Registration and coffee
Welcome & Housekeeping
Students as partners in resource creation
Ewan Russell, University of Liverpool
Involving students as partners in the development of teaching and learning initiatives can provide insights for both students and academics. Over the years I have worked with students in resource creation. This talk will provide details on the various resources created, and how the partnerships came about in the first place. I will also provide some future plans for working with students as partners.
Exercise Creation in Linear Algebra: what can we learn from an example of curriculum co-creation?
Jean-Baptiste Gramain and Morgiane Richard (University of Aberdeen)
Curriculum co-creation has been demonstrated to (at least sometimes) be a transformative experience, and provide students with a deeper understanding of the material they’re working on. In order to test and use these ideas in the context of Higher Education Mathematics, the students enrolled on two consecutive Level 2 undergraduate courses in Linear Algebra at the University of Aberdeen took part in a number of pedagogical activities, and were assessed on exercises which they had designed and solved themselves. During these courses, students were invited to complete three questionnaires about their experience of Exercise Creation and its impact on their confidence, and, at the end, were given the opportunity to take part in a focus group discussion.
In this talk, we will present the activities run with students, as well as the results gathered about their perception of the experience. We will also discuss successes and failures, and hopefully provide a few useful tips for organising curriculum co-creation in mathematics.
Coffee/Tea break
Using pre-sessional resources to provide academic support and improve transition to university-level mathematics
Shazia Ahmed and Jenny August, University of Glasgow
It has been recognised for some time that students are entering university ill-equipped in terms of their mathematical skills despite having achieved good grades at Advanced Higher/A level.
The problems have become more apparent post-pandemic with some of the poor maths exam results in 2022/23 across different cohorts giving cause for concern. Factors contributing to this are believed to include various topics being removed from the Higher and Advanced Higher Maths curriculum and an increased difficulty in getting students to engage with the support available to them once they arrive at university.
In this talk, we will present an overview of an initiative undertaken in the College of Science and Engineering aimed at easing the transition and promoting student engagement in the academic year 2023-24. This took the form of pre-arrival maths resources sent to incoming students designed to bridge the gap between Higher and Advanced Higher entrants to first year. This included videos and practice questions to help them improve their skills and introduced them to the maths support available during their studies.
The talk will also include discussing our plans for improving the resource for this coming year, based on feedback and lessons learned from this experience.
Embedded maths workshops for chemistry students
Emma Coutts, Heriot Watt University
Chat GPT 4.0: demonstration and discussion.
Markus Upmeier, University of Aberdeen
Raising Awareness of Stats Anxiety: Getting in the Students’ Shoes
Morgiane Richard and Karen Mitchell, University of Aberdeen
The University of Aberdeen does not offer a centralised stats support service alongside its maths support service. Yet, many disciplines teach statistics, and staff and students recognise the benefits that such a service would bring to our institution. Discussions with staff in the School of Psychology have revealed that there is a fear of quantitative methods amongst some of their students who are often also diagnosed with a learning difference. In turn, this will impact further how students can interact with the statistics elements of their courses.
In an attempt to raise awareness on maths and stats anxiety and how to overcome it, we have devised a fun and interactive workshop for students, which we will run with the audience in this session.
Lightning Talk: SMSN Digital Accessibility Project
Lunch
Lives behind the lemmas
Mark McCartney, Ulster University
The history of mathematics can be used in teaching in a variety of ways, from occasional asides in lectures to a whole module in the final year. Like any academic discipline, history has depth and complexity, with many more people, places, and periods involved in teaching, learning, and researching mathematics than make it into the mathematical headlines. This talk will ‘fly the flag’ for the history of mathematics; give pointers to some resources; and look at ways history can be used to encourage and engage students.
A peek into the past
Ben Martin, University of Aberdeen
Recently a set of 200-year-old lecture notes was donated to the University of Aberdeen by Peter Mackay. They contain various topics on arithmetic, algebra and trigonometry, as well as a section on natural philosophy; the notes were taken, probably by a student, from lecture courses taught at King’s College Aberdeen in 1816-17. They are beautifully hand-written and bound into a single volume. I will discuss the contents of the notes and offer some thoughts on how maths teaching at Aberdeen has changed over the last two centuries.
John Little, Robert Gordon University
In this presentation I will point out how the post of maths and statistics tutor aligns with university strategy and try to illustrate how I and the post might stay relevant in light of potential institutional restructuring and possible future priorities, based on where recent student demand has come from but also by means of a SWOT analysis.
Along the way I will look at how I have tried to address more immediate concerns about innovation.
Lightning Talk: SMSN Scottish Maths Support Provision Survey Project
Coffee/tea break
SMSN AGM