1,720,999 research outputs found
Mathematics and ocean swimming
No full textMathematics is often taught in first year as a service subject. It is important that mathematics academics provide a good service to those whose students they teach. The income of many mathematics groups in universities in Australia largely depends on this teaching. At times mathematics academics are seen as not succeeding in this teaching and are blamed for the lack of skills of the students taught, or blamed for not being able to pass more students. It is claimed here that mathematicians are often given a very difficult task, that learning mathematics has some aspects of what has been called “complex learning” and that some mathematics students are involuntary learners. It is up to mathematicians to educate those whom we serve about the challenges faced and about what is realistic for their students. An analogy which might assist in this is presented
Workshop support for first-year mathematics and statistics
No full textThe Mathematics Education Support Hub ran mathematics and statistics support workshops for 17 different subjects from 2016 to 2018. The mathematics and statistics in these subjects was at first-year level. Data on workshop attendance was collected. For each student in a subject for which workshops were run, final marks, secondary school mathematics background and degree enrolled in were obtained from university records. This enabled an investigation into attendance at support workshops in relation to mathematics background and discipline of the degree, and into the effectiveness of support workshops and relationships to mathematics background. Greater workshop attendance was linked to higher final marks, with noticeable and significant differences for different mathematics backgrounds. Unsurprisingly, students with stronger backgrounds performed better than those with weaker backgrounds at every level of workshop attendance. An interesting result is that students with no mathematics in their final year of secondary school showed a much greater rate of improvement in final mark for increasing workshop attendance than any of the groups with secondary school mathematics, surpassing those with an Elementary mathematics school background at a very low level of workshop attendance. Significant differences in workshop attendance were found for different level of mathematics background and different discipline of degree of study
Perceptions of feedback in mathematics – results from a preliminary investigation at three Australian universities
No full textFeedback on learning is recognised as so important that it features on student evaluation of teaching surveys and on Australia’s national Course Experience Questionnaire. Ideally, the student responses are then used to improve on practices. However, we argue that this process is flawed in first year mathematics. In this pilot study, we surveyed students enrolled in first year mathematics subjects at three Australian universities about their perceptions of feedback. Students were asked what they considered to be feedback in mathematics and what feedback they had received in their mathematics subject. In this study we compare these answers to the lecturers’ views of what types of feedback were provided. We come to the conclusion that students enrolled in first year mathematics subjects perceive feedback very differently to their lecturers. This devalues the usefulness of questions about feedback on end-of semester surveys on the quality of teaching. We also question whether students may be missing out on accessing feedback that is intentionally provided to improve their learning
On the existence of nanojoins with given parameters
No full textNanojoins are parts of large carbon molecules joining several nanotubes with the same or different parameters and chemical and electrical properties. It is known that Euler's formula implies that such nanojoins must contain faces that are not hexagons if at least three tubes are joined. As the atoms in a nanojoin are carbon atoms preferring hexagonal rings, it is normally assumed that apart from hexagons only pentagons and heptagons occur. In this paper we will give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of nanojoins joining nanotubes with given parameters and given numbers of pentagons and heptagons
Thinking deeply of simple things : 45 years of the National Mathematics Summer School
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to better inform the mathematics community about the ANU–AAMT National Mathematics Summer School. This two week residential program is for the discovery and development of mathematically gifted and talented students. It takes about 64 mathematics students who have one year of secondary school left to complete and about a dozen students who have just completed secondary school from all over Australia. We present the summer school goals, how we attempt to achieve them and why we believe that we are successful
Year 13 or first-year university : a holistic learning design that attempts to combine elements of secondary and tertiary learning and teaching
No full textFor many years, Australian universities have been accepting students into their courses, including Science, with inadequate mathematical backgrounds. In addition to this lack of mathematical preparation, students are illprepared for the demands of independent learning as required by university courses. Thus many students are enrolling in university courses without basic numeracy skills and furthermore, they lack the ability to cope with the requirements of self-directed learning. This results in students being totally overwhelmed by their first few weeks experience at university which can result in significant ‘drop-out’ rates. This report describes a learning design used in the delivery of a firstyear mathematics unit that attempts to remediate numeracy skills and develop the independent learning skills required by the ‘traditional’ university experience
Supporting engagement or engaging support?
No full textThe need for learning support in first year mathematics subjects in universities in Australia is increasing as student diversity increases. In this paper we study the use of learning support in a first year mathematics subject for which there is no assumed mathematics knowledge. Many students in this subject have a poor mathematics background, noticeably worse than five years previously. The interplay between learning support and
engagement is found to be significant and the use of support can be used as a measure of engagement. The success of support is tied up with the success of engagement, making it difficult to measure the success of learning support. However student outcomes appear to be substantially improved through both mechanisms. We also highlight some concerns and consequences of the declining level of mathematics preparation of incoming students
HSC mathematics choices and consequences for students coming to university without adequate mathematics preparation
No full textStudents who complete higher levels of maths in high school experience lower rates of unemployment and receive higher salaries, on average, than their less-accomplished peers' (Business Insider Australia, 5.11.2013), yet we all know as mathematics teachers that the number of students enrolling in the higher levels of mathematics for their HSC has been declining for many years
Antimagicness of some families of generalized graphs
No full textAn edge labeling of a graph G = (V,E) is a bijection from the set of edges to the set of integers {1, 2,...,│E│}. The weight of a vertex v is the sum of the labels of all the edges incident with v. If the vertex weights are all distinct then we say that the labeling is vertex-antimagic, or simply, antimagic. A graph that admits an antimagic labeling is called an antimagic graph. In this paper, we present a new general method of constructing families of graphs with antimagic labelings. In particular, our method allows us to prove that generalized web graphs and generalized flower graphs are antimagic
A note on antimagic labelings of trees
No full textIn 1990, Hartsfield and Ringel conjectured “Every tree except K2 is antimagic”, where antimagic means that there is a bijection from E(G) to {1, 2,…, |E(G)} such that at each vertex the weight (sum of the labels of incident edges) is different. We call such a labeling a vertex antimagic edge labeling . As a step towards proving this conjecture, we provide a method whereby, given any degree sequence pertaining to a tree, we can construct an antimagic tree based on this sequence. Furthermore, swapping the roles of edges and vertices with respect to a labeling , we provide a method to construct an edge antimagic vertex labeling for any tree and we consider edge antimagic vertex labeling of graphs in general
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