King etal (2017) Temporality of Emotion: Antecedent and Successive Variants of Frustration When Learning Chemistry

Interesting article about emotions and their use in teaching and learning. It is interesting to note the realization that even negative emotions can be useful.

Karjanto (2017)Attitude toward mathematics among the students at Nazarbayev University Foundation Year Programme

DOI: 10.1080/0020739X.2017.1285060
DOI: 10.1080/0020739X.2017.1285060

Discovery of many works towards attitudes for Mathematics in the introduction. Positive attitude linked to:

·         Confidence

·         Usefulness

·         Previous attainment

·         Enjoyment

This study is relevant as it studies attitudes in Foundation years of university.

Previous attainment seemed not to be important for attitude (research was done on best students, that are the ones that go to this course). However they claim to have proved that previous attainment is correlated with positive attitude. From figure 3 there seems to be a difference between attitudes from Maths-Physics and the rest of students (Biology-Chemistry and International Relations-Economics).

Results could be biased because of the number of students from each track (Maths-physics =3xBiology-Chemistry=5x IRE)

It is interesting to note that students from BC have a positive attitude between MP and IRE.

Kember 2016. Why do Chinese students out-perform those from the West? Do approaches to learning contribute to the explanation?

https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2016.1248187

Interesting article which analyses transitions between understanding and memorisation used in teaching/learning. The consequence for western practices, especially those dominated by anglo-saxon trends, is going back to basics: the use of a combination of understanding and memorisation not only to improve learning outcomes, but deep learning and solving problem skills.