Building Students’ Hard and Soft Skills through Innovative Teaching Approaches to Mathematics

Abstract

The goals of this case study were to (1) analyze the role of innovative mathematics teaching approaches among middle and high school students regarding their hard and soft mathematical skills; (2) to examine students’ perceptions about the mathematical teaching approaches, used by their teachers during class sessions, (3) to analyze aspects of innovation in them. The descriptive case study approach was used to analyze the role of innovative teaching approaches in helping students to develop various mathematical hard and soft skills. A qualitative meta-analysis methodology was applied to ten student theses about mathematics teaching within the Department of Mathematics in the School of Postgraduate studies of IKIP Siliwangi in Cimahi. This paper presents the results based on ten graduate students’ theses research studies, selected purposively from 68 student theses. The selection of articles aimed to include a variety of theses discussing mathematics skills teaching and learning approaches. The results show that, in general, students who were trained with innovative teaching approaches attained higher grades than students taught by conventional teaching methods. It has been established that students’ grades on mathematical hard skills varied after intervention. On the contrary, regarding students mathematical soft skills, some theses reported no difference between students taught using both approaches, while some reported greater differences. Finally, students had good opinions regarding the innovative teaching-learning approaches, used by their teachers.