Abstract:

Worldwide research data have corroborated that first-year university students, who study in economic or business schools, often encounter difficulties when they are asked to solve a mathematic problem or to apply a theoretical economic notion in their everyday practice. Thus, the process of investigating what causes this problematic situation, throughout the school years of primary and secondary education, might reveal the factors that affect students’ mathematical comprehension and problem-solving achievement even after their academic admission. The difficulty to express and understand certain notions relates with the prior knowledge of students, upon which the definition of the notion is often based. Also, many teachers do not explain sufficiently the necessity for the creation and existence for some notions. Therefore, students do not realize the necessity and the usefulness of what they are taught. Here, we discuss the role and the special characteristics that make some fundamental mathematical notions, such as ‘variable’, ‘equation’, and ‘derivative’ to act as obstables for the students to understand. Also we discuss the role of some fundamental economical notions like ‘capital’, ‘interest’, and ‘interest rate’ to the later successful understanding of more complex economic problems. So, in this paper we present the results of an empirical research conducted in two phases (September 2017 and September 2018) in 205 first-year university students that study in the Department of Sports Management, in the University of Peloponnese, Greece. The research took place before their very first lecture in the Module “Mathematical Economics”, where the participants would be taught by the researchers the aforementioned core mathematical and economical notions. Our main research scope was to identify and explain the most influential factors of students’ weakness to cope with simple mathematical and economical notions in a typical university module, such as “Mathematical Economics”. Our research instrument - a reliable and internally consistent questionnaire - included both demographic and Likert-type items. We used both descriptive and inferential statistical techniques to handle and analyze the research data. All analyses were performed via the statistical package for the social sciences, SPSS. The crucial significance of effective grasping – even from their primary education - of the notions ‘variable’, ‘function’, ‘derivative’, ‘interest’, ‘capital’, and ‘interest rate’ was confirmed by the inferential tests results. Our research results indicate that first-year university students lack fundamental knowledge of mathematical and economical notions that are vital to the understanding of university modules such as “Mathematical Economics”, because these notions act as advanced organizers, according to Ausubel Theory, that help students in later classes to understand more effectively, more complex notions and problems. The research results also reflect that while students are willing to learn mathematics and economics, and they also recognize the importance and usefulness of mathematical and economical knowledge in their scientific development, in fact they perform very poorly in university. Finally, another one interesting result is that, students who consider mathematics and economics as important for their lives, due to their higher intrinsic motivation, perform significantly better than those with lower motivation.

Keywords:

Education, Ausubel theory, advanced organizers, motivation, mathematical comprehension, prior knowledge, economics education.