Getting into university: from foundation to first year engineering

With this poster proposal I present an ongoing longitudinal study with engineering students taking a (science) foundation course. The aim of the research is to explore the reasons why students decided to take the foundation course going beyond the rather obvious one, “because they did not have the necessary qualification for direct entry”. Secondly, I wish to explore students’ mathematical progression into first year engineering and ultimately the usefulness of the foundation course in that respect. I took a case study methodology to collect data in the form of interviews with students; analyses were qualitative. Initial findings indicate that students expressed a variety of reasons for taking the foundation course, and that students’ mathematical progression is not linear.