This paper reports on empirical results about the influence of two different teaching designs on the development of tertiary students’ modelling competency and attitudes towards modelling. A total of 144 first year engineering students were exposed to a diagnostic entrance test, a modelling unit consisting of five lessons with ten tasks, enframed by a pre- and a post-test, and at the end a questionnaire on attitudes towards mathematical modelling. Similar to the German DISUM study, in the modelling unit, one group of participants followed an independence-oriented teaching style, aiming at a balance between students’ independent work and teacher’s guidance, while two other groups were taught according to a more traditional teacher-guided style. Linear mixed regression models were used to compare pre- and post-test results. The results show that all groups had significant learning progress, although there is much room for further improvement, and that the group taught according to the independence-oriented design had the biggest competency growth. In addition, this group exhibited more positive attitudes than the other groups in five of six attitudinal aspects.

本文报告了两种不同教学设计对大学生建模能力和建模态度发展影响的实证结果。共有 144 名一年级工程专业学生接受了诊断入学测试，一个由五节课和十个任务组成的建模单元，由前测和后测组成，最后是一份关于对数学建模的态度的问卷。与德国的DISUM研究类似，在建模单元中，一组参与者遵循独立导向的教学风格，旨在平衡学生的独立工作和教师的指导，而另外两组则按照更传统的教师进行教学——引导式。线性混合回归模型用于比较测试前和测试后的结果。结果表明，尽管还有很大的进步空间，但所有小组的学习进步都很大，按照独立导向设计的小组教学的能力增长最大。此外，该组在六个态度方面中的五个方面表现出比其他组更积极的态度。