The relationships between pre-university mathematics education and mathematics achievement in the first year of bachelor degree

• Main Author: Choy, Wai Kit
• Format: Final Year Project / Dissertation / Thesis
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: QA Mathematics
• Online Access: http://eprints.utar.edu.my/5197/1/MEME15110_Project_Choy_Wai_Kit_21UEM00746.pdf; http://eprints.utar.edu.my/5197/

Mathematics is one of the most important subject Malaysian students must take. This is because mathematics is considered a tool and language for science and technology. In many undergraduate programmes, students are required to have a certain level of mathematical ability. Therefore, it is crucial to determine whether the mathematics syllabus for pre-university programmes and the students’ pre-university mathematics performance have a relationship with their undergraduate mathematics performance. This project aims to identify the mathematics syllabus of four pre-university programmes (UTAR Foundation, UEC, STPM and A-Level) and the distribution of their exam question types using the revised Bloom's taxonomy, and to analyse whether the outcome of pre-university mathematics education affects students' mathematical performance in their first year of study. The target students are Bachelor of Science (Honours) Actuarial Science, Bachelor of Science (Honours) Applied Mathematics with Computing and Bachelor of Science (Honours) Financial Mathematics at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). The analysis of the relationship between the pre-university mathematics education and mathematics achievement in the first year of bachelor is performed using multiple linear regression. In this analysis, we investigated the factors such as gender, SPM Mathematics result, SPM Addition Mathematics result, pre-university mathematics syllabus and pre-university mathematics result, that could have an impact on the students’ undergraduate mathematics result. The result shows that the pre-university mathematics syllabus and the students’ pre-university mathematics result have a relationship with their mathematics achievement in the first year of undergraduate study.