This study is aimed at analyzing the causes for actively and inactively communicating students by testing students' mathematical communicative competence and communicative level which is one of the objective of mathematic education in the 7th curricul...
This study is aimed at analyzing the causes for actively and inactively communicating students by testing students' mathematical communicative competence and communicative level which is one of the objective of mathematic education in the 7th curriculum.
For such purposes, two research questions are established as follows.
(1) How competent are 6th grade students in the four areas of mathematical communication: writing, reading, speaking and listening?
(2) What are the causes for difference in competence of mathematical communication between students?
Case study was performed to attain the purpose of this study. Subjects were total 140 6th grade students of the four classes in each of W Elementary School which were located in Ham yang-gun, Gyeong-Nam. For Research Question 1, a test of communicative competence was conducted and the rate of actively communicating students was obtained. For Research Question 2, total of twelve among actively and inactively communicating students were selected and an in-depth analysis was performed for them.
This study reached the following results.
First, the area in which mathematical communication is most active was shown to be the writing activity of describing one's own thinking or solution process. On the other hand, speaking activity was shown to be relatively active in small groups. However in the case of expression in front of a blackboard, the lack of presenting power and a sense of self-confidence resulted in wise mathematical communicative competence.
Secondly, students with the active ability of writing and reading knew how to properly use everyday language and mathematical terms and expressed clearly the process of logical solution and their understanding in a variety of ways. What they had in common was that they had a very high degree of achievement in mathematics and that they were interested in it. Also, they usually read many books with delicate and calm character. Students with the active ability of listening had the mentality of respecting others' opinions and listening to them to the end, and paid attention to what their teacher explained, and wrote down and asked what they could not understand among his/her explanations. Among those analyzed deeply, some students had excellent ability of writing, reading and listening, but poor ability of speaking. Students with excellent ability of speaking were active in character and somewhat talkative because of many conversations with their families and friends.
On the other hand, students with the inactive ability to write could not recognize the importance of the process of solving questions, found mathematics very difficult, and said that they did not know from what to start and in what ways to write the process of solution. They could not find how to solve them because of their lacking abilities to understand and interpret them and they had many troubles in explaining their solutions owing to their unclear use of mathematical signs and language. For the ability of listening, they had a relatively low degree of achievement in math and could not understand most of what they heard from their teacher because of not paying attention to him or her. For the ability of speaking, they were anxious about mathematics and lack of concentration and endurance because of their timid character and lacking sense of self-confidence. The main causes for their trouble in communication were a low degree of achievement in mathematics, a lack of interest in it, and boredom with the classes. They had little power of concentration on the classes because they did not pay attention to what their teacher explained.
In conclusion, mathematical communicative competence was shown to vary in interest in mathematics, the degree of achievement, and personal tendency. To extend students' mathematical communicative competence, it will be necessary to systematically analyze their communication problem and seek appropriate methods for solving the reasons and causes.