Mathematical misconceptions of students in Engineering education: statistical analysis and suggestions to pedagogical approaches

Abstract

Misconceptions in mathematics of students entering to the university has challenged engineering education pedagogy. Awareness of educators of the existence of the misconceptions can ensure that they do not retain in engineering learners. Misconceptions arise when making the same error recursively and different from the mistakes in mathematics. Moreover, if the misconceptions were undetected, they would negatively affect the future learning and hence detrimental. This research is focused on identifying the common misconceptions through a comprehensive analysis and their relation to the engineering education and hence to emphasize the importance of the remedies in school level and undergraduate level. To this end, 132 engineering undergraduate students from different levels and of mixed gender were participated in this study. Sets of data were collected from a conceptual error testing, which contains questions that include common errors, which students make as misconceptions in basic mathematics. Further, a questionnaire was designed to capture their confidence in answering each question. We employed statistical tools to perform analysis and the results depicted that the misconceptions seemed to have a significant impact on their performance in the university, which is captures by GPA, and the performance of the emirates standardized tests and their high school performance in Mathematics. However, the high school test marks and the conceptual error test marks have no correlation and hence high school tests do not reflect their conceptual errors and hence the remedies are required for improve school level tests. Moreover, the students have not rectified misconception errors in mathematics throughout the degree level. The student's confidence level, for each question was recorded in 1–5 scale and the statistical analysis suggested that there is no relation with the confidence in answering a question. More importantly, results revealed that the students make conceptual errors very confidently and giving correct answer with no confidence and hence some students aware of the misconceptions and however they should be guided properly to overcome them. The study implicated that the educators are required to adopt techniques in instructional methods and assessments methods to correct misconceptions to enhance deep learning. This should be accomplished at the foundation level and hence the students foundation should be thoroughly studied to prevent the arising of such misconceptions and eliminate the present misconceptions.