I’m very excited to announce that I, together with Christian Seifert, have been awarded a Tandem Fellowship by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft. Christian, among other things, teaches undergraduate mathematics for engineers, and together we have developed a concept to improve instruction, which we now get support to implement.
The problem that we are addressing is that mathematics is taught to 1300 students from 12 different engineering study programs at once. At the moment, in addition to lectures and practice sessions in both very large and small groups, students get weekly online exercises that they can earn bonus points with. Student feedback is positive – they appreciate the opportunity to practice, they like that they are nudged towards continuously working on whatever is currently going on in class, and obviously they like to earn bonus points they can use on the exam.
However, mathematics is not typically a subject that non-mathematicians are very keen on. Many feel like there is no relevance of the content to their lives or even their studies. And many don’t feel confident they have a chance to succeed.
As I wrote in my recent posts on motivation, both believing that you can succeed and seeing the relevance of things you are supposed to be studying to your life are necessary for people to feel intrinsically motivated. So this is where we want to start.
Since the experience with the weekly online tests is so positive, we want to develop exercises that apply the mathematics they are currently learning to topics from their own, chosen fields. So if they are supposed to practice solving a set of linear equations, students of mechanical engineering, for example, might as well use one from a mechanical engineering case. Or even better: they might be asked to develop this set of equations first, and then solve it. By connecting mathematics with topics students are really interested in, we hope to get them to engage more with matematics.
More engagement will then likely mean that they improve their understanding both of mathmatics itself and – equally important – of their main subjects, where currently manystudents lack the math skills required. At the same time, we hope this will increase student motivation for both subjects.
Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done to first implement this concept and then evaluate whether it is working as well as we thought it would, and then probably modifying it and evaluating some more. But I am excited to get started!