare Students for Nursing School. University of St Thomas Houstan. Retrieved from http://www.stthom.edu/Public/getFile.asp?IsDownload=0&File_Content_ID=111881 

Online Mathematics Diagnostic Test and Remediation for New Entrants in Higher Education in the Pacific Region

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