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Abstract(s)
It 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.
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Keywords
Educational experiences Higher education Mathematics curricula Student engagement Personalized learning Active learning