Gerhard Dorn, a PhD candidate at TU Graz, is an advocate of innovative teaching methods and is passionate about helping first-year students overcome their maths anxiety.
His own experience as a teacher and student representative opened his eyes to a widespread issue. His work as a private tutor and intensive discussions with students finally motivated him to investigate the fear of maths in more detail. Together with his project partner Michael Fuchs, Gerhard Dorn took advantage of TU Graz’s membership of the university network Unite! to set up and realise his project at a European level and also obtained funding from the Unite! seed fund. With the help of a trans-European online survey of students from all’Unite! universities, he was able to show in the ’Freshman math skills and anxiety evaluation’ project that maths anxiety is an issue throughout Europe. Over 3,500 students took part in the survey. The follow-up project ’How do we teach maths in Europe’’ now focuses on developing innovative teaching and learning methods for maths lessons.
Dorn finds the exchange of experience and best practice models at other universities exciting. In teaching, these range from physical maths learning spaces at Aalto University, where students come together 24/7 to learn together, to a virtual escape room game as an introduction to university mathematics at Politecnico di Torino.
