Abstract:

The distinction between deep and surface approaches has been widely used to describe how students learn in higher education. Additionally, the intention to seek meaning or to reproduce information is a consequence of how students interpret the context of learning. This situated view of learning empowers learners to engage mathematics in meaningful and powerful ways.

This discipline-specific quantitative inventory study looked at how students of engineering and business management tackled their tasks within a first-year mathematics course in a Finnish university of applied sciences. The data was collected from 137 students during the course. The results indicate that the approach of learning mathematics is different between students and that they can be divided in two clusters named “Deep” and “Surface”.

Most students from both clusters replied they like to learn mathematics together with peers. But conceptual understanding, flexible thinking and an exploratory approach that have been suggested as indicators of deep learning in mathematics and were found only in cluster named “Deep”. The findings can be utilized in higher education by targeting designed support for different kinds of learners to support students to succeed and find meaning in mathematics.

Keywords:

Higher education, mathematics learning, learning approaches, deep learning, surface learning, quantitative study.