A survey of the mathematics landscape within bioscience undergraduate and postgraduate UK higher education

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a survey of UK University bioscience academics carried out in 2011 in order to find out what school qualifications, attitudes and expectations students arrive at university with, how this impacts upon the maths that is taught and the way that it is taught within bioscience degrees. The proportion of students with A-level maths entering bioscience degrees varies enormously between institutions however the majority of bioscience undergraduates had done only GCSE maths. Nearly half of these students had either a B or C grade and 16% had less than a C grade. Students with a B or C grade at GCSE are likely to have an incomplete understanding of many key topics such as rearranging equations and manipulating scientific notation. Students who have only done GCSE maths will not have covered logarithms at all. Students’ attitudes, primarily defined as a “fear-of-maths”, have to be overcome and respondents emphasized the importance of building confidence and motivation by embedding the maths within the biological context. The maths taught within bioscience degrees consists typically of concepts covered at GCSE and AS level and very few undergraduate bioscience courses cover maths beyond this. There was no clear consensus as to whether more advanced mathematical concepts such as calculus should be included at undergraduate level. This is in contrast to the USA where calculus, mathematical modelling and computational tools are included in the undergraduate bioscience curriculum