This study was designed to gain insights into instrumental genesis process of CAS in Korean high school students and to explore its practical potentials in secondary mathematics education. Three activities, such as Concept-Centered Mathematics Activit...
This study was designed to gain insights into instrumental genesis process of CAS in Korean high school students and to explore its practical potentials in secondary mathematics education. Three activities, such as Concept-Centered Mathematics Activity based on CAS, Mathematical Conjecture Building Activities related to factorization, and Problem Solving Activities, were constructed and executed to seven Grade 10 students for fifteen class hours. The lessons were given on the condition that classpad300(CAS) was available. Post-unit interviews with students were also conducted. The data which were analyzed consists of classroom observations(audio and video taped), personal files saved in the Classpad300 during the activities, student's answer booklets and interviews.
The process of instrumental genesis of CAS and the practical potential of the instrumented CAS found in this study are as follows:
First, instrumental genesis is a complex process, which is composed of two closely connected schemes : Instrumentation(Instrumented Action Scheme), directed toward the subject, and Instrumentalization(Usage Scheme), directed toward the tools(CAS).
It was not a natural process for CAS, which is merely an artifact, to be utilized as an useful appliance, and it required a considerable amount of time and efforts. Students experienced diverse Instrumentation processes of CAS in physical and psychological manner. Also they expanded their notion on “solving an equation” to “solving one letter with regard to other letters” while dealing with many restraints of CAS. In addition, students became to understand the substitution concept in depth, beyond a simple number changing. Furthermore, decimal representation format of real number contributed to clarifying the understanding of real number. Consequently, it is meaningful in mathematics education, especially in algebra education, in that the CAS based concept centered mathematics activity offers great opportunities to deal with high-qualified application problems.
Second, instrumentation process in the factorization activities of ) was not a burden to subjects. The instrumented CAS caused students to concentrate on the task to develop primary conjectures and theorems and to make them more sophisticated. Therefore, the activities to build mathematical conjectures and theorems through factorization with CAS made students improve their reflective thinking to induce the patterns from the samples, make theorems, and justify or modify them.
Third, with the help of CAS, the students in this study solved the irrational equations that they hadn't learned in their regular class, and could understand the meaning of the solutions as well. It was shown that the problems students were presented with in the instrumentation process helped students to deal with more advanced application problems. Therefore, the problem solving activities based on the instrumented CAS may have an influence on the sequence of mathematics curriculum, e.g. the optimization problems may precede the calculus problems such as derivatives in high school.
The results of this study to investigate the instrumental genesis of CAS in mathematical activities will give insights into the secondary mathematics curriculum to prepare the CAS in Korea.