How to Get a Good Job and Improve Your Career – With a PLE - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 102

To give a feeling of what kind of PLEs have been developed, during step (1)
above, the instructor provided students with examples about how to build a PLE,
and noticeably with a sample PLE, built by the instructor himself, called “Proget-
toMatematica”[13], for a screenshot see Fig.1.
This website contained features like solved exercises, papers and external links.
At the end of the schoolyear, all students completed a brief anonymous Question-
naire on their subjective assessment of the experience.

4 Results

The analysis of the results concerns two aspects: the first one was related to the
increase of “critical sense” by students and the second one concerned their results
in mathematical understanding.
Concerning the increase of “critical sense”, from Table 1 we notice that the
number of materials found by students on Internet is decreasing from February to
May, and at the same time the percentage of materials kept is increasing. This re-
sult shows that students are improving their skills of analyzing contents found on
Internet, and the effectiveness of the scaffolding provided by the tutor, including
the sample PLE. The second result of the experience is given by grades of each
student referring to plane trigonometry at the end of the II semester.
The assessment of the mathematical skills of each student in the class was made
at the beginning of the 1 st semester, around the middle, and at the end of the first
semester. It showed a bad situation, with most students having problems, and a re-
sulting low performance in mathematics. Class results are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2 Class situation during the 1 st semester

Total amount of students in class 22

Students below par at the end of the 1 st semester 12

Students below par with a severe situation 5

Percentage of students below par at the end of the 1 st semester

54.50%

Average of marks of the whole class at the end of the 1 st semester 5.5

Understanding the motivations behind these poor results required several inter-
views by the instructor. Most students' problems related to a general lack of me-
thodologies for dealing effectively with mathematical issues. This resulted in poor
understanding of proposed Maths topics, in a short term (school success/failure)
perspective. What really is worrisome is the consequence of such a deficiency
in a long term perspective, i.e. the lack of methodologies to deal with Maths is
likely to negatively impact also in their approach to lifelong learning, and in their
future careers. Bearing in mind that the objective was well beyond that of simply
grading more students as sufficient in Maths, the work described in section 3 was