• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.173-188
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• 2016

Research on didactic transposition in mathematics education has about 25-year and about 35-year long history in and out of Korea, respectively. This study attempts to investigate in trends of those research and to suggest tasks needed to be tackled. Major findings are followed. First, studies done in Korea tended to focus on the application of the didactic transposition theory for proving its effectiveness in understanding mathematics textbooks and mathematics lessons in-depth. It is suggested to conduct meta-analysis of the accumulated results or analysis of further applications of the didactic transposition theory to improve theoretical aspects of didactic transposition. Second, new categories for extreme teaching phenomenon were found and new typology in knowledge to be considered in the didactic transposition was developed in a few studies done in other subject matter education. Application of these to mathematics education may enhance research in didactic transposition of mathematical knowledge. Third, praxeology or a complex of praxeology for Korean school mathematics should be explored as did in other countries. Fourth, there have been rich attempts to link perspectives in didactic transposition to other perspectives or fields such as anthropology, human and education in technology era, praxeology theory in economics, epistemology in other countries but not in Korea. It is suggested to extend the scope of discussion on didactic transposition and to relate various concepts given in other disciplines. Fifth, clarification or negotiation of meaning for the main terms used in the discussion on didactic transposition such as personalization, contextualization, depersonalization, decontextualization, Topaze Effect, Meta-Cognitive Shift is suggested by comparing researchers' various descriptions or uses of the terms.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.301-318
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• 2017

This paper explores students' question generation process and their study in small group discussion. The research is based on Anthropological Theory of the Didactic developed by Chevallard. He argues that the savior (knowledge) we are dealing with at school is based on a paradigm that we prevail over whether we 'learn' or 'study' socially. In other words, we haven't provided students with autonomous research and learning opportunities under 'the dominant paradigm of visiting works'. As an alternative, he suggests that we should move on to a new didactic paradigm for 'questioning the world a question', and proposes the Study and Research Courses (SRC) as its pedagogical structure. This study explores the SRC structure of small group activities in solving ill-structured problems. In order to explore the SRC structure generated in the small group discussion, one middle school teacher and 7 middle school students participated in this study. The students were divided into two groups with 4 students and 3 students. The teacher conducted the lesson with ill-structured problems provided by researchers. We collected students' presentation materials and classroom video records, and then analyzed based on SRC structure. As a result, we have identified that students were able to focus on the valuable information they needed to explore. We found that the nature of the questions generated by students focused on details more than the whole of the problem. In the SRC course, we also found pattern of a small group discussion. In other words, they generated questions relatively personally, but sought answer cooperatively. This study identified the possibility of SRC as a tool to provide a holistic learning mode of small group discussions in small class, which bring about future mathematics classrooms. This study is meaningful to investigate how students develop their own mathematical inquiry process through self-directed learning, learner-specific curriculum are emphasized and the paradigm shift is required.