undergraduates' attitudes and the study of mathematics at the ...

About 70% said they were satisfied while 43% and 28% in the third and fourth years respectively
said they not were satisfied. In second year also, more females (75%) were more satisfied than
male students (64%) while in both third and fourth years almost the same percentage of males
and females were not satisfied (57%).
The findings indicated that students were more interested in maths in the second year than in the
last two years of their study. For example,the number of interestung topics to students dropped
from 17 in the second year to 10 in both third and fourth years. Both undergraduates and
postgraduates indicated that they lacked tutorials in the subject to reinforce what was taught in
lectures, and lacked time to cover the topics as lecturers had little time to thoroughly teach
especially abstract topics.
Students’ less interest in maths, that the subject had little application to real life situations
especially to their future careers, that it was not related to other subjects taken by them, that there
were no maths projects, reference books and textbooks, could be major reasons which made
students loose interest in the final year of study. At this final stage (in final year), where students
were thinking more of their future, the relevance of the subject or topics became crucial to their
expected careers. Some students’ dissatisfaction on how some maths lecturers taught the subject
could be related to the fact that some difficult topics were not thoroughly covered to involve
applications which could probably be acquired by students for future use either in daily activities
or in their careers.
Maths lectures indicated that students’ difficulties in grasping abstract mathematical concepts at
the university could be due to their poor background in the subject. It could also be argued that
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