• School Mathematics
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.447-466
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• 2007

Math education in schools have to enable students to understand the importance of math and nurture the capacity to resolve various problems in daily life with reasoning, which is therefore, always applicable to the actual world. Proportional reasoning capacity is being often used in daily life, and some kind of unit is not fixed. So students are considering it very difficult. This study looks into the difficulties that students have in proportional reasoning, what kind of problem solving strategy is being used, what the problems are in current textbooks, etc. Based on this, it tried to check the concept changes in students' proportional reasoning by developing the instruction program for 'proportional expression' unit in the 6th grade. Based on the results, this study analyzes the features of proportional reasoning instruction programs and the instruction results. Also it analyzes in-advance & after examination papers of the experimental class and comparison class to contribute to the instruction method and instruction contents improvement of 'proportional expression' unit.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.501-520
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• 2019

This study compared and analyzed Korean, American, Singaporean, and Japanese middle school mathematics curriculum standards and the learning contents in statistics. Through a comparative analysis of the curriculums of these four countries, I found several overall features and differences between the curriculums. First, all four countries emphasized statistical education in a real-life context. Second, all four countries emphasized the use of technological tools. Third, there is a middle school grade in which only Korea does not deal with statistical domains. Fourth, the statistical areas of the United States, Singapore, and Japan focused on identifying trends or variability in data distribution. Fifth, I have found some contents that only Korea does not deal with. Based on this, the following recommendations were developed for the development of the next curriculum and new textbooks in Korea. First, the statistics curriculum should be changed from one that focuses on understanding statistical concepts to one that focuses on statistical activity that utilizes these concepts. Second, in terms of middle school statistical curriculum contents, the addition of interquartile range (IQR) and box plots as learning contents should be considered. IQR and box plots are simple and practical techniques for the comparison of multiple sets of data that can be easily learned and drawn by middle school level students and applied to real-life-related statistical data to expand statistical literacy. Through this study, it is suggested that IQR and box plots need to be included in the statistical curriculum of middle schools in Korea.