eSTEeM Seminar Series: Scholarship Showcase - October 2022

Location: Via MS Teams
Contact

eSTEeM continues its seminar series with presentations from project teams. October’s seminar will explore the methodology and findings of the following two eSTEeM projects.

Recognising and addressing maths anxiety within STEM students

Sue Pawley and Sally Organ

Unsurprisingly, students with maths anxiety who are required to study mathematics, often to support a related discipline, frequently react with avoidance techniques such as delaying study or not studying regularly and this puts them at high risk of failure. To investigate this issue we have undertaken a large quantitative study across core OU introductory modules in STEM that have varying levels of engagement with mathematical content.

Our presentation will cover the key results obtained from the surveys, insights gained from the interviews and initial plans for supporting students with anxiety.

Investigating how to enhance the idea generation process for academic projects by engineering students

Martin Braun

Many undergraduate project modules require students to propose their own topics. As this is the first time for many students that they need to do this, such a task may cause some concerns. Drawing on a literature review and a survey of other OU project modules, a toolkit was developed to support students’ ideation process for engineering projects, thus aiming at reducing student anxiety. This talk will highlight not only the developmental process, but also the lessons learned from beta testing this toolkit with some engineering project students.