ISCAP - Matemática - Artigos
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing ISCAP - Matemática - Artigos by Subject "Active learning"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Different skills- differentiated learning plansPublication . Soares, Filomena Baptista; Lopes, Ana Paula; Nunes, PaulaPersonal development and realisation through academic success is an overall objective of Higher Educational Institutions (HEI), promoting the embracement of an open and fruitful future to their students. These students enrol in several Higher Education courses after attending well distinguished secondary school programs. The impact of these different backgrounds, with its inherent differentiated basic skills, is a general and worldwide challenge, fundamentally when facing some specific “constructive” subjects like foreign languages and Mathematics. In this paper we present a project developed in a Math course, with the first year students from the Accounting and Management Bachelor Degree in the School of Management and Industrial Studies (ESEIG). This project, which started in the academic year 2012/13, proved to be a success, both in terms of acceptance by the students and course global assessment results. We will describe all the methodologic steps connected to its development, implementation and maintenance, ranging from project submission to Scientific and Pedagogical boards for approval, student’s background “characterisation”, teachers and staff involvement in the different parts of the project, among many others. The project results over the last three years will be presented, assessing its pros and cons and we will also analyse its transferability to other courses and/or subjects, one of our actual major concerns. Like any other project that tries to promote success in some “historically critical” courses, there are many obstacles, objections and problems both in its implementation and, moreover, in its pursuit. However, it is not possible to develop a conscientious work, when confronted with recurrent student’s difficulties, just “move forward” without even trying to change “something”.
- The background impact in HEI math lecturesPublication . Nunes, Paula; Soares, Filomena; Lopes, Ana PaulaIt is a fact, and far from being a new one, that students have been entering Higher Education courses with many different backgrounds in terms of secondary school programs they attended. The impact of these basic skills is a general and worldwide challenge, fundamentally when facing some specific “constructive” subjects like foreign languages and Mathematics. Working with students with an extensive variety of Math qualifications is an outrageous challenge when they enter an advanced Math course, leading to an almost generalized expectations’ failure - from students enrolled in course and from their teachers, who feel powerless in trying to monitor knowledge construction from completely different “starting points”. If teachers’ "haste" is average, more than half of the students do not “go along” and give up, even before experiencing any kind of evaluation procedure. On the contrary, if the “speed” is too low, others are discouraged (feeling not progressing at all) and the teacher runs the risk of not meeting the minimum objectives (general and specific) of its course, which may have a negative impact on students’ future training development. Failure in Mathematics, despite being a recurrent and global issue, does not have any “magical solution”, however, in general, teachers in this area seem untiring, searching, investigating, trying and implementing new and old “recipes” to tackle and demystify this subject. In this article we describe a project developed in a Math course, with the first year students from an Accounting and Management bachelor degree, and its outcomes since it was brought to practice, revealing its impact in students’ success, from approval to dropout rates, in this course. We will shortly describe students’ differentiated Math backgrounds, their results in a pre-assessment analysis and how we try to deal with these differences and level them up, having in mind the same “finish line”. One should never forget that all these students were officially accepted in higher education institutions, so they are ones’ reality, the reality of institutions whose name one should value and strive to defend.