• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.95-120
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• 2011

Modern society is the age of the information. As new information is springing up every day and pace of change becomes faster, the importance of communication skills is growing. The recent mathematics education is recognized as not a fragmentary mathematical knowledge or results of the learning, but a procedure of mathematical thinking, and the effective expression skill of their mathematical ideas and the ability to forward it to others are regarded very serious. As the method of mathematics evaluation, mathematical essay is introduced to replace the existing multiple-choice written test. This method assess the ability which students have, that express the reorganized knowledge and information according to given situation by themselves. Ultimately, it is expected to help that students get the higher order thinking skills such as logical thinking and creativity. However, definition of elementary mathematical essay is unclear, and proper teaching methods is lacking for each stage of elementary school students. Thus, in this paper, I have defined the concept of elementary mathematical essay and made a foundation of elementary mathematical essay research, then researched about the effective utilization of elementary mathematical essay using school education. Also elementary mathematical essay teaching-learning materials is developed and applied to analyzed the students' responses. Using this program, in real elementary school education, the implications has deduced.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.149-167
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• 2009

This study was aimed to examine problem-solving ability of fifth graders on two types of mathematical essay problems, and to analyze the process of mathematical justification in solving the essay problems. For this purpose, a total of 14 mathematical essay problems were developed, in which half of the items were single tasks and the other half were data-provided tasks. Sixteen students with higher academic achievements in mathematics and the Korean language were chosen, and were given to solve the mathematical essay problems individually. They then were asked to justify their solution methods in groups of 4 and to reach a consensus through negotiation among group members. Students were good at understanding the given single tasks but they often revealed lack of logical thinking and representation. They also tended to use everyday language rather than mathematical language in explaining their solution processes. Some students experienced difficulty in understanding the meaning of data in the essay problems. With regard to mathematical justification, students employed more internal justification by experience or mathematical logic than external justification by authority. Given this, this paper includes implications for teachers on how they need to teach mathematics in order to foster students' logical thinking and communication.