• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.145-174
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• 2009

Based on the thinking that people can understand more clearly when the problem is related with their prior knowledge, the Purpose of this study was to analysis students' informal knowledge, which is constructed through their mathematical experience in the context of real-world situations. According to this purpose, the following research questions were. 1) What is the characteristics of students' informal knowledge about fraction before formal fraction instruction in school? 2) What is the difference of informal knowledge of fraction according to reasoning ability and grade. To investigate these questions, 18 children of first, second and third grade(6 children per each grade) in C elementary school were selected. Among the various concept of fraction, part-whole fraction, quotient fraction, ratio fraction and measure fraction were selected for the interview. I recorded the interview on digital camera, drew up a protocol about interview contents, and analyzed and discussed them after numbering and comment. The conclusions are as follows: First, students already constructed informal knowledge before they learned formal knowledge about fraction. Among students' informal knowledge they knew correct concepts based on formal knowledge, but they also have ideas that would lead to misconceptions. Second, the informal knowledge constructed by children were different according to grade. This is because the informal knowledge is influenced by various experience on learning and everyday life. And the students having higher reasoning ability represented higher levels of knowledge. Third, because children are using informal knowledge from everyday life to learn formal knowledge, we should use these informal knowledge to instruct more efficiently.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2017

The properties of arithmetic are considered as essential to understand the principles of calculation and develop effective strategies for calculation in the elementary school level, thanks to agreement on early algebra. Therefore elementary students' misunderstanding of the properties of arithmetic might cause learning difficulties as well as misconcepts in their following learning processes. This study aims to provide elementary teachers a part of pedagogical content knowledge about the properties of arithmetic and to induce some didactical implications for teaching the properties of arithmetic in the elementary school level. To do this, elementary school mathematics textbooks since the period of the first curriculum were analyzed. These results from analysis show which properties of arithmetic have been taught, when they were taught, and how they were taught. Based on them, some didactical implications were suggested for desirable teaching of the properties of arithmetic.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.83-105
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• 2021

In this paper, we analyzed the misconceptions and errors incurred during factorization learning. We also examined whether online individualization classes had a positive effect on students' mathematical achievement. The experiment was conducted for 4 weeks (16 times in total) on middle school juniors in rural areas of Gyeonggi Province, where the influence of private extra education was small. In the class, the 'Google Classroom' was used as a LMS, the video lecture was uploaded to YouTube, and the teacher interacted with the students through "Zoom" and "Facetalk". In the online class situation, students' assignments and test answers were checked in real time through 'Google Classroom', and immediate feedback was provided to the experimental class group's students. However, for the control group students, feedback was provided only to those who desired. A total of 7 achievement evaluations were conducted in the order of pre-test, formative evaluation (5 times), and post-test to confirm the change in students' ability improvement and achievement. Through the formative evaluation analysis, it was possible to grasp the types of errors and misconceptions that occured during the factorization process. Students' errors were divided into four types: theorem or definition distortion error, functional errors such as calculation, operation, and manipulation, errors that do not verify the solution, and no response. As a result of ANCOVA, the two groups did not show any difference from the 1st to 4th formative assessment. However, the 5th formative assessment and post-test showed statistically significant differences, confirming that online individualization classes contributed to improvemed achievement.

• School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.773-791
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• 2016

Teacher noticing ability has been considered as one of important elements influencing a quality of teaching. Noticing is closely related to teachers' in the moment decision making in a class, and teachers notice things as they create and interact with their classroom setting. Mathematics teachers as an expert should notice students' mathematics learning during a class. The aim of this study was to analyze how mathematics teacher's pre-noticing activity that the teacher anticipated students' typical strategies and difficulties in learning targeted mathematics knowledge and prepared appropriate responses worked in practice. As a result, the teacher conducted three types of noticing in her classes: noticing shaping students' understanding by using students' misconceptions or errors; noticing creating students' learning opportunities based on their prior knowledge; noticing improving students' informal reasoning. This study concluded with discussion about the positive effect of teacher's pre-noticing activity on her actual noticing in practice, as well as implications for teacher education.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.257-275
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• 2021

This study investigated the prospective teacher's noticing of students' mathematical thinking from the perspective of how the prospective teacher pays attention to, interprets, and responds to the student's responses related to variables. The prospective teachers were asked to infer the students' thinking from the variables related to the tasks and suggest feedback accordingly. An analysis of the responses of 26 prospective teachers showed that it was not easy for prospective teachers to pay attention to the misconception of variables and that some of them did not make proper interpretations. Most prospective teachers who did not attend and interpret were found to have failed to provide an appropriate response due to a lack of overall understanding of variables. even though prospective teachers who did proper attend and interpret were found to have failed to respond appropriately due to a lack of empirical knowledge, even with proper attention and interpretation.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.111-135
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• 2023

This study conducted a student-centered inquiry lesson on the similarity of figures using AlgeoMath, with student learning aspects analyzed from a communication perspective. This approach aimed to inform pedagogical implications related to teaching geometric similarity. Through utilizing AlgeoMath, students were able to visually confirm that their chosen figures were similar, experiencing key mathematical concepts such as the ratio of similarity to the area of similar figures, and congruency and similarity conditions of triangles. In the lessons applying this concept, we categorized the features of similarity learning displayed by students, as seen in the communication aspects of their exploratory activities, into 'Understanding similarity ratios', 'Grasping conditions of similarity in triangles', and 'Comparing concepts of congruency and similarity'. Through exploratory activities based on AlgeoMath, students discussed the meaning and mathematical relationships of key concepts related to similarity, such as the ratio of similarity to the area of figures, and the meaning and conditions of congruence and similarity in triangles. By improving misconceptions about the similarity of figures, they were able to develop deeper mathematical understanding. This study revealed that in teaching and learning the geometric similarity using AlgeoMath, obtaining meaningful pedagogical outcome was not solely due to the features of the AlgeoMath environment, but also largely depended on the teacher's guidance and intervention that stimulated students' thinking.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.23-43
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• 2010

This study is to investigate how much highschool students, who have learned functional concepts included in the Middle school math curriculum, understand chapters of the function, to analyze the types of errors which they made in solving the mathematical problems and to look for the proper instructional program to prevent or minimize those ones. On the basis of the result of the above examination, it suggests a classification model for teaching-learning methods and teaching material development The result of this study is as follows. First, Students didn't fully understand the fundamental concept of function and they had tendency to approach the mathematical problems relying on their memory. Second, students got accustomed to conventional math problems too much, so they couldn't distinguish new types of mathematical problems from them sometimes and did faulty reasoning in the problem solving process. Finally, it was very common for students to make errors on calculation and to make technical errors in recognizing mathematical symbols in the problem solving process. When students fully understood the mathematical concepts including a definition of function and learned procedural knowledge of them by themselves, they did not repeat the same errors. Also, explaining the functional concept with a graph related to the function did facilitate their understanding,

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.79-104
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• 2022

It is very important to help students learn by examining how well students solve math problems. Therefore, in this study, four methods(error analysis by problem type, schematization analysis, area graph analysis, and broken line graph analysis) were constructed to analyze how the connectivity between concepts of middle school functions affects the problem solving results. The students' learning situation was visually expressed to enable intuitive understanding. This analysis method makes it easy to understand the evaluation results of students. It can help students learn by understanding their learning situation. It will be useful in mathematics teaching and learning as it can help students to monitor their own problems and make a self-directed learning plan.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.247-264
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• 2021

The area of a trapezoid is an important concept to develop mathematical thinking and competency, but many students tend to understand the formula for the area of a trapezoid instrumentally. A clue to solving these problems could be found in Dienes' theory of learning mathematics and Watson and Mason' concept of example spaces. The purpose of this study is to obtain implications for the teaching and learning of the area of the trapezoid. This study analyzed the example spaces constructed by students in learning the area of a trapezoid based on Dienes' theory of learning mathematics. As a result of the analysis, the example spaces for each stage of math learning constructed by the students were a trapezoidal variation example spaces in the play stage, a common representation example spaces in the comparison-representation stage, and a trapezoidal area formula example spaces in the symbolization-formalization stage. The type, generation, extent, and relevance of examples constituting example spaces were analyzed, and the structure of the example spaces was presented as a map. This study also analyzed general examples, special examples, conventional examples of example spaces, and discussed how to utilize examples and example spaces in teaching and learning the area of a trapezoid. Through this study, it was found that it is appropriate to apply Dienes' theory of learning mathematics to learning the are of a trapezoid, and this study can be a model for learning the area of the trapezoid.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.295-301
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the difficulties of teachers and students on the unit about 'measuring weight.' In this research, we have acquired data about teachers through survey, interview, and self-reflection journals, at the same time we have collected information on the students through survey, assessment test, and interview. We have extracted the difficulties from analysis with constant comparison method. In addition, we have analysed the curriculum of science and mathematics to know the leaning sequence. The analysis had been checked up by experts in science education. The result of the study is as follows: The difficulties of teachers are from the lack of teachers' descriptive knowledge, disorder of conceptual hierarchy in the curriculum, poor experimental instruments, and low psychomotor skill of students. The difficulties of students are from common misconceptions, opaque concepts, lack of manipulation skill, insufficiency of mathematical ability, difficulty of application of principles to the real situation, and lack of problem-solving ability. In addition, teachers have recognized that students face more difficulties in experiment class, while students think that they face more difficulties in conceptual understanding class.