Investigating students’ academic numeracy in 1st level university courses

Abstract

This paper investigates how an online test ('Self-Test' developed at the University of Southern Queensland) can enrich students' understanding of their academic numeracy, through a purpose-built, self-assessment tool aligned with online modules. Since its creation and evaluation, the tool has been developed and tailored to suit other first year courses based around an academic numeracy framework of competence, confidence and critical awareness (Galligan 2013a). This paper will highlight how the new Self-Test is underpinned by this framework and how students' levels of numeracy can be better understood by the lecturer through Self-Test in a first year nursing for numeracy course and a maths for teachers course. It particularly addresses over-and under-confidence, error analysis and students' reflective comments, and how this understanding can better inform course development and teaching.

Nutrition students and mathematics: Competent but not confident

“…This data indicates that nearly one third of the students worried that they "lack the maths knowledge to do what is required", are "scared [they] will make a mistake" and "don't … know enough about maths". Teaching and learning literature indicate that ability is just one of several aspects to numeracy (AAMT & Education Department of Western Australia, 1997;Boreland, 2016;Galligan, 2011Galligan, , 2013Galligan & Hobohm, 2015). Individuals may have the ability to answer questions correctly but struggle with confidence, critical awareness and willingness to participate.…”

“…Disengagement from mathematics can be so dramatic that it excludes students from their preferred courses of study and career choice (Brady, 2014). Descriptions of numeracy incorporate not only the ability to solve mathematical problems but also having confi dence and critical awareness (Galligan & Hobohm, 2015). Similarly, Boreland (2016) describes numeracy as "quantitative literacy", referring to taking numerical skills and applying them to a broader context.…”

The Impact of Calculators on a Test of Clinician Numeracy: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Finally, participants in our study may not have critically analysed their answers to assess whether they were likely to be correct. There is evidence that errors made by bioscience students (Tariq 2008) and nursing students (Galligan and Hobohm 2015) in numeracy tests are often due to failure to crosscheck their answers; therefore, it is likely that medical students also make this type of error. Determining the type of error being made is an important step in developing appropriate educational intervention, because successful remediation requires that the intervention is targeted at the area of weakness (Wallace 2019).…”

Developing Pre-Service Teachers: The Impact of an Embedded Framework in Literacy and Numeracy

“…This area of numeracy in the university environment can be considered to be academic numeracy practices (Prince & Archer, 2008) or academic numeracy (Galligan, 2013;Galligan & Hobohm, 2013). Prince and Archer (2008) suggest that the word practice is important to associate with academic numeracy as it then implies that academic numeracy practice is more than just mathematics since numeracy is more context driven, while mathematics moves away from context and moves into abstract thinking.…”