Implementation of Horizontal Connections in the Course of Mathematics by Combining Pedagogical and Digital Technologies

Abstract

The study examines three experiments of implementing the “learning through teaching” approach combined with the development of digital technologies and explores the influence of these methods on the quality of education for undergraduate engineering students at an urban technical university in Russia. In the first experiment, small independent groups of students within the same cohort developed individual Java modules with the goal of creating an intelligent system to support solving problems using graphs. In the second experiment, each student peer-taught the topic of their choice to three other students and then administered an oral exam to these students to assess their understanding. In the third experiment, each participant selected a problem to develop a solution and recorded a video that explained this solution to other students. All recorded videos were made available to all students, and the combined collection consisted of 100 videos. During the final exam, students were randomly assigned one of these problems and had to present their solutions to the instructor. Analysis of the experiments demonstrated that integrating “learning through teaching” led to an increase in student interest in the discipline and an improvement in conceptual understanding, more so for students in the role of teacher than in the role of learner. Overall, combining pedagogical and digital technologies improved the quality of education for engineering students.