Abstract:

In general, students of business administration and management, economics, and other social sciences do not like mathematics. Most of them chose their social sciences degrees because they did not have the ability, patience, or the right learning methodology in secondary school to pursue a more technical career. However, mathematics is ubiquitous, and quantitative methods are also required to fulfill most of the social sciences degrees. In economics and finance, students have to master several mathematical functions such as the net present value or the compound interest. In business administration, students have to learn several quantitative methods to assign costs to products. In this paper, we address the problem of teaching and learning quantitative methods when the student is a non-believer in mathematics. More precisely, we focus on the characteristics of students of social sciences to develop a workflow to smooth both the teaching and the learning process of quantitative methods. By workflow, we here mean a set of building blocks that are connected to develop an activity in the best possible way. A workflow requires a systematic organization of resources that enable the transformation of some inputs into the desired output. In our context, our main goal is to transform educational activities into mathematical knowledge, teaching into learning. Indeed, we argue mathematical knowledge involves as much creativity, imagination, and intuition as calculus, rigor, and computational thinking. To develop such a set of abilities, we propose a workflow to facilitate the teaching/learning process of quantitative methods in the context of cost accounting within a business administration and management degree. The methodology followed in this work comprises three main steps: first, we identify what are the best practices in teaching mathematics to higher education students; second, we select from the set of best practices those that are more suitable to be applied to a social sciences context; and third, we transform these best practices in tangible workflows to be implemented in cost accounting learning. As the main outcome of this work, we describe a workflow aimed to solve the problem of teaching quantitative methods to social sciences students. This workflow represents a good starting point to develop alternative workflows to teach quantitative methods in other subjects and other social sciences studies. In addition, this workflow is a proposal that can be compared and evaluated with the ultimate intention of improving teaching and learning practices. As a result, we think developing useful workflows may help other teachers facing the challenge of teaching quantitative methods in social sciences degrees.

Keywords:

Mathematics, workflows, teaching/learning process, social sciences.