Abstract
Math anxiety is always just around the corner. At the university, it makes students continuously postpone the Calculus exam, leading them into a vicious circle of low confidence and poor performance. To get out of this situation, students need to be motivated and involved. They also need to master metacognitive strategies that can support their learning process. In this paper, we present a digital activity entitled Advent Calendar, focused on storytelling and proposed through the logic of spacing. The aim is to increase students’ motivation and self-awareness, but also to obtain learning analytics useful to monitor progress and solve any possible weaknesses with appropriate feedback. The activity was proposed using the tools offered by the Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle. It was tested in three university courses at two Italian universities, the University of Milan and the Polytechnic University of Turin, with students’ active participation. This participation had a high impact on the results of the final examination. Feedback demonstrated positive feelings and good results in the motivation process, while the analytics showed a continuous approach to the study of mathematics.
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Notes
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Teachers can also use H5P to create an interactive Advent Calendar. H5P is a free, content authoring plugin that can be integrated with Moodle (see https://h5p.org/content-types/advent-calendar, https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_hvp).
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Teachers can use the restrict access feature to edit the availability of any Moodle’s activity or course section according to certain conditions such as dates, groups, grades or activities completion (see https://docs.moodle.org/311/en/Restrict_access).
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Iannella, A., Morando, P., Spreafico, M.L. (2022). Challenges in Mathematics Learning at the University: An Activity to Motivate Students and Promote Self-awareness. In: Casalino, G., et al. Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online. HELMeTO 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1542. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96060-5_23
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