Curriculum and beyond: Mathematics support for first year life science students

The move into higher education is a real challenge for students from all educational backgrounds, with the adaptation to a new curriculum and style of learning and teaching posing a daunting task. A series of exercises were planned to boost the impact of the mathematics support for level four students and was focussed around a core module for all students. The intention was to develop greater confidence in tackling mathematical problems in all levels of ability and to provide more structured transition period in the first semester of level 4. Over a two-year period the teaching team for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology provided a series of structured formative tutorials and “interactive” online problems. Video solutions to all formative problems were made available, in order that students were able to engage with the problems at any time and were not disadvantaged if they could not attend. The formative problems were specifically set to dovetail into a practical report in which the mathematical skills developed were specifically assessed. Students overwhelmingly agreed that the structured formative activities had broadened their understanding of the subject and that more such activities would help. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the package of changes undertaken resulted in a significant increase in the overall module mark over the two years of development.

Visualising London

This research investigates how photographs can be analysed to extract meaning. Two methodologies, visual anthropology and social semiotics, are used to analyse a collection of images and accompanying texts generated by a group of first year tourism students in London. Photographs are categorised into subject areas including iconic buildings, street scenes, people and analysed according to how they relate to the photographers’ characteristics, such as age and nationality. A group of images of Big Ben are then analysed using a social semiotics approach, considering both compositional and contextual information to extract meanings. Results and techniques are then contrasted and compared, noting how the complexity of the image makers’ experience of the city they are documenting lead to their images having multi-layered meanings, and that combining analytic methods can fruitfully reveal a range of these meanings.