Abstract:

The high number of students per class, situation typically found in higher education in Portugal, makes it difficult to adopt an approach in which the student’s work is seen as the core of the learning process. The use of digital contents in this context is helpful for the students to build their own appropriate environment outside the classroom, using all support and learning material created for that purpose. A fundamental problem we have in Mathematics is that many students are not well prepared in the previous concepts.

We have been developing and using several kinds of learning objects (LO) for calculus in the recent years, some of them dedicated to recall previous concepts. Among all kinds of contents, students valorize learning objects that simultaneously challenge them and give them useful feedback.

In this paper, we compare the usefulness of different kinds of LO using computers, in a calculus course for students of several sciences and engineering programs. For that purpose, we applied a survey, which was answered by 40% of a population of 290 students of the previously mentioned programs.

The learning objects include multiple-choice questions with detailed solutions, quizzes, formative assessment tests, short videos, and others. We present a quantitative analysis comparing different kinds of LO, considering students of several areas of study.

Together with the quantitative analysis, we add some qualitative considerations based on students’ answers to open questions concerning the learning methodology adopted.

Keywords:

Learning, computers, calculus, videos, multiple choice, self-diagnosis.