Composite indicators are a very useful tool for conveying summary information on the overall performance of institutions and facilitating decision-making. Increasingly, there is a demand for indicators that allow performance to be assessed after the implementation of a strategy. This has several difficulties, and in this paper, we address three of them: how to evaluate at different points in time, how to estimate the weighting of the criteria and how to normalize the data. Our proposal is based on multicriteria techniques, using a recent method, uwTOPSIS, and is applied to data collected from 2975 students enrolled in the first year of science and engineering at the Industrial University of Santander (Colombia) from the first semester of 2016 to the first semester of 2019. In the paper, we show that our proposal makes it possible to measure and evaluate the academic performance of students at two points in time, and this allows the University to know whether its student support policy has been successful and to what degree it has been effective. Due to the large amount of data handled, data management has been done using R programming language, and model implementation has been done with Python.

The article presents the results of a literature review that covered various study types and contributions made on cognition and numerical thinking in Colombia. After conducting a search in different sources, 84 relevant documents were selected and analysed in detail. Three categories were created: (i) subjects and lines of research; (ii) teacher training; and (iii) contributions to teaching and learning processes in the classroom. The results of the study indicate that in Colombia there is a prevalence of studies that focus on proposals addressing needs in mathematics classes. There is also a significant amount of studies on cognitive, semiotic and sociocultural perspectives. A gap between these two types of studies is also presented. Some considerations for future research on the topic are outlined at the end of the article.

Resumen La finalidad de este artículo es presentar algunas reflexiones teóricas y metodológicas que hemos incorporado al diseño un curso-laboratorio de Cálculo Diferencial, basadas en las configuraciones actuales de los procesos de aprendizaje y de enseñanza de esta asignatura. Del planteamiento y experimentación del curso surge como conclusión que la enseñanza actual del Cálculo exige la búsqueda y aprovechamiento de las experiencias de la nueva sociedad, la cual está rodeada de diferentes artefactos digitales que permiten rescatar el movimiento como núcleo conceptual de cálculo.