• School Mathematics
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.619-632
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• 2013

One area where research is especially needed is their elaboration process and how they elaborate their idea as a group in a mathematical board game re-creation project. In this research, this process was named 'Mathematical Elaboration Process'. The purpose of this research is to understand how the gifted children elaborate their idea in a small group, and which idea can be chosen for a new board game when they are exposed to a project for making new mathematical board games using the what-if-not strategy. One of the gifted children's classes was chosen in which there were twenty students, and the class was composed of four groups in an elementary school in Korea. The researcher presented a series of re-creation game projects to them during the course of five weeks. To interpret their process of elaborating, the communication of the gifted students was recorded and transcribed. Students' elaboration processes were constructed through the interaction of both the mathematical route and the non-mathematical route. In the mathematical route, there were three routes; favorable thoughts, unfavorable thoughts and a neutral route. Favorable thoughts was concluded as 'Accepting', unfavorable thoughts resulted in 'Rejecting', and finally, the neutral route lead to a 'non-mathematical route'. Mainly, in a mathematical route, the reason of accepting the rule was mathematical thinking and logical reasons. The gifted children also show four categorized non-mathematical reactions when they re-created a mathematical board game; Inconsistency, Liking, Social Proof and Authority.