• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.717-746
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• 2014

The study aimed to explore how to improve mathematical thinking through metacognitive learning by stressing metacognitive abilities as a core strategy to increase mathematical creativity and problem-solving abilities. Theoretical exploration was followed by an analysis of correlations between metacognitive abilities and various ways of mathematical thinking. Various metacognitive teaching and learning methods used by many teachers at school were integrated for sharing. Also, the methods of learning application and assessment of metacognitive thinking were explored. The results are as follows: First, metacognitive abilities were positively related to 'reasoning, communication, creative problem solving and commitment' with direct and indirect effects on mathematical thinking. Second, various megacognitive ability-applied teaching and learning methods had positive impacts on definitive areas such as 'anxiety over Mathematics, self-efficacy, learning habit, interest, confidence and trust' as well as cognitive areas such as 'learning performance, reasoning, problem solving, metacognitive ability, communication and expression', which is a result applicable to top, middle and low-performance students at primary and secondary education facilities. Third, 'metacognitive activities, metaproblem-solving process, personal strength and weakness management project, metacognitive notes, observation tables and metacognitive checklists' for metacognitive learning were suggested as alternatives to performance assessment covering problem-solving and thinking processes. Various metacognitive learning methods helped to improve creative and systemic problem solving and increase mathematical thinking. They did not only imitate uniform problem-solving methods suggested by a teacher but also induced direct experiences of mathematical thinking as well as adjustment and control of the thinking process. The study will help teachers recognize the importance of metacognition, devise and apply teaching or learning models for their teaching environments, improving students' metacognitive ability as well as mathematical and creative thinking.

• School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.159-173
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• 2016

In real educational field, there are cases that concrete problematic situations are introduced after abstract concepts are taught on the contrary to process that abstract from concrete contexts. In other words, there are cases that abstract knowledge has to be concreted. Freudenthal expresses this situation to antidogmatical inversion and indicates negative opinion. However, it is open to doubt that every class situation can proceed to abstract that begins from concrete situations or concrete materials. This study has done a comparative analysis in difference of mathematical thinking between a process that builds abstract context after being abstracted from concrete materials and that concretes abstract concepts to concrete situations and attempts to examine educational implication. For this, this study analyzed the mathematical thinking in the abstract process of concrete materials by manipulating AiC analysis tools. Based on the AiC analysis tools, this study analyzed mathematical thinking in the concrete process of abstract concept by using the way this researcher came up with. This study results that these two processes have opposite learning flow each other and significant mathematical thinking can be induced from concrete process of abstract knowledge as well as abstraction of concrete materials.

• School Mathematics
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.563-584
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• 2010

This study is aimed at analysing the mathematical thinking processes based on image by the mathematically gifted. For this, the 'Splitting a Tetrahedron' Task was used and mathematical thinking of the two middle school students were investigated. One of them deduced how many tetrahedral and octahedral were there when a tetrahedra was splitted by the surfaces which were parallel to each face of the tetrahedra without using any physical material. The other one solved the task using physical material and invented new images. A concrete image, indexical image and symbolic image were founded and the various roles of images could be confirmed.

• 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.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.58 no.3
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• pp.459-481
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• 2019

This study aims to investigate students' statistical thinking through statistical processes in different instructional settings: Teacher-centered instruction vs. student-centered learning. We first developed instructional materials that allowed students to experience all the processes of statistics, including data collection, data analysis, data representation, and interpretation of the results. Using the instructional materials for four classes, we collected and analyzed the data from 57 seventh graders' discourse and artifacts from two different instructional settings using the analytic framework generated on the basis of literature review. The results showed that students felt difficulty particularly in the process of data collection and graph representations. In addition, even though data description has been heavily emphasized for data analysis in statistics education, it is surprisingly discovered that students had a hard time to understand the relationship between data and representations. Also, there were relationships between students' statistical thinking and instructional settings. Even though both groups of students showed difficulty in data collection and graph representations of the data, there were significant differences between the groups in terms of their performance. Whereas students from student-centered learning class outperformed in making decisions considering verification and justification, students from teacher-centered lecture class did better in problems requiring accuracy than the counterpart. The results from the study provide meaningful implications on developing curriculum and instructional methods for statistics education.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.53 no.3
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• pp.383-397
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• 2014

This study aims to explore secondary students' thinking while doing proof in geometry. Two secondary students were interviewed and the interview data were analyzed. The results of the analysis suggest that the two students similarly showed as follows: a) tendencies to use the rules of congruent and similar triangles to solve a given problem, b) being confused about the rules of similar and congruent triangles, and c) being confused about the definitions, partition and hierarchical classification of quadrilaterals. Also, the results revealed that a relatively low achieving student has tendency to rely on intuitive information such as visual representations.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.365-385
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• 2017

This study aims to explore mathematics teachers' pedagogical design capacity. For this purpose, we googled and collected 327 lesson plans for middle-school mathematics and investigated how mathematics teachers plan and design their mathematics lessons through the format and structures, objectives and mathematical tasks, anticipation for students' thinking, and assessment and technology use. The findings from the data analysis suggest as follows: a) all the lesson plans are structured in a very similar way; b) the lesson plans seem to be based on the textbooks exclusively, that is, the mathematical tasks and flow is strictly followed and kept in the lesson plans in the way the textbooks suggested; c) the lesson plans do not include any evidence of what teachers anticipate for students' thinking and would do to resolve the students' issues; and d) the lesson plans do not contain any specific plans to assess students' thinking processes and reasoning qualitatively, and not intend to use technology in order to promote effective teaching and meaningful understanding.

• Research in Mathematical Education
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.45-58
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• 2001

This study sheds light on the importance of developing creativity in mathematics class by examining the theoretical base of creativity and its relationship to mathematics. The study also reviewed the realities of developing creativity in mathematics courses, and it observed and analyzed the processes in which students and teachers solve the mathematics problems. By doing so, the study examined creative abilities of both students and teachers and suggests what teachers can do to tap the potential of the student. The subjects of the study are two groups of students and one group of mathematics teachers. These groups were required to solve a particular problems. The grading was made based on the mathematical creativity factors. There were marked differences in the ways of the solutions between of the student groups and the teacher group. It was clear that the teachers\\` thinking was limited to routine approaches in solving the given problems. In particular, there was a serious gap in the area of originality. As can be seen from the problem analysis by groups, there was a meaningful difference between the creativity factors of students and those of teachers. This study presented research findings obtained from students who were guided to freely express their creativity under encouragement and concern of their teachers. Thus, teachers should make an effort to break from their routine thinking processes and fixed ideas. In addition, teaching methods and contents should emphasize on development of creativity. Such efforts will surely lead to an outcome that is beneficial to students.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.99-115
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to look into whether this mathematising learning utilizing realistic context has an effect on the mathematical thinking. To solve the above problem, two 5th grade classes of D Elementary School in Seoul were selected for performing necessary experiments with one class designated as an experimental group and the other class as a comparative group. Throughout 17 times for six weeks, the comparative group was educated with general mathematics learning by mathematics and "mathematics practices," while the experimental group was taught mainly with mathematising learning using realistic context. As a result, to start with, in case of the experimental group that conducted the mathematising learning utilizing realistic coherence, in the analogical and developmental thoughts which are mathematical thoughts related to the methods of mathematics, in the thinking of expression and the one of basic character which are mathematical thoughts related to the contents of mathematics, and in the thinking of operation, the average points were improved more than the comparative group, also having statistically significant differences. The study suggested that it is necessary to conduct subsequent studies that can verify by expanding to each grade, sex and region, develop teaching methods suitably to the other content domains and purposes of figures, and demonstrate the effects. In addition to those, evaluation tools which can evaluate the mathematical thinking processes of children appropriately and in more diversified methods will have to be developed. Furthermore, in order to maximize mathematising for each group in each mathematising process, it would be necessary to make efforts for further developing realistic problem situations, works and work sheets, which are adequate to the characteristics of the upper and lower groups.

• School Mathematics
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.297-316
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• 2002

In this paper, a teaching unit on series of number sentences with patterns is designed according to Wittmann's perspectives. In this paper, series of number sentences wish patterns means number sentences in which some patterns are contained. especially, seven kinds of number sentences wish patterns are offered as basic materials, and fifteen tasks based on these basic materials are offered. These tasks are for ninth grade students and higher grade students. These tasks heap students to recognize patterns, and to understand mechanism underlying in those patterns by looking for patterns and proving whether these patterns are generally hold. As working on these tasks, students can reinforce meaning of algebraic expression, its manipulation, and concept of number series. Students also can reinforce mathematical thinking such as analogical thinking, deductive thinking, etc. In this point, this teaching unit reveal important objectives, contents, and Principles of mathematics education. This teaching unit can also be rich sources for student's activities. Especially, for each task's level is different, each student's personal ability is considered fully. Since teachers can know mathematical facet, psychological facet, and didactical facet holistically, this teaching unit can offer broad possibilities for experimental studies. SD, this leaching unit can be said to be substantial. In this paper, this leaching unit is not applied in classroom directly. Actually such applying in classroom is suggested as follow-up studies. By appling this teaching unit in various classroom, some effective informations for teaching this teaching unit and some particular phenomenons in those teaching processes can be identified, and this teaching unit can be revised to be better one.