Features
Refresher Course Helps First-Year Students Lay Math Anxiety to Rest
Community learning project spawns math brush-up
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Ninety-six per cent: That's the grade average from high school calculus that Stuart Dimillo brought to the first year of his U of G physics program this fall. So why did he spend two hours during Orientation Week in a library resource room brushing up on math basics?
Referring to his early high school years in Arnprior, he says: "This stuff is what we did way back, and I don't remember it. It's made me feel a lot more comfortable going to class."
Boosting confidence in first-year math-a-philes and math-a-phobes alike is the main goal of Survivor Math, a pilot program that began as a senior undergraduate project in community learning and wound up attracting about 70 students to a McLaughlin Library learning centre on two afternoons during Orientation.
The two-hour refresher course - complete with plenty of Timbits but no calculators - was designed to help new students reinforce math basics in an engaging way and get acquainted with the resource centre run by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics on the third floor of the library.
Speaking over the voices of "tribes" of students working out decimals, exponents, fractions and equations, Prof. Steve Gismondi said the exercise allows students to recognize up front where their weaknesses are.
Offered for the first time this fall against the backdrop of a campus-wide initiative to improve numeracy, the voluntary program was open to more than 2,000 students who will take introductory math courses this year.
The idea for the brush-up sessions grew out of a community service learning project completed last spring by senior students in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development.
For their course in non-formal teaching and learning taught by Prof. Helen Hambly, four students created a math basics curriculum for a learning community close to home: U of G students tackling intro math.
Three of those senior students are now enrolled in teachers' college. The fourth, Jelena Loncar - now beginning her master's degree in mathematics at Guelph - spent the summer refining the idea and developing learning materials for this fall's trial run.
She suggested the idea to Prof. Joe Cunsolo, Mathematics and Statistics, who belongs to the campus-wide numeracy committee formed a year ago along with representatives from the Department of Computing and Information Science, the Learning Commons and Teaching Support Services.
"I got all excited because I've been concerned about the numeracy issue on campus," says Cunsolo.
Explaining that students are often over-reliant on calculators for rudimentary operations, he says: "They know the basic concepts, but they get tripped up by the basic math."
Recalling "math anxiety" from her own university days, Hambly says: "What Jelena is doing is finding creative ways to get students over that anxiety. What Survivor Math is designed to do is to break down the barriers so you don't feel judged if you're anxious about math problems." (An earlier numeracy project in Hambly's learning course saw students work on ideas for teaching math to would-be factory workers in Arthur.)
Besides Cunsolo, Gismondi and Loncar, instructors for this fall's sessions included student peer helpers from the supported learning groups program of the Learning Commons.