RebelMaths

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

E-Assessment in the Mathematical Sciences 2018 What is the EAMS Conference? Today I had the pleasure of attending day 1 of the EAMS 2018 conference in Newcastle University. EAMS stands for E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences. I previously attended this conference in 2016 together with Julie Crowley but today I had to brave it alone. The content of the conference lands wonderfully somewhere in the intersections between Mathematics, Pedagogy, Education Technology and Computer Science. Each speaker seems to come at the problem of E-assessment in Maths from a slightly different perspective thus making the conference a fabulous melting pot of ideas and knowledge. I had this great idea to write a take aways blog post for each day. However when I actually sit down to write it I realise that I learned far too much today to easily to sum it all up in a neat little post with a snappy title. On top of that I had planned to write it immediately while things were still fresh but now I'm...

Domino logic Gates: A hands on lesson on boolean logic One of my favourite classes this year was one where we built domino Logic gates. We were seven weeks into a first year maths course for computer science students. We had been working through sets  then algebra and then Boolean Algebra. Each week we had one three hour lecture (horrific, right). In the seventh week there was the first in class test for the module and I knew that the students were going to be tired after doing the test and I needed to keep it "light" somehow for the remainder of the three hour period. I was also working with these same students in a module called Effective Learning and Development and from discussion in that module I knew that a few of the learners were the type of learner that liked to move and do hands on work (there was a time that I would have said they were learners with a kinesthetic learning style but I know that is all out of vogue at the moment). I had been thinking of ways to t...