An Analysis of Korean Middle School Students' Learning Style

우리나라 중학생들의 학습양식 분석

International comparative studies of students' performance in mathematics have shown that Korean students possess very negative attitudes toward mathematics, while they are ranked as one of the highest in the cognitive achievement of mathematics. This has prompted mathematics educators to seek for a way to improve the quality of mathematics education. In this context, this research has been conducted to investigate the learning style of Korean middle school students under the assumption that it is of essence to understand the characteristics of our students as mathematics learners. For the purpose, in-depth interview had been conducted and sixteen middle students participated in the interview. The students were chosen to represent the average group of their age-cohorts based on their performance in mathematics and their SES. The interview was designed as a semi-structured clinical interview. In the interview, the students were given mathematical tasks dealing with central themes in the domain of function. Each student was given about 30 to 50 minutes to solve the tasks. After an interviewee finished the tasks, s/he was asked to explained how s/he solved the tasks. The researchers asked additional questions to clarify the students' understanding of the mathematical themes in the tasks and to identify their strategies for learning mathematics. The analysis of the in-depth interview has primarily identified the characteristics of the students' understanding of the main themes in function and then has been extended to investigate their characteristic styles for learning mathematics. The analysis of the interview identified the learning styles of the students as 'inductive learning based on prototypical cases', 'repeated practice of exemplar mathematics problems', 'disengaged learning', and 'double standards in learning mathematics'. Based on the results of the analysis, this research presents the implications for the improvement of mathematics education.

본 연구에서는 수학과 학습 개선 방안 탐색을 위하여 본 연구에서는 중학교 3학년 학생을 대상으로 함수 영역과 관련된 과제를 기반으로 하는 심층 면담을 실행하여 우리나라 중학생의 학습양식에서 나타나는 경향성을 탐구하였다. 심층면담에서 학생들이 제시된 과제를 해결한 뒤 해결방법에 대해 설명하는 과정에서 연구자는 학생들이 과제 해결에 활용한 수학적 아이디어가 형성된 배경에 대한 추가 질문을 제기하는 방식으로 그들의 학습양식에 관한 자료를 수집하였다. 면담 자료 분석 결과, 우리나라 중학생들의 대표적인 학습양식으로 '사례 중심의 귀납적 학습', '유형 중심의 문제 풀이 학습', '몰입없는 학습', 그리고 '학습태도의 이중성'을 도출하였고 면담 자료에 기초하여 이들 학습양식의 특징을 서술하였으며 수학과 교수-학습 개선을 위한 시사점을 논의하였다.