Dr. Eabhnat Ní Fhloinn:

I will start with Deputy Cannon's question about ICT. What we strive to do with mathematics support is help students to become independent learners. That is a major struggle when they reach third level. They are not used to that type of approach. One of the problems with mathematics in particular is that students often do not know the terminology for what they cannot do. It is incredibly difficult for them to use ICT independently. They can follow a programme, a module or a course where everything has been laid out and they must do tutorial one and tutorial two and there are ICT resources for that programme. If they struggle to get the correct answer, they do not know which part of the answer at which they have arrived is incorrect, so they do not know the resource to look up to help them. That is the major problem for students who are really struggling. They do not know the terminology. They will often look up the wrong thing and decide the resource was useless because it did not help them with the right thing. In fact, however, they were looking at the wrong one. We find that for much of the time we are encouraging them to try to identify and pin down exactly the point at which their understanding breaks down and to come to us to find out what type of terminology we would use for that. This enables them to use the ICT resources related to that. However, it still requires person-to-person contact. The reason that happens to such an extent in mathematics is because so much of it is building blocks. If one misses one of those, one misses everything afterwards.

This addresses a little of what Senator Jim D'Arcy was asking regarding the end in sight for mathematics learning support. The problem is that there will always be people who were sick for a while previously, who came through a different education system, have dyslexia or have various different challenges and have missed something crucial at some point, sometimes in primary school and sometimes at second level. Sometimes it has just been a while and they cannot remember certain things. However, because one might be missing one or two of those crucial building blocks, it affects everything one does afterwards. We will probably never have a situation where everybody has grasped enough to do just fine without this extra help. Sometimes we see students who are really struggling in their course, but within half an hour or an hour of spending time with us and solving a few basic problems for them they suddenly find they are able to do the ones that look more complex. However, they cannot get to that stage without that. That is a major problem we see.

ICT resources would be great and the more we can use them, the better. We are trying to tailor things as much as possible to the needs of the students. We still believe, however, that we must be the middle man, as it were, between the student and the ICT resources.