Skip to main content

Posts

Numbas Question using Eukleides

Experimenting with using the new Eukleides extension in Numbas v4.0 A few weeks ago I attended an advanced numbas workshop given by Christian Lawson-Perfect in Cork Institute of Technology. During the workshop Christian introduced us to some of the newest features of Numbas that might be useful for us. Two things that immediately struck me as useful were the Eukleides extension and also the ability to embed a Numbas question into a blog. So here I am three weeks later finally getting around to trying both of those things out. A couple of years ago myself and Julie were both working on the teame.ie project which involved a lot of thinking about Numbas questions and trying to create nice exams and questions to help students with their learning via scaffolded tests and formative feedback.  We had difficulty getting the trigonometry questions to look nice and I'm not sure that our way of making the diagrams variable was ideal. So I decided to revisit one of those questions and r
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Opportunities to Respond (OTR)

As part of some reading lately relating to "great teachers" I came across an acronym I hadn't seen before, OTR. As per usual my interest was piqued and off I went down the rabbit hole to learn what these OTRs were. What are OTRs? OTR stands of Opportunities to Respond. OTRs therefore are opportunities for students to respond  to questions, tasks or demands. Some literature emphasises that the responses must be correct while other papers focus on the fact that feedback on responses must be given. Examples of OTRs might include an individual responding to a teacher prompt responding verbally in a group (choral response) responding via white board or holding up cards responding by using some form of digital classroom response system responding to peers in group work A subset of OTRs is TD-OTRs which are teacher directed opportunities to respond. Personally I love getting students talking to each other in class so I like the idea of considering OTRs that are no
Post a Comment
Read more

Maths Anxiety: What can a lecturer do?

During the course of my reading lately I've had to consider the effects of Maths anxiety on students in Higher Education and ways in which we can help students deal with the anxieties they experience and hopefully lessen them over time. What is Maths Anxiety?  Maths anxiety is a vicious circle where a student finds mathematics difficult, becomes anxious about this, this anxiety negatively impacts on their learning and so they find maths even more difficult.  Encounters with maths lectures/classes becomes a prompt for anxiety and so the student begins each encounter with a negative attitude. Mathematics Anxiety was described by Spicer (2004) as "an emotion that blocks a person's reasoning ability when confronted with a mathematical situation" (p.1). While a student is in a state of anxiety their working memory, which they need for working on their maths, is instead focused on how anxious they are. This anxiety negatively effects their learning  and performance. Th
Post a Comment
Read more

Take Aways from AILTA2018

All Ireland Conference on Learning, Teaching and Assessment in Further and Higher Education My day at AILTA started off wonderfully with a stroll to the venue through the autumn leaves on Griffith Avenue. I'd never been to Marino institute of Education before and was very impressed with the setting for this great conference. In this blog post I couldn't possibly hope to cover even a small amount of the topics touched upon in today's conference. I'll just gather some reflections from talks that were particularly relevant to my own interests and practice. There were a few key themes that struck me during the day. Firstly, as would be expected, there was a great emphasis on taking an evidence informed approach to your practice. Secondly, the idea of listening to student stories came up at several talks and discussions. Thirdly there was a lot of discussion around the difference between digital assessment vs. technology enhanced assessment. Fourthly, there were seve
Post a Comment
Read more

Trying out a Simple Goal Free Problem in HE Maths

What are Goal Free Problems? I have recently been reading "How I wish I'd Taught Maths" by Craig Barton. I'm still not even half way through the book but it is full of great ideas. Very importantly these ideas are also backed up by research and Mr. Barton makes it very easy for readers to find the research in question. So today I tried something nearly new to me. I say nearly new because I have done something similar before but never had a name for it. In the past when students have been struggling with trigonometry problems I have always advised them to find out whatever they can and then see if that helps with the question. This is probably a simplified version of the goal free problem.The idea of the goal free problem is that there is no fixed 'answer' that students need to reach. Instead they explore the question and see what 'answers' they can come up with. Today's Goal Free Problem I decided to try it out today with a first year Busine
Post a Comment
Read more

Promoting Discussion in Higher Education Mathematics: Talk-Test

Promoting Discussion in Higher Education Mathematics. Over the last few years I have tried several different ways to incorporate group work and discussion in my Higher Education Mathematics classroom/lectures. Students don't instinctively love talking about maths! It takes a bit of work to set up some reason for students to get involved in mathematical discussion. I've tried the usual things: The basic "have a chat with your neighbour about that",The incentivised by fear "check your answers with you neighbour because I'll randomly pick someone to ask". The classic "think-pair-share". I've really enjoyed using the method from Peter Liljedahl's thinking classroom of using Vertical Non Permanent Surfaces (#VNPS). The rule I promote is that if you are writing on the board you can't write your own ideas, someone needs to tell you what to write. I find this works very well to promote discussions about interesting problems. This
Post a Comment
Read more

EAMS 2018 Take Aways from Day 2

EAMS Day 2 Day 2 of EAMS had a LOT of speakers (of which I was one). I couldn't possibly hope to do justice to all the interesting and varied content presented so I'll just pick out a few things that caught my eye and made me think "hmmm....what if I tried that out with .....". The day started out with a Keynote from Paul Milner from nationalnumeracy.org.uk  entitled "Maths outside the Classroom".  Paul introduced us to some scary statistics about the lack of Numeracy among adults (in the uk, but have no reason to believe the story would be much different in Ireland). These poor levels of Numeracy in the working adult population are costing the UK economy approximately 1.3% of GDP. He made a great point that even if we somehow got the current education system 'perfect' it would take 50 years for this to address the adult numeracy problems. We were shown a diagram from the National Numeracy website showing the three key attitudes that an adult lea
Post a Comment
Read more