New teaching for new students in a new context:
Pushing the boundaries in first year science

This project aimed to quantitatively measure the ability of first year science students to transfer their mathematical skills and knowledge, gained primarily in the senior years of secondary school, from an abstract to a physical context. An instrument used in earlier studies to measure transfer of mathematical knowledge was modified for this project, and tested with 49 student volunteers. A Transfer Index was developed to measure the degree of transfer of the students' mathematics skills and knowledge and analysed alongside the variables derived from student records. The statistical results suggest that the NSW Universities Admission Index (UAI) is a good overall measure of a student's high order cognition and that students who take harder mathematics courses in the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) have better abstraction abilities than other students. The results also failed to show a significant correlation between the Transfer Index and HSC subject grades. Although there may be other explanations, this may be consistent with a surface learning approach being adopted by HSC students. If so, it would be interesting to determine whether this phenomenon is seen in students entering higher education from other secondary education systems. Interviews with students provided qualitative data which helped identify cognitive resources and processes involved in transfer. Students' expectations and literacy skills were found to enhance or impede the transfer process. The self-selecting nature of the cohort is a major issue for generalization of the findings, and further studies need to use larger samples that are selected differently.