An innovative approach of a supplementary mathematics course in engineering: Our learning experience in Guatemala

Supplementary education has been always a topic of discussion in academia. In most of developing countries, students lack of a solid education in mathematics. In particular, freshmen engineering students have shown deficiencies in the areas of arithmetic, algebra and trigonometry, which are prerequisites for entry-level mathematics courses. In this paper, we focus on freshmen engineering students enrolled in the first calculus course offered by Universidad Galileo in Guatemala. We show how the deficiencies from high school education were detected, and then, we present the improvement obtained by our students as a result of a hands-on based supplementary course. Such a course was focused on developing problem solving and operatory skills in the previous mentioned areas. In contrast to classic supplementary approaches, our course was offered concurrently with the calculus course and its grade was part of the main course grade distribution. The course design and execution details are also addressed. In order to analyze the impact of our supplementary course we split the class into two groups based on the abilities they presented in a diagnostic test conducted at the beginning of the academic period. At the end of the term, we repeated the same diagnostic test in order to compare the impact of such a supplementary class. Our main result showed that, even though we could not level up the two groups of study, we were able to reduce the academic breach between them by 34%. In addition, we present all the statistical analysis and comparisons between different tests we ran throughout the study. We conclude the discussion with the future improvements to implement in order to achieve better results.