Intervention in engineering students' maths education to overcome the aftermath of distance learning

Abstract

During the pandemic, many people in secondary school failed to acquire solid and profound knowledge. Teaching maths in remote education with distance learning has been a challenge for both teachers and students. In engineering higher education, several years after the pandemic, we are seeing problems that are having an impact on the overall education not only in the basic subjects but in further engineering subjects. There is a need for an intervention programme that can be applied effectively in large-scale courses where the number of students exceeds 100. Recently, we have created supplementary courses to help students learn the advanced Calculus material more effectively, while ensuring that they can catch up with their secondary school knowledge at their own pace. This research aims to analyse the changes in student performance of first-year student during the first two semesters of university math courses (Calculus 1 and 2). In our research, we investigated three different groups of students: the “2018 group” studied math traditionally, while the “2020 group” took online education at the end of high school and at the beginning of their university studies. Finally, the “2022 group” spent two years in high school at home in distance learning but started in-person education at the university and had significant problems during the first semester. Therefore, those students participated in an intervention programme. The performance analysis after Calculus 2 shows that we have succeeded in developing an inclusive pedagogical programme that we intend to further develop in the future to reduce drop-out. © 2024 SEFI 2024 - 52nd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering, Proceedings: Educating Responsible Engineers. All rights reserved.