Abstract:

In recent years, the question of motivation has become one of the basic problems in mathematics education. Motivating students is one of the most important and most demanding aspects of teaching mathematics, because teacher’s task is to focus attention on the less interested students as well as on the motivated ones.

In our research, we studied the impact of the mathematical homework assignments on the students' knowledge in the first year of a bachelor study at the Faculty of Operations and Economics of Transport and Communications (FPEDAS).

To gain good mathematical knowledge and successfully pass the exam, it is necessary to work regularly during the semester. We assume that one way to motivate students to work during the semester is that the results achieved during the semester are part of the overall assessment. Until school year 2017/2018, the students’ assessment consisted of two parts: the test during the semester and the final exam. In school year 2017/2018, we developed a set of 40 simple tasks that students had to solve during the semester. The points received by the students from this homework were part of the final evaluation. We compered results of the students with homework assignments to students without homework assignments. We proved, that mathematical homework helped students with weaker knowledge, while there was almost no change in the results of good students.

Keywords:

Mathematical skills, motivation, homework.