UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
This short book is designed to help people who are studying either mathematics or a subject which uses a significant amount of mathematics. It is not a mathematics course in itself,but rather a tutorial offering approaches to the study of mathematics.The book is presented in three parts:the first aims to develop the skills needed to interpret the language and attitudes of mathematics;the second suggests approaches to several common mathematical tasks while the third offers help with study methods.
There is a great deal of good advice and common sense packed into the central 150 pages of this slim text.The author has obviously thought carefully about the learning process and he stresses the need for the student to understand, before doing anything else,what is being implied by the mathematical shorthand of symbols and equations.I would commend this aspect of the book to any person starting out on a mathematics course.The final section on studying and coping with examinations also contains a huge amount of good advice -none of it new but all of it sensible and too often ignored by students.
I read the book in a day and most of it was both easy to access and stimulating.However I do have some concern that many students will not find it so user-friendly.The author stresses that his intent is not to teach mathematics,yet at several points I was faced with unfamiliar (and undefined)mathematical terms which I was asked to use in self-assessment questions.It is very off-putting to encounter such barriers to understanding and I could forgive many students for giving up the first time they meet an unknown term or phrase.This is more likely to be the outcome when the particular term is not to be found in the (rather skeletal)index.Two examples of terms which were not known to me and are neither defined nor in the index are abelian group and injective function .In fact, the latter is defined later in the text,but since it does not appear in the index,the reader has no way of knowing this!
In summary this is more than a curate's egg of a book.It is excellent in parts (not just good),but the very students who should most benefit from it are likely to be discouraged when they meet unfamiliar terms.
Professor Peter Goodhew
UK Centre for Materials Education
