Abstract:

The aim of the project described in this article was helping students in the Agricultural and Food Science Faculty pass the mathematics exam, which is one of the main obstacles in this type of degree, often slowing down careers and extending graduation time.

Although the goal of the first-year mathematics course is primarily to provide useful skills to tackle subsequent exams of a more strictly disciplinary nature, many students perceive it as an insurmountable obstacle and tend to face it only at the end of their university career.

One of the causes of failure in mathematics is known to be the attitude toward the discipline, which depends mainly on emotional disposition (positive/negative), view of the subject (relational/instrumental) and perceived competence (low/high). In order to intervene on these three factors, we decided to structure a teaching activity using a tool well known for its self-reflect and awareness-gaining capability: the personal journal. Through it, we wanted to achieve two goals: to raise students' awareness of the difficulties inherent in the secondary to tertiary transition, and to collect feedback on the course.

Therefore, we created an “assignment activity” on the Moodle platform of the course dedicated to the completion of a personal journal, and we asked students to complete it by midnight of each day they had taken a math class, summarizing the topics covered during the day also expressing their opinions, feelings and reflections on them. In addition, we told them that we would read their contributions, but that these would be inaccessible to their classmates, in order to discourage any feelings of fear of peer judgment.

To encourage participation, we made explicit the learning objectives of this activity, so that students would understand the importance not only of disciplinary aspects but also of metacognitive and emotional aspects in learning mathematics and passing the exam, and we offered the opportunity to take an intermediate test to those students who completed the journal of all the first ten lessons.

In this way, we were able to observe students as they became more aware of the differences between high school and university education, particularly in the context of math classes. The latter, in fact, have a faster pace, deal with a greater variety of topics, and the discipline is approached relationally rather than instrumentally, thus paying more attention to understanding meanings and patterns rather than to performing calculations and exercises. All these aspects, if not introduced gradually to students, can create a real transition crisis and trigger mechanisms of learned helplessness, especially in subjects already previously marked by "school injuries" in mathematics.

This insight into each student's personal academic journey allowed us to get a macro view of the course and to organize in a timely manner catch-up activities on the topics that students perceived as most challenging.

In addition, some students shared with us the feeling that they felt seen, somehow cared for, and in this sense the activity made it possible to counteract the feeling of depersonalization that the transition from high school to university with very large classes often entails

Keywords:

Math learning, self-reflection, metacognition.