Difficulties in teaching the university discipline ''The Foundations of Mathematical Methods of Information Treatment''

The experience of preparing bachelors of different academic profiles shows that the students perceive academic subjects differently from the point of view of their importance, complicatedness and difficulty. As a rule, the most difficult disciplines are considered to be the disciplines of mathematical and scientific courses, especially for the students studying the Humanities. Thus, there appears a contradiction between the difficulties that the students of humanitarian specialities come across studying mathematical and scientific subjects and the possibilities of some of them to overcome these difficulties independently. The problem consists in solving the contradiction between the intentions of students who entered the universities to get a good education and then to have a valid position in the society and their possibilities to independently overcome the difficulties they may face during their study at the university. To solve this contradiction aims at finding variants of settling a very important task for a university of how to keep the contingent of the students or, at least, of how to diminish the number of dropped out students within the period of study due to academic failures. Solving this problem is very important from humanitarian, social and economical points of view. Teaching Mathematics to students of humanitarian specialities is accentuated on purpose in the Federal State Educational Standard of Higher Professional Education. In this respect, the discipline ''The Foundations of Mathematical Methods of Information Treatment'' has been introduced in the main course of mathematical and scientific subjects. It is less connected with requiring fundamental knowledge of Mathematics of the students, more with their logical abilities and culture of thinking, research skills and acquiring methods of statistical processing of experimental data. At the end of the course of studying the discipline a bachelor is to learn both mathematical methods of analysis and treatment of information and methods of collecting and interpreting the data. Mathematical methods of information treatment still require the students to have quite a good knowledge of Mathematics: they are to understand the logics of the argument; know the basic mathematical formulas, and have skills of how to operate them. However, there come up difficulties caused by insufficient school level of knowledge in Mathematics that the students have. There are also difficulties caused by the lack of textbooks available for non-motivated students with a low level of knowledge in Mathematics. The students find it difficult to operate the abstract material, such as mathematical notions and formulas. It is also complicated for them to work with large amounts of information by means of applied computer programs. To understand how these difficulties correlate with each other is necessary for overcoming academic failures of the students.

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