Towards a global improvement of Engineering Maths Teaching

Abstract- A model for managing the processes involved in the teaching and learning of mathematics for engineering students is presented. It consists of combining, through a continuous quality improvement approach, a number of useful teaching and learning strategies. In fact, the Short Period Teaching-Learning Cycle strategy is used in the classroom in order to guarantee immediate feedback and correction for both the student and the lecturer, i.e., based on small units of content, key processes such as motivation, delivery of the lesson, study, learning evaluation, corrections, reinforcement and projection are successively developed in the time elapsed in a class session. A Cooperative Learning procedure is applied in homework activities, i.e., “the instructional use of small groups so that the students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning”, constituting a valuable complement to the activities in the classroom. Cooperative Teaching is also introduced, i.e., all the faculty involved in a particular section of a course work together to optimize the development of the teaching-learning activities from a just in time approach. They also make significant efforts to coordinate the different subjects, mainly first year maths and physics, to initiate an experimental curriculum integration. In this stage of our research we are also developing and testing written materials to be employed in the Short Cycles activities in the classroom and the corresponding set of exercises and problems for the cooperative learning activities. The written materials are structured following a cognitive taxonomic point of view, i.e., according to the increasing complexity of the skills that they require to be solved. Finally, in order to promote a deeper learning and understanding, innovations in the delivery of metacognitive instructions were also introduced in the classroom. Numerous advantages of this model compared to the standard organization of the teaching-learning activities are reported