First-year and final-year undergraduate students’ perceptions of university mathematics departments

Abstract

In many countries, concerns have been raised regarding the lack of participation of students in mathematics at the university level due to a dearth of skilled professionals to meet the needs of an increasingly technological, and thus mathematical, world. In this article, we report findings from a study in which we compared the experiences of first-year and final-year undergraduate students studying in the mathematics departments at two Australian universities. We focus on the participants’ conceptions of the supports and challenges that they experienced in the mathematics departments, using a multimodal data collection method, photovoice. We found key differences between first-year and final..