An Examination of First-Year University Students' Attitudes toward and Approaches to Learning Mathematics

Abstract

The purpose was to analyze first-year university mathematics students' responses to a questionnaire which asked 93 students to report on their approaches to learning and attitudes toward mathematics. A majority of the students studying analytical geometry, calculus, and trigonometry had positive attitudes toward mathematics and preferred learning the subject by doing lots of examples to reproduce them, a learning strategy known as the ‘surface approach’.