Abstract

Undergraduate research increasingly features in university mathematics degrees. Despite this, research papers are used infrequently in mathematics teaching, and this is especially the case for first-year undergraduates. Mathematical subjects are more likely than other STEM disciplines to pinpoint cognitive difficulty as the principal reason for not exposing undergraduate students to research papers. In this paper, we test whether first-year students can engage effectively with research papers. We describe an intervention that exposes first-year, first term undergraduate students to current research in probability and statistics by asking them to read a research paper and summarize it for a general readership following an interview with the paper’s author. Our findings show that the activity introduced students to new fields of knowledge and helped to develop a clearer understanding of scientific process, leading to a heightened sense of personal satisfaction at engaging closely with current research. We argue that structured reading of research papers can lead to productive and rewarding engagement with difficult content, recent and current research and with research processes and that this should make us reconsider the role of research papers in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum.

中文翻译：

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艰巨的事情将使您更进一步：帮助一年级本科生有意义地参与有关概率和统计的最新研究论文

摘要

本科生研究在大学数学学位中越来越具有特色。尽管如此，数学教学中很少使用研究论文，特别是一年级本科生。与其他STEM学科相比，数学学科更有可能指出认知困难是不让大学生接触研究论文的主要原因。在本文中，我们测试了一年级学生是否可以有效地参与研究论文。我们描述了一种干预措施，通过让他们阅读研究论文并在对论文作者进行采访后为普通读者进行总结，从而使一年级，一学期本科生能够接触到概率和统计方面的最新研究。我们的发现表明，该活动将学生带入了新的知识领域，并有助于加深对科学过程的理解，从而提高了与当前研究紧密联系时的个人满意度。我们认为，对研究论文进行结构化阅读可以导致富有难度的内容，最新研究和当前研究以及研究过程中的富有成果的参与，这应该使我们重新考虑研究论文在本科数学课程中的作用。