An exploration of student learning in mathematics

Abstract

Limited work reported within the student learning perspective supports the existence of discipline‐specific forms of learning behaviour. There may thus be discipline‐specific sources of variation in students’ self‐reported learning behaviour that can inform the modelling of learning outcome, and that can contribute towards a formulation of individual‐level risk assessment in the study of mathematics. Additionally, the literature on mathematics education suggests that there may be cognitive processes invoked in the learning of mathematics that are not represented in generalized models of student learning. This paper reports the results of two exploratory studies of student learning in mathematics among university and technikon students, respectively. The first study is an analysis of first‐year university students’ self‐reported learning behaviour based on the Extended Approaches to Studying Inventory (EASI). The results suggest that there is an empirical manifestation of a dimension of variation in learni...