| Summary: | Modern undergraduates join science and engineering courses with poorer mathematical background than most contemporaries of the current faculty had when they were freshers. The problem is very acute in the United Kingdom but more and more countries adopt less resource intensive models of teaching and the problem spreads. University tutors and lecturers spend more and more time covering the basics. However, most of them still rely on traditional methods of delivery which presuppose that learners have a good memory and considerable time to practice, so that they can memorize disjointed facts and discover for themselves various connections between the underlying concepts. These suppositions are particularly unrealistic when dealing with a large number of undergraduates who are ordinary learners with limited mathematics background. The first author has developed a teaching system that allows such adult learners achieve relatively deep learning of mathematics – and remarkably quickly – through a teacher-guided (often called Socratic) dialog, which aims at the frequent reinforcement of basic mathematical abstractions through Eulerian sequencing. These ideas have been applied to create a prototype of a Cognitive Mathematics Tutoring System aimed at teaching basic mathematics to University freshers., an electronic Personal Algebra and Calculus Tutor (e- PACT).
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