University students’ fully digital study of mathematics: an identification of student-groups via their resources usage and a characterization by personal and affective characteristics

Abstract

We investigated university students’ study of mathematics in the digital setting context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We gathered data from a survey of 89 students enrolled in a ‘Linear Algebra 1’ course including affective variables, learning strategies, social relatedness and resources considered useful. The results indicate students’ high effort and self-regulation and a high variation in affective characteristics and social relatedness. All the traditional aspects of mathematics teaching (lecture, tutorials and lecture notes) were rated as particularly useful. In addition, the videos from external resources were rated as equally useful as the teaching team’s videos. In contrast, traditional literature such as textbooks was rarely considered useful. The most useful resource rated was communication with peers, underlining the important role of social learning despite fully digital learning environments. Finally, a cluster analysis based on students’ rated usefulness of the resources led to three different user-types. Whereas the ‘digitals’ find the external digital resources very useful (videos, webpages, etc.), the ‘traditionalists’ rate the digitalized traditional resources best (lecture, tutorials, etc.). All resources receive uniformly good ratings from a third group (‘all resource users’). We reflect on our findings in light of the pandemic and describe directions for future research.

First-year university students' self-regulated learning during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative longitudinal study

“…They regulate their choice of resources and use nontraditional media that might look more accessible. The intensive use of nontraditional media may thus indicate difficulties in learning the content (Kempen & Liebendörfer, 2021 ).…”

“…When seeking help to complete tasks, students may focus on keywords without paying much attention to the mathematical content (Aguilar & Puga, 2020 ). However, the more resources are available, the more specific the selection must be (Kempen & Liebendörfer, 2021 ; Rønning, 2014 ). In order to select the appropriate resources, the students “have to evaluate the quality of the knowledge disseminated over the internet” (Engelbrecht et al, 2020 , p. 826).…”

“…Alternatively, students with low learning success might benefit less from face-to-face formats because they are quickly overwhelmed and cannot engage in the discourse at all (Solomon, 2007 ). Thus, weaker students in particular may benefit from different materials that can be used as often as they like at their own pace (Kempen & Liebendörfer, 2021 ).…”

“…Students reported that communication with peers was very important (Kempen & Liebendörfer, 2021) but had become more difficult, and they reported increased isolation (Hyland & O'Shea, 2021;Radmer & Goodchild, 2021). Online collaboration was made possible through breakout rooms but was not satisfactory, in particular for pen-andpaper work (Lishchynska et al, 2021).…”

Personalized Recommendation Method of Sports Online Video Teaching Resources Based on Multiuser Characteristics

“…Due to the rapid increase in the number of videos, the cost of obtaining video data manually is too high, and obtaining video data automatically through web crawlers has become an effective solution. In the actual data acquisition process, the combination of manual acquisition and automatic acquisition is usually adopted [8]. at is, large-scale data is automatically processed by web crawlers.…”