• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.717-754
• /
• 2015

As a design research, this study aims to identify students' collaborative problems solving patterns using the Wiki and design factors triggering MKB(mathematical knowledge building) in virtual environment. For 70 days, 14 Korean secondary gifted students, who enrolled in calculus II courses in one of gifted institutions in Korea, solved 10 math problems together using the Wiki. In this study, I considered five design factors; motivation, practice of LaTeX, norms of participation, epistemic agency, and two types of educational settings. The primary pattern emergent in students' collaborative problem solving process is identified as 'solutions and refutations' along the double helix consisting of the constructive line and the critical line, which is very similar to the pattern of 'Conjectures and Refutations'(Lakatos, 1976). Despite that most participants had difficulty in using LaTeX for mathematical expressions, this study shows that Wikis are valuable tools for providing Korean secondary students opportunities to learn social virtue such as humility and courage (Lampert, 1990), which is considered to be have been neglected in Korean educational environment but is emphasized as precious for doing mathematics in the field of mathematics education.

• School Mathematics
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.423-446
• /
• 2015

This study aims to look into the characteristics of argumentation in the task context of 'Monty Hall problem' at a high school probability class. As a result of an analysis of classroom discourses on the argumentation between teachers and second-year students in one upper level class in high school using Toulmin's argument pattern, it was found that it would be important to create a task context and a safe classroom culture in which the students could ask questions and refute them in order to make it an argument-centered discourse community. In addition, through the argumentation of solving complex problems together, the students could be further engaged in the class, and the actual empirical context enriched the understanding of concepts. However, reasoning in argumentation was mostly not a statistical one, but a mathematical one centered around probability problem-solving. Through these results of the study, it was noted that the teachers should help the students actively participate in argumentation through the task context and question, and an understanding of a statistical reasoning of interpreting the context would be necessary in order to induce their thinking and reasoning about probability and statistics.