Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Abstract:The dissonance between Eastern and Western learning approaches is regarded as an obstacle for Chinese students to adjust in Western education environments, and one of the reasons is the lack of an understanding of Chinese learning approaches, i.e., Chinese learners are uncritically perceived as rote learners. This paper investigates Chinese international foundation students' learning approaches when they were in China and here in the UK. Their experiences indicate that, similar to UK students, Chinese students learn with the intention of understanding, they use memorisation only when they fail to understand or have examination pressure. Consequently, Chinese students adjust well to Western teaching styles. Some difficulties they experienced in classrooms

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This paper presents data from a study comparing student experience and attainment when teaching statistics using Traditional Teaching (TT) and Flipped Learning (FL) approaches on a Foundation level module at a UK university. A survey of students’ experience and perception of FL was conducted at the end of the year. The results showed that the students liked the flexibility of FL and believed that studying asynchronously encouraged them to improve their independent learning skill and motivated them to search for more information for the subject, a finding broadly supported by other studies (Price and Walker, 2021). However, what was surprising, is that students believed they learned ‘better’ with TT than with FL, a perception supported by student overall attainment data. The study concludes that careful considerations must be made to make FL effective. These include the student demographic and their mathematics competency, the module contents and difficulty level. Otherwise, the use of FL may reduce students’ engagement and academic performance in Maths at Foundation level.

Mathematics is a common component of many science and social science degrees, but frequently not considered a prerequisite for their study. This can lead to some students studying mathematics components at undergraduate level with little or no previous mathematical learning and varying levels of motivation, or desire, to study mathematics. This situation has consequences for student experience and teaching practice, including the potential for lower levels of student engagement, higher levels of student anxiety and lack of student motivation for studying a subject that is not what they chose as their degree subject. This paper details an intervention designed to address issues experienced in the teaching of mathematics to undergraduate students, with varying motivation for the study of mathematics and high levels of mathematics anxiety, in their first year of study in a department of Earth Sciences at a UK university. The intervention provided a bespoke mathematics module, designed and taught collaboratively by a teaching specialist in mathematics and a subject specialist in Earth Sciences. The mathematics specialist was able to provide extensive experience in teaching students from widening participation backgrounds and those with mathematics anxiety, making the content more accessible to the students, particularly those with mathematics anxiety. The Earth Sciences specialist was able to contextualize the mathematics content, showing students how the content was applicable to the rest of the degree and helping locate the mathematical content within the broader scope of the discipline. Previous approaches to this module were taught either solely by an Earth Sciences specialist or solely by a mathematics specialist. Compared with those approaches the collaborative teaching intervention improved student attainment by 10% in the average module mark and moved the module from having the lowest student satisfaction scores in the department to the highest. This innovation also benefited both teachers with respect to professional development, which is discussed in the paper.