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'Harder things will stretch you further': helping first-year undergraduate students meaningfully engage with recent research papers in probability and statistics

Grindle, N; Jones, E; Northrop, P; (2021) 'Harder things will stretch you further': helping first-year undergraduate students meaningfully engage with recent research papers in probability and statistics. Teaching Mathematics and its Applications , 40 (1) pp. 1-15. 10.1093/teamat/hraa001. Green open access

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Abstract

Undergraduate research increasingly features in university mathematics degrees. Despite this, research papers are used infrequently in mathematics teaching, and this is especially the case for first-year undergraduates. Mathematical subjects are more likely than other STEM disciplines to pinpoint cognitive difficulty as the principal reason for not exposing undergraduate students to research papers. In this paper, we test whether first-year students can engage effectively with research papers. We describe an intervention that exposes first-year, first term undergraduate students to current research in probability and statistics by asking them to read a research paper and summarize it for a general readership following an interview with the paper’s author. Our findings show that the activity introduced students to new fields of knowledge and helped to develop a clearer understanding of scientific process, leading to a heightened sense of personal satisfaction at engaging closely with current research. We argue that structured reading of research papers can lead to productive and rewarding engagement with difficult content, recent and current research and with research processes and that this should make us reconsider the role of research papers in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum.

Type: Article
Title: 'Harder things will stretch you further': helping first-year undergraduate students meaningfully engage with recent research papers in probability and statistics
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/teamat/hraa001
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hraa001
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Undergraduate education, research papers, Statistics and Probability, staff-student interviews, group work
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Statistical Science
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10095401
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