• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.615-637
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to analyze the actual realization of the opportunity to learn given to students by examining students' cognition for enrichment mathematics textbook tasks' levels of cognitive demand. First, we analyze characteristics and limitations based on the theoretical framework. Second, we examine students' cognition about the distribution of the mathematics textbook tasks' levels of cognitive demand. And we analyze how the opportunity to learn actually work. Third, in the sense that enrichment textbooks are textbooks for science school students, we analyze whether the opportunity to learn for gifted is offered. The conclusion is as follows: First, with respect to levels of cognitive demand, PNC tasks account most. Second, students also cognize that PNC tasks account most. Third, tasks for gifted are not offered and students also cognize that opportunity to learn for gifted is lacked.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.227-246
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• 2024

The purposes of this study were to analyze the levels of cognitive demand and questioning types in tasks of 'Data and Chance' presented in elementary mathematics textbooks in Korea, the United States, and Australia. The levels of cognitive demand of textbook tasks were analyzed according to the knowledge and process and thinking types required in the tasks. The tasks were also analyzed for questioning types, answer types, and response types. As a result, in terms of knowledge and process and thinking types in tasks, all three countries had something in common: the percentage of tasks requiring 'representation' and process was the highest, and the percentage of tasks requiring 'basic application of skill/concept' was also the highest. From a thinking types perspective, differences were found between textbook tasks in the three countries in graph and chance learning. The results of analyzing questioning types showed that in all three textbooks, the percentage of observational reasoning questions was highest, followed by the percentage of factual questions. The proportions and characteristics of the constructing questions included in the U.S. and Australian textbooks differed from those in the Korean textbooks. Based on these results, this study presents implications for constructing elementary mathematics textbook tasks in 'Data and Chance.'

• School Mathematics
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.37-59
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to examine and analyze the mathematical tasks in the high school textbooks. In particular, it aimed to reveal the overall picture of the level of cognitive demand of the mathematical tasks in the textbooks. We adopted the framework for mathematical task analysis suggested by Smith & Stein (1998) and analyzed the mathematical tasks accordingly. The findings from the analysis showed that 95 percent of the mathematical tasks were at low level and the rest at high level in terms of cognitive demand. Most of the mathematical tasks in the textbooks were algorithmic and focused on producing correct answers by using procedures.

• School Mathematics
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.445-469
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• 2014

This study aims to examine secondary mathematics teachers' understanding of the levels of cognitive demand on mathematical tasks suggested in mathematics textbooks. The study also attempts to investigate whether the teachers are able to characterize the tasks accordingly and to change low level tasks to high level ones. For this purpose, we developed a survey and 50 secondary mathematics teachers participated in the survey. The findings from the data analysis suggest that 59 percent of the teachers selected high level tasks as appropriate for achieving the national curricular goals, but about 1/3 of the teachers identified PNC tasks as high level ones. The results also reveal that more than half of the teachers were not able to transform low level into high level tasks and only 4 teachers out of 50 were able to transform successfully. The teachers seem to find difficulty in transforming low level tasks into high level ones.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.251-272
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• 2005

Given that cognitive demands of mathematical tasks can be changed during instruction, this study attempts to provide a detailed description to explore how tasks are set up and implemented in the classroom and what are the classroom-based factors. As an exploratory and qualitative case study, 4 of six-grade classrooms where high-level tasks on ratio and proportion were used were videotaped and analyzed with regard to the patterns emerged during the task setup and implementation. With regard to 16 tasks, four kinds of Patterns emerged: (a) maintenance of high-level cognitive demands (7 tasks), (b) decline into the procedure without connection to the meaning (1 task), (c) decline into unsystematic exploration (2 tasks), and (d) decline into not-sufficient exploration (6 tasks), which means that the only partial meaning of a given task is addressed. The 4th pattern is particularly significant, mainly because previous studies have not identified. Contributing factors to this pattern include private-learning without reasonable explanation, well-performed model presented at the beginning of a lesson, and mathematical concepts which are not clear in the textbook. On the one hand, factors associated with the maintenance of high-level cognitive demands include Improvising a task based on students' for knowledge, scaffolding of students' thinking, encouraging students to justify and explain their reasoning, using group-activity appropriately, and rethinking the solution processes. On the other hand, factors associated with the decline of high-level cognitive demands include too much or too little time, inappropriateness of a task for given students, little interest in high-level thinking process, and emphasis on the correct answer in place of its meaning. These factors may urge teachers to be sensitive of what should be focused during their teaching practices to keep the high-level cognitive demands. To emphasize, cognitive demands are fixed neither by the task nor by the teacher. So, we need to study them in the process of teaching and learning.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.62 no.3
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• pp.363-380
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• 2023

This study analyzed the difficulties and mathematical modeling knowledge improvement that an elementary school teacher experienced in modifying a mathematics textbook task to a mathematical modeling task. To this end, an elementary school teacher with 10 years of experience participated in teacher-researcher community's repeated discussions and modified the average task in the data and pattern domain of the 5th grade. The results are as followings. First, in the process of task modification, the teacher had difficulties in reflecting reality, setting the appropriate cognitive level of mathematical modeling tasks, and presenting detailed tasks according to the mathematical modeling process. Second, through repeated task modifications, the teacher was able to develop realistic tasks considering the mathematical content knowledge and students' cognitive level, set the cognitive level of the task by adjusting the complexity and openness of the task, and present detailed tasks through thought experiments on students' task-solving process, which shows that teachers' mathematical modeling knowledge, including the concept of mathematical modeling and the characteristics of the mathematical modeling task, has improved. The findings of this study suggest that, in terms of the mathematical modeling teacher education, it is necessary to provide teachers with opportunities to improve their mathematical modeling task development competency through textbook task modification rather than direct provision of mathematical modeling tasks, experience mathematical modeling theory and practice together, and participate in teacher-researcher communities.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.77-110
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• 2007

This study attempted to investigate how to students show high-level mathematical thinking in math classes. This paper describes how to setup the task for lead to a high - level of thinking out students and what efforts are required while a teacher tried to maintaining students's high-level cognition during the tasks implemented. The researcher as teacher analyzed the tasks of length measurement unit in 2-Ga elementary math textbooks, modified and created math tasks demanded students' high-level cognition, made instruction plans, and implemented those tasks maintaining the levels of cognitive demand of tasks. After that, the researcher reflected and analyzed the levels of cognitive demand of tasks of instruction and factors that cause to change intended high-level cognitive demand. After reflection, second roof of action research was conducted to 2-Na length measurement unit. This paper includes those results and reflections of practitioner.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.103-123
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• 2017

Mathematical tasks in general introduce and deal with real-life situations, and they derive to students' thinking fluently in solving the given tasks. The tasks might be considered as an important and significant factor to lead a successful mathematical teaching and learning situation. MiC Textbook is a representative one showing such good examples and tasks. This study explores concretely and in detail the cognitive demand level of mathematical tasks, by the subject of MiC Textbook. To accomplish this, this study is to reconstruct more elaborately the analysis framework developed by Hwang and Park in 2013. The framework basically was set up utilizing 'the cognitive demand level' suggested by Stein, et, al. The cognitive demand level is divided into two levels such as low level and high level. The low level is comprized of two elements such as Memorization Tasks(MT), Procedures Without Connections Tasks(PNCT), and high level is Procedures With Connections Tasks(PWCT), and Doing Mathematics Tasks(DMT). This study deals with the tasks on the area of 'data analysis and statistics' in MiC 1, 2, 3 level Textbook. As a result, mathematical tasks of MiC Textbook led learners to deal with and understand mathematical content for themselves, and furthermore to do leading roles for checking and reinforcing the content. Also, mathematical tasks of MiC Textbook are comprized of the tasks suitable to enhance mathematical thinking ability through communication. In addition, mathematical tasks of MiC Textbook tend to offer more learning opportunity to learners' themselves while the level of MiC Textbook is going up.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.61-75
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• 2015

This study analyzed the characteristics of mathematical tasks including the level of cognitive demands set up by pre-service elementary school teachers. 50 pre-service teachers in G university of education who participated in their 4 weeks teaching practicum were selected as subjects. They planned and implemented mathematics lesson with their lesson plans. Lesson plans, video of their lessons, transcript of video were gathered and analyzed the characteristics of mathematical tasks used in their lesson. Through the analysis, several conclusions were drawn as follow. First, 78% of the subjects modified tasks in mathematics textbooks. Since modification or construction of mathematical tasks gives good chance for constructing mathematical task knowledge for teaching, more chance should be given to pre-service teachers to construct new tasks or modify tasks in mathematics textbooks. Second, types of modification done by pre-service teachers were categorized as number change(15.6%), situation change(78.1%) and material change(6.3%). As Chapman(2013) emphasized the importance of MtKT, pre-service teachers must have more MtKT by understanding the characteristics of mathematical tasks. Third, the level of cognitive demands required by mathematical tasks were relatively low. 74% of mathematical tasks was lower cognitive demands and only 26% was higher cognitive demands. The level of cognitive demands of tasks in mathematics textbooks tended to be lowered by the directions given right after the tasks were given. In this respect, the structure of mathematics textbooks need to be changed.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.279-288
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to verify the impact of cognitive factors and GSR on the task performance. For this study 64 students participated. Multiple regression and repeated measures were applied to analyze the data. The result for the survey indicated that previous knowledge, physical efforts, and task difficulty had significant impacts on task performance. Particularly, task difficulty has a negative impact. This can be interpreted as someone who has high prior knowledge inputs higher physical efforts with low task difficulty perception will show high performance. On the other hand, the low arousal level of GSR in the evaluation stage is a prediction variable of task performance. This result shows that high prior knowledge and low arousal level of GSR produces high performance. However, the analysis of difference in GSR between learning and evaluation stages does not show significant difference. It suggests that physiological measure such as GSR is reliable index of cognitive load; however, it partially represents cognitive load. Other crucial factors should be added for comprehensive measures.