African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education

This research reports on second-year students who designed and developed an integrated C# programming and database project as one of the course outcomes in a problem-based environment. Project teamwork involved three key actions, namely cooperation, taking responsibility and dealing with dependencies. For these actions, several competencies were required. Based on the literature, a framework was proposed involving five categories of competencies as well as associated mechanisms to manage team cooperation, responsibilities and dependencies in joint programming projects. The purpose of the research was to test the proposed framework of competencies using the data at hand. An interpretivist approach directed this research and a qualitative methodology was followed. Ninety-nine second-year BSc Computer Science and Information Technology students participated in the research at a South African university. Students worked mainly in teams of two members and selected the partners themselves. Data collection involved weekly project sheets, which indicated a team’s responsibilities and cooperation as well as their planning, design, development and reflection on project activities. The data were manually analysed. Several quotes provided supporting evidence of the proposed framework and it was validated by referring to instances of some mechanisms that team members used to manage their problem-based projects.

The study in this paper reports on whether an online homework system in combination with a flipped classroom has a positive effect on success rates of first year statistics students. Departing from a traditional teaching model (Baseline), the technology-based intervention strategies implemented were firstly the Aplia™ interactive online homework system (Phase 1) and then, in addition, the flipped classroom (Phase 2). In the flipped classroom model, the transfer of information took place by prereading and pre-class Aplia™ homework assignments. This approach intended to allow more quality time to be spent on revisiting difficult concepts and engaging in problems inside the lecture hall, thus enhancing the learning process. The average final marks of the three cohorts were compared using an ANOVA test. Chi-square tests were used to evaluate the effects of the changing teaching models from Baseline through Phase 1 to Phase 2. The success rates of three different cohorts (n = 1485, 1343 and 1466 respectively), consisting of only first-time statistics students with a Grade 12 mathematics mark of at least 60%, were assessed. For Phase 1 compared with the Baseline the increase in the success rate was insignificant, but the success rates for Phase 2 compared with both Phase 1 and Baseline improved significantly with a small to medium effect size, because of the very large samples. The practical importance of this is that the number of successful students increased by more than 100 from Phase 1 to Phase 2 and more than 130 from Baseline to Phase 2. A significant relationship was also found between the different cohorts and their mark distributions, confirming that the online homework system in combination with the flipped classroom in particular is effective in increasing the success rate.

This paper analyses student teachers’ meta-narratives associated with ‘doing’ mathematics. The quality of the vocabulary associated with the doing of the mathematical objects of a sample of 56 multilingual thirdyear mathematics methodology students preparing to be secondary teachers was explored and assessed. Sfard’s theoretical concept of ‘pronounced foci’ and her ‘critical categories’ for determining if a narrative was mathematical were used to analyse the data. Meta-narratives refer to the written mathematical metacognitive monologues that manifested students’ thinking while they were doing the mathematical objects. Students were required to write, in language suitable for teaching, a description of the procedure which led to a solution. The procedures and their associated meta-narratives provided data for a mixed-method analysis in this case study. The absence of a mathematical vocabulary presented difficulties when students engaged in meta-narratives. The data also show that inexact mathematical vocabularies are not culturally specific since the 11 English mother tongue students demonstrated a similar lack of command of mathematical language as their peers. Meta-narratives revealed mathematical misconceptions that may not have been detected without them. For two of the three mathematical objects there is a significant but moderate positive correlation between correct vocabulary and correct procedure. The findings support the need for mathematical vocabulary (and language) to be a teaching focus when preparing teachers for their careers and that the assessment of tasks is not completely achieved by evaluating only the procedural ‘doing’ of mathematics