She has found from her research that university maths departments have been extremely
She has found from her research that university maths departments have been extremely competitive, judgemental and traditional in their approach. The residential school was replaced with more group work in tutorials, and the end-of-course exam was replaced with an assignment.Leone Burton, professor of maths and science education at Birmingham University, thinks that the shortfall of women in maths in higher education is not simply the fault of the schools, in any case. If you make A-level `softer’ you will end up with an impossible problem at 18.”This view is opposed by many people working in higher education, including those who helped devise and monitor the Open University course MU120 which proved so effective for Liz Buckingham. “The great thing is that you can see what you are doing; you can see a graph going off to infinity. Feedback showed that 63 per cent of students felt they had made most progress on the parts of the course where the calculator was used.
But quite apart from that, there is room for the sort of collaborative and creative approaches to maths which women seem to find more appealing.”One of the great successes of the MU120 course, she thinks, was that it provided a graphic calculator, which is effectively a small computer, for all students. With chaos theory there are no longer right and wrong answers to all mathematical problems. Dr Christine Atkinson, of the Gender and Maths Association, argues that courses such as MU120, which attracted equal numbers of men and women, indicate that a different approach to teaching can work without loss of rigour.”There are two points here,” she says “First, the subject itself is changing. Maths, he says, will always leave some people cold, however good the teaching.”You can change the syllabuses higher up, but ultimately that will put us out of joint with the rest of the world and make British maths graduates unemployable in Europe You can’t get rid of this difficulty Maths is a black-and-white subject.
This gulf, he concedes, may explain why girls are dropping out at that point. But he opposes change in syllabuses and approaches at the higher levels. Tony Gardiner, president of the Mathematical Association, says we must accept that this approach has made the subject “more woolly”, and the gulf between GCSE and A-level much wider. Most agree that school maths teaching has changed up to GCSE level, and that introducing problem-solving and collaborative work, with more emphasis on coursework and less on competitive examinations, has made the subject more “girl-friendly” at that level.Beyond that, there is dispute. At postgraduate level men outnumber women two-to-one on taught courses, and by three-to-one in research.
