SUMMARY. Attitudes towards mathematics of over 300 first-year sixth-form students were studied in relation to the type of mathematics curriculum previously followed by them, to their choice of sixth-form courses and the students' intelligence, personality and mathematical achievement. The main findings are that no significant differences in liking for mathematics and in views about the difficulty of learning mathematics were found between students who had followed a 'modern' or 'traditional' mathematics curriculum, but that attitudes to mathematics were strongly correlated with students' mathematical bias as inferred from their choice of sixth-form subjects. As an additional aspect of the study, students' preferences for different modes of presenting mathematical information were examined, with three presentation modes being used: symbolic, graphical and verbal. Students' mathematical bias was found to be strongly associated with preference for the symbolic communication mode and anti-preference for the verbal mode.

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It is well documented that there is currently an unsatisfied need in industry f o r more qualij?ed engineers, and a disturbing decline in college students opting f o r technical degrees. Part of the problem is the high attrition rate among engineering majors, which can be attributed, in large part to problems with mathematics. In addition, the Accreditation Board on Engineering and Technology (ABET) has adopted a new set of criteria f o r evaluating engineering programs, which is outcome -based rather than course-based. The ABET 2000 criteria require that the institution formulate educational objectives, then assess their educational strategies. We are currently developing a strategy using webbased mathematics examinations, tutoring and advising to help improve retention of engineering students and to address ABET'S outcomes-based assessment. This paper describes the software used in our on-line testing and the exam questions we designed based on electrical engineering applications.'

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