Abstract:

In the ongoing content reform of education in Slovakia, which has begun in 2008 and still continues, each basic and secondary school has had the chance to create its own content of individual subjects taught in each of their forms. Besides “standard subjects“ also new subjects emerged – e.g. media education, multicultural education, entrepreneurship education and financial literacy. Increasing number of teaching hours in some subjects (e.g. foreign languages), however, resulted in cutting teaching hours in others (e.g. mathematics). In the paper we present the results of our research conducted with the students of the 1st form of BC study programmes studying the subjects Mathematics 1 and Mathematics 2 at three different technical faculties of the University of Žilina, Slovakia in the academic years 2010/2011, 2014/2015 and 2015/2016. Participants of the research have been both the students who were studying mathematics at their secondary schools before as well as after the content reform. On the basis of a three-year research we could compare and generalize not only all the observed students’ study results and thus make valuable deductions but also confirm the fact that acquiring and retaining mathematical skills as well as developing mathematical thinking depend to a large extent on the work and attitudes of the students themselves, on their personal relationship to mathematics, although influenced by several different factors. The research results have also confirmed that the ongoing reform of mathematics is a meaningful and reasonable but not completed process and indicated the necessity of other series of research in order to find out to which extent it is going to be successful.

Keywords:

Reform, education, mathematics, teaching.