Teaching Mathematics and its Applications Advance Access originally published online on August 21, 2008
Teaching Mathematics and its Applications 2008 27(4):167-173; doi:10.1093/teamat/hrn015
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Mathematics support—support for all?
Address for correspondence: Godfrey Pell, School of Education, Rm 8.74 E.C.Stoner, University of Leeds, Leeds LS9 2JT, UK. Tel: +44 (0)113 343 4378, Fax: +44 (0)113 343 3552. E-mail: R.G.Pell{at}education.leeds.ac.uk
Submitted May 2008; accepted July 2008
Mathematics Support Centres are to be found in various forms in the majority of UK higher education institutions. They have been established in order to ease widespread and serious difficulties that a significant number of students have with mathematics, particularly at the school–university transition. They usually offer mathematics and/or statistics support to students across the full range of disciplines studied. Anecdotal evidence suggests that those students who make good use of such centres are not just those who struggle with mathematics. Many frequent users are quite competent and simply want to do better. The study reported here describes and analyses data from one cohort of engineering students. A novel aspect is the quantification of the proportion of support centre visitors who fall into these, and other, categories. We conclude of the cohort in the study, mathematics support has improved the pass rate by 
3%. Of the failures, about half (4% of the sample total) could well have passed had they attended the mathematics support centre regularly. Furthermore, the majority of those attending were not students who were in danger of failing. This has important implications not only for the design of mathematics support provision, but also for the performance of the high fliers. The methodology offers one way tackling the difficult task of evaluating the effectiveness of mathematics support initiatives.
Godfrey Pell is the Principal Statistician in the Schools of Education, Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Leeds; he is an internationally regarded authority on assessment, and has authored numerous papers on the topic.
Tony Croft is Director of the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University and a Director of sigma—the Centre for Excellence in the university-wide provision of mathematics and statistics support. He has authored many mathematics books for both engineering undergraduates and for those who need an accessible introduction to mathematics at university.