Aiming for excellence in STEM learning and teaching proceedings

Abstract

While maths can be viewed as enabling learning in science and medicine, in reality we see students are bringing their maths anxiety with them to their studies. Our work focuses on dissecting the maths problem as it relates to teaching and learning in these so-called hard disciplines. We have been challenging the inertia of what we see as a stand off with students taking the view that they are unable to do maths and educators frustrated at their disengagement. We have found that the maths problem resonates with several pedagogical frameworks (e.g. Meyer and Land’s Threshold Concepts Framework, Perkins and Simmons’ four frames of understanding) and we have found these useful for unpicking where our students become disengaged. We have applied a number of interventions to assist student learning and are now using our findings to inform the design of an online diagnostic to more explicitly address dysfunctional stances that students adopt when asked to manipulate their quantitative data. Given the extent of the maths problem and the move to increase diversity in the Higher Education sector, we discuss how to enable students to shift to a more positive learning disposition