Cafe Society Adds Up to a Great Idea for Students Struggling With Their Maths

By PETER RANSCOMBE

FANCY some calculus with your cappuccino? Or maybe you’d prefer some logarithms with your latte?

A maths cafe – an informal meeting during which students can ask tutors about mathematical problems – is just one of many suggestions to help university students who are struggling with numbers.

Experts from around the UK met at St Andrews University this week to discuss ways in which they could help students struggling with the maths they needed in the coursework for their degrees. Speakers at the conference included Celia Hoyles, the government’s chief adviser for mathematics and professor of mathematics education at the London Institute of Education, and Dr Tony Croft, the founder and director of the mathematics education centre at Loughborough University.

“The conference was a resounding success,” said Dr Christie Marr, head of the mathematics support centre at St Andrews University. “Conferences about mathematics support in the past have talked about delivery, but this was different because it was an executive-level conference aimed at the people who make strategic decisions about what provisions should be supplied by their universities.

“Rather than just focusing on the delivery of mathematics support, we concentrated on the logistics, the economics, the sustainability, exploring the different models for supplying mathematics support.”

Dr Marr went on: “More than 50 per cent of UK universities now have some form of mathematics support.”

Mathematics cafes, such as those run by Portsmouth University, were one of the models discussed. Tutors found informal drop-in sessions in university cafes or students’ unions were a very effective way of helping students who had maths problems.

Other models for offering support include that being used at St Andrews, where Dr Marr offers one-to-one tuition sessions.

“Typically, I need to see each student for only a single one- hour session,” she explained.

“I can plug the gaps for students if they think they have not grasped one particular topic.

“I see students right across the board, across all levels. I see as many students who are going to get firsts as are going to get thirds.

“It’s not that they’re weaker; it’s just that they identify that they might have a gap in their knowledge.”

Dr Marr believes the gaps may arise when students reach university after studying under different systems.

“At St Andrews, about a third of our students come from a Scottish background with Highers, another third come from the rest of the UK with A-levels and then the remaining third come from abroad, so we have people with a huge range of mathematical backgrounds joining the university.

“Rather than the lecturers having to go for the lowest common denominator and treat the students as if none of them has covered a topic, they can assume a more appropriate level of knowledge, confident in the fact that if students haven’t covered a particular topic, then they can come to me for assistance. At the beginning of the academic year, I go round as many lectures as possible and make myself high-profile, so students know where to find me.”

Dr Marr studied mathematics at Oxford before training as a teacher in London. She taught in a range of schools before returning to Oxford to study for a master’s degree and a PhD in maths.

She moved to St Andrews two years ago to set-up its mathematics support centre and now uses her teaching skills to help students from different disciplines, ranging from social scientists, who need help with statistics, through to physicists and chemists, who use a lot of maths in their subject areas.

“Maths is such a hierarchical subject, if a student misses out on understanding one particular concept, then the whole of the next few weeks of tutorials and lectures could be lost on them,” Dr Marr said.

“My tutorials are a very cost- effective way of making sure we don’t have to remove content from courses, which is something people have been worrying about.”

(c) 2007 Scotsman, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.