Contribution: The article describes an innovative concept to create authentic application examples for mathematics courses in an engineering degree program in order to illustrate the relevance of mathematics for engineering. Background: It can be difficult and time consuming for mathematics instructors to find and understand authentic…

Contribution: This concept article shows how the mathematical competencies research framework (MCRF) can guide the design of rubrics to assess engineering mathematics tasks. Practical guidance is given for engineering mathematics educators wanting to create effective rubrics that support student learning and promote academic success. Background:…

The student experience with mathematical modelling has the potential to differ in nature to the experience of a typical mathematics student. The research reported in this paper forms part of a broader study looking into tertiary learning experiences for mathematical modelling. This paper reports on: What are the student experiences when learning…

Tychonov's 1935 solution of the heat equation, exhibiting nontrivial heat fluxes spontaneously appearing along an isolated conducting rod initially held at zero degrees, has intrigued some specialists for almost a century. No doubt those practicing heat engineers who took mathematics seriously were initially relieved to learn that the construction…

This study explored the utilisation of GeoGebra as a modelling tool to develop undergraduate engineering mathematics students' conceptual and procedural knowledge of complex numbers. This mission was accomplished by implementing GeoGebra-enriched activities, which provided carefully designed representational support to mediate between students'…

This study investigates social, mathematical, and sociomathematical norms perceived by college students in an engineering mathematics course and examines the students' sense of mathematics as signals of individual merit. Data sources include a survey and one-on-one interviews with 38 students. The findings help illustrate student perceptions of…

High dropout rates in the first year of undergraduate studies are an expression of the secondary-tertiary transition problem and they seem to be particularly high in those degree programs where specialized mathematics courses are taught in the first year of study. Research shows that students' difficulties during the transition period cannot be…

This study investigates the relationship between first-year higher education students' (N = 405) approaches to learning and academic performance on engineering mathematics courses. In addition, we study what combinations of approaches to learning students apply, how these combinations change over time, and whether they are linked to the…

Flipped Classroom as a pedagogical framework has gained popularity at secondary and tertiary levels of mathematics education, but there is a lack of research based on a solid theoretical foundation. This article considers the flipped mathematics classroom from the perspective of affordances and cultural-historical activity theory. The empirical…

The contribution aims at subject-specific analyses of student solutions of an exercise from an electrical engineering signal theory course. The basis for the analyses is provided by praxeological studies (in the sense of the Anthropological Theory of Didactics) and the identification of two institutional mathematical discourses, one related to…

Calculus is a required course in most engineering programmes and is intended to provide students with tools they will use throughout the rest of their training. However, research seems to indicate that calculus is not very prevalent in the engineering workplace or in university engineering courses. To shed some light on how calculus is actually…

This study investigated how students reason about the partial derivative and the directional derivative of a multivariable function at a given point, using different graphical representations for the function in the problem statement. Questions were formulated to be as isomorphic as possible in both mathematics and physics contexts and were given…

Extant literature has emphasized the importance of education research being theory-based. To this end, many research articles have a distinct "theoretical framework" section describing the theoretical underpinnings that inform the research. Nevertheless, there is large variation in how explicit articles are regarding their use of…

Mathematics is traditionally considered necessary for engineering courses. Over the last three decades, the mathematics requirements for entry into engineering programmes has steadily weakened in Australia. Further, the mathematics component of engineering programmes has progressively decreased. This research aims to investigate the following two…

Contribution: This article compares student success via different pathways in which students take mathematics courses required for engineering degrees. Background: Mathematics courses are an integral part of engineering curriculum. Many institutions require or recommend the order in which students take Calculus II, Multivariable Calculus,…