An essential part of this is to direct students away from a passive role in maths learning. This will include developing worked examples and practise exercises for their web pages, which will demonstrate to subsequent users how errors are made and how to remedy them. Pages will be linked with other interactive web pages to support foundation maths. As well as encouraging students to spend time practising maths, the aim is to encourage them to analyse their problems, identify where they make mistakes and construct some concrete advice on how to avoid these mistakes. Parts of the maths syllabus where students have problems have been identified, and previous student cohorts have been tested to assess their mathematical skills and weaknesses.
Results show that algebraic manipulation and statistics cause significant difficulties.
A web page template has been developed, so that students can concentrate on the content rather than the production of the web pages. A collection of maths problems for students to work on has been compiled. The intention in developing this resource has been to assemble comprehensive lists of examples which will expose all the errors of reasoning which students are likely to make. Examples of the methods used to derive these will be presented at the conference. Leman, R. and McGrath, P., Students experiences in the formal methods classroom .