Page - 231 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

differential and integral calculus, within their degree programmes. Many of these questions would have responses on a Likert-type scale (often of the general type “Strongly agree”, “Agree”, “Neither agree nor disagree”, “Disagree” or “Strongly disagree”), whilst others related to their preferred modes of study or the types or resources they liked using to help them study and learn mathematical topics. Several such questions allowed the responder to choose “Other”, in which case they were asked to specify to what their choice of “Other” referred. A few questions allowed completely free responses, in their own words, from the student participants. The set of questions to be used, the “Information for Participants” sheet, “Consent to Participate” form and details of how the resulting data would be stored (and how long for) and what they would be used for were all sent to the Ethics Committee of Kingston University’s Learning and Teaching Enhancement Centre (LTEC), from which the project received approval to proceed. Four groups of students were approached with requests to participate in our study. Two groups were Bachelors degree specialist students of Mathematics (19 first year, 19 second year, all full-time), another group were first year Bachelors degree students of Civil Engineering (18 Students : 8 full-time, 10 part-time), whilst the third group were first year students of Aeronautical Engineering (16 students, all full-time). All these groups had to study Calculus as part of their degree programmes. In total, we interviewed 72 students in the present study. 3.2. Results and Discussion We found some similarities, but several notable differences between the four groups studied. For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on their preferred approaches and resources to help them study and revise mathematical topics. The data for the two groups of Engineering are summarized in Figure 1, whilst the corresponding data for the two groups of specialist Mathematics students are presented in Figure 2. Figure 1. Engineering Students’ Preferred Methods and Resources for Studying Mathematical Topics In Figures 1 and 2, means Lecture notes and Tutorial Problem sheets provided by lecturers, are traditional Text Books, are On-Line Resources, including text- based websites and video-based resources such as Khan Academy and YouTube, plus on-line quizzes. is the University’s “drop-in clinic” student support scheme for mathematics topics, and the others are specific combinations of the above. M.Davis etal. /Developing“Smart”TutorialTools toAssist StudentsLearnCalculus 231