Abstract:

For the last years we have detected serious problems in our students regarding basics mathematical skills; especially those related to operations and reasons. In order to evaluate our students starting points when they come into university we had prepared and given to our students an initial evaluation form about basic operations they should have acquired after finishing the high school period.

We have focus on attention on numerical and algebraic operations mainly (the fourth basic operations with real numbers including radicals, and solving linear and quadratic equations with only one unknown). In a second level of skills the form also contains questions about graphical representation of elementary functions and immediate derivatives.

Our sample space is first-year students in the course “Mathematics for Business I” for all the degrees of the Faculty of Business in Pablo de Olavide University, at Seville. In this work we want to check the lack of basic mathematical skills in our students and secondly the influence of the way to access to the university.

Keywords:

Mathematical skills, Initial evaluation, Business studies, learning difficulties.