Page - 232 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

Figure 2. Mathematics Students’ Preferred Methods and Resources for Study. Abbreviations are as for Figure 1. Figures 1 and 2 above show some interesting contrasts between the groups. Aeronautical engineering students seem to have a preference for more traditional learning resources, namely lecture notes, problem sheets and textbooks, whereas the Civil engineering students mainly preferred on-line resources. The mathematics students seemed to favour a mixture of on-line materials and lecture notes and problem sheets, with none claiming to make extensive use of traditional text books. MathsAid seemed to be more popular with second year (Level 5) students, possibly because they were more familiar with it being available. Overall, On-Line Resources (of various types) were popular with the majority of the students surveyed, with only 18 out of the 72 claiming not to make much use of them, compared with only 5 out of the 72 who claimed to rely primarily on traditional text books. (This contrasts with the findings of [3] where only 23% of the respondents in 2015 claimed to make regular use of web- based resources.) These findings strengthen the argument for investing in the development of high-quality, easy to use and extend on-line resources for the teaching and learning of mathematics in degree level studies, covering many topic areas and providing practice examples which offer useful, meaningful feedback to their student users. Further statistical analysis of the participants’ responses – including those to the other questions is currently underway. 4. CalculEng – our on-line tutorial tool for helping students learn Calculus As discussed above, we have identified a need for high quality tutorial resources to help students learn and practice mathematical topics such as differential and integral calculus. Ideally, such materials should offer students the opportunity to enter their answers in standard mathematical notation (not just allowing multiple choice or short numerical answers), check the answers for consistency both with the “correct” model solution and with anticipated “common error” answers, and then provide the student meaningful feedback which will assist his or her learning of the topic or technique. As noted in section 1, on-line tutorial exercises which do not provide feedback on a student’s answers will make it hard for the student to identify where, how or why they made mistakes. This will impair “feed forward” progress towards them fully understanding and mastering the topics and techniques being learned. These are all things which we attempt to address in our CalculEng system. M.Davis etal. /Developing“Smart”TutorialTools toAssist StudentsLearnCalculus232