The Effects of an Independence-Oriented Teaching Design on the Development of Tertiary Students’ Modelling Competency

This chapter reports on results from the project CoSTAMM (Comparative Studies into Teaching Approaches for Mathematical Modelling). A modelling unit was implemented in 2022 at a public university in South Africa in a second-year chemistry class with 42 participants following an independence-oriented teaching design. The same unit had been implemented in 2019, with 144 first-year engineering students following partly an independence-oriented and partly a teacher-directed design. The unit consists of five lessons with ten tasks, a diagnostic test, a pre-test, and a post-test. The design was planned with impulses from the DISUM study. Linear mixed regression models were used to evaluate and compare the results. The independence-oriented design yielded substantial progress in students’ modelling competency on both occasions.