Workshop support for first-year mathematics and statistics

The Mathematics Education Support Hub ran mathematics and statistics support workshops for 17 different subjects from 2016 to 2018. The mathematics and statistics in these subjects was at first-year level. Data on workshop attendance was collected. For each student in a subject for which workshops were run, final marks, secondary school mathematics background and degree enrolled in were obtained from university records. This enabled an investigation into attendance at support workshops in relation to mathematics background and discipline of the degree, and into the effectiveness of support workshops and relationships to mathematics background. Greater workshop attendance was linked to higher final marks, with noticeable and significant differences for different mathematics backgrounds. Unsurprisingly, students with stronger backgrounds performed better than those with weaker backgrounds at every level of workshop attendance. An interesting result is that students with no mathematics in their final year of secondary school showed a much greater rate of improvement in final mark for increasing workshop attendance than any of the groups with secondary school mathematics, surpassing those with an Elementary mathematics school background at a very low level of workshop attendance. Significant differences in workshop attendance were found for different level of mathematics background and different discipline of degree of study.