TEACHING AND LEARNING MATHEMATICS IN ENGINEERING STUDY PROGRAMMES AT UNIVERSITY FROM THE GENDER POINT OF VIEW

A teacher´s work with students in mathematical courses at the beginning of their study at university engineering study programme is difficult, but also exciting. Mathematics is very important part of such study programme. The goals of the math teaching are obvious:
- knowledge of some parts of mathematics is needful in some other courses of the study programme;
- teaching and learning mathematics train abilities for logical thinking, accuracy and precision that can be reflected in other
activities (further study and work);
- the terms "truth" and "truthful" present the highest values in mathematics and its teaching could help to transfer them into the
real life of a student.
But no always students understand math learning identical with these goals. It depends on their previous education, on their relation to chosen study programme and also on their vision about their future job.
In the contribution we will give some details on the following topics (taken from our own experience):
1. We will compare the goals of math teaching at university with the goals of math learning of students at the age of 18 and we
analyze differences between them. We also analyze students´ expectations and misgivings from learning mathematics
depending on their individual characteristics and gender, when they are entering to an university (having good or bad or
none experience with learning mathematics from their previous education, especially at secondary school).
2. We will deal with differences between girls and boys in motivation to learn mathematics comparing it with influence of other
individual characteristics of girls and boys to this motivation.
3. We also will analyze the characteristics and competences that guide women and men to be the teachers of mathematics.


Acknowledgement: This work has been supported by the Slovak grant agency KEGA under the grant No. 088 ŽU - 4/2011.