Abstract:

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education, with the increased use of e-learning and digital platforms, has forced teachers to rapidly develop new teaching strategies. On the other hand, students have become increasingly passive, attending classes (both at a distance and in presence) interacting little with the teacher and classmates. Streaming and/or the availability of recording of lessons encouraged this passive attitude, which proved particularly dangerous for students starting a new course of study (for example, students enrolled in the first year of university).

In this framework, if we have to teach a first-year university Calculus course, usually perceived as difficult and unexciting, designing actions to promote motivation and increase students’ engagement becomes an essential challenge. In fact, if already before the emergency due to COVID-19 students enrolled in Italian scientific degrees perceived the Calculus exam as an obstacle, now this negative mindset often turns into a cycle of poor confidence, less motivation, and poor performance.

In this paper we present some activities that have been proposed in two courses of Calculus (Agricultural Sciences) during the first semester of the academic years 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 in order to keep students engaged and help them approach the study of mathematics effectively, improving both their level of satisfaction and their results. In particular, the activities were designed to be carried out by working in small groups during the lessons, with the aim of encouraging reflection and a meta-cognitive attitude through discussion and comparison between classmates (e.g. collaborative and cooperative learning, peer review). We exploited suitable digital tools to collect feedback from students, and to show the results immediately after the closure of the activity and discussed them with the class. The time devoted to group activities was recovered by recording the part of the lesson that was not done and making it available for asynchronous use (usually only for a limited time).

The experience was very useful for both students and teachers. In fact, students have become more aware and satisfied with the experience in the classroom, have improved their cognitive and metacognitive strategies and have developed an effective method of study. On the other hand, teachers were able to constantly monitor the learning level of a large class (also using the learning analysis) and use the collected results to design review activities on specific topics, both in synchronous and asynchronous mode.

Keywords:

Mathematics, higher education, learning strategies, metacognition.