Developing and Evaluating ESTEEM (Electronic Student Toolkit for Engagement in Engineering Mathematics)

The paper reports on aspects of the development and application of our ESTEEM project. The project aims to combine Engineering Mathematics resources that exploit advances in interactive technology, alongside traditional approaches, to improve student engagement in large group teaching environments. The work is being carried out in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds where the drive has been to improve the depth of understanding that our students have in Engineering Mathematics through approaches that increase levels of engagement. The aim of the toolkit under development is to combine direct links to high quality freely-available online Maths resources with new materials (that have been developed in conjunction with Civil Engineering students at Leeds) to exploit a range of interactive technologies (clickers, tablet, directed interactive online assessment). The developed resources focus on relevant Civil Engineering examples to maximise student engagement. The paper discusses some of the approaches taken to increase engagement using the interactive teaching elements, and includes survey results from two student cohorts who have been trialling aspects of the toolkit during the project development. The survey results show strong support for the inclusion of a range of interactive approaches for improving engagement. Further to this, a summary of results from a quantitative study comparing engagement with an out-of-lecture online teaching and assessment tool, when used both as a formative tool and summative tool, is included. These results demonstrate that there can be substantial engagement by students with online formative assessment tools when students feel it is integral to their course. Furthermore, engagement can be further improved when a small summative mark is associated with each task (with over 91% of the cohort actively engaging).