A meeting in November of ca 30 HE chemists marked the start of a new initiative to address how university chemistry departments should respond to the varying mathematics skills of students starting chemistry degrees. Organised by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Faraday Division, the RSC Education Division and the Higher Education Academy Physical Sciences Centre, the meeting, Tackling the mathematics problem for chemistry, was the result of the RSC Faraday Division’s decision to contribute more to the teaching of physical chemistry in universities. Faraday Division Council identified two strands to the ‘maths problem’ faced by HE chemistry: the teaching of maths to new entrants; and encouraging the more mathematically able students to develop their skills throughout their chemistry degree course.

Chemist Paul May put the problem into context with his experiences at Bristol University. The Bristol solution to the problem is its remedial maths course designed and run by its chemists (see Educ. Chem., 2004, 41(2), 56). Paul Yates of Keele University advocated a chemical context approach to teaching maths to chemists (see Educ. Chem., 2002, 39(3), 78). He suggested a glance at the maths content in the A-level chemistry syllabus would show why new students don’t appreciate the importance of maths to studying chemistry.

Joe Kyle, a mathematician from Birmingham University, urged chemists, ‘Meet your students where they are in their levels of maths attainment. Don’t set students into maths courses based on A-level scores but instead diagnose students’ maths skills and then teach accordingly to the individual’. He acknowledged that this will make for a labour intensive approach, but pointed out that there are good web-based resources that can assess students’ abilities and integrate understanding and skills without putting a heavy burden on staff, such as the AiM project.

Reading physicist Mike Tinker introduced the chemists to PPLATO, a collaborative web-based project which produces resources designed to support the teaching of physics and maths to first-year and foundation-year students through personalised development programmes. ‘Some early chemistry and physics courses set too low a threshold for the maths skills students require to proceed to the next year of study, eg a 40 per cent pass mark on a remedial maths course’, suggested Tinker. The PPLATO resources, he explained, can generate unique questions every time and assess students performance, to encourage a mastery learning approach to maths skills.

Participants agreed that the problem should not lie solely at the door of physical chemists. According to Professor Mike Pilling, Faraday Division president and a driving force behind the initiative, a more collaborative effort across the HE chemistry community is needed. ‘It is clear, from the meeting, that powerful software is available to help chemists address the maths problem. We need to assess what materials would be valuable, find ways of funding their development to incorporate chemistry contexts, and learn how best to use them in our departments’. Pilling wants to see chemistry departments develop better links with teachers in schools and colleges, ‘We must understand the problems one another are facing’, he said. ‘Both the Smith report on post-14 mathematics and the Tomlinson report on 14–19 curriculum and qualifications reform put forward proposals that could provide a potential way forward at the schools level, especially in keeping maths skills active in 16–19-year olds. But we must meet teachers half way and pay more attention to what is being taught in schools and how it’s being done. The national and regional Science Learning Centres will provide a good way of doing this’, he suggests, ‘but we can only solve the problem if we work together’.

James Berressem