• The Mathematical Education
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.315-329
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• 2007

The concepts of ratio, rate, and proportion are used in everyday life and are also applied to many disciplines such as mathematics and science. Proportional reasoning is known as one of the pivotal ideas in school mathematics because it links elementary ideas to deeper concepts of mathematics and science. However, previous research has shown that it is difficult for students to recognize the proportionality in contextualized situations. The purpose of this study is to understand how the mathematical concept in the middle school mathematics curriculum is connected with ratio, rate, and proportion and to investigate the characteristics of proportional reasoning through analyzing the concept including ratio, rate, and proportion on the middle school mathematics curriculum. This study also examines mathematical concepts (direct proportion, slope, and similarity) presented in a middle school textbook by exploring diverse interpretations among ratio, rate, and proportion and by comparing findings from literature on proportional reasoning. Our textbook analysis indicated that mechanical formal were emphasized in problems connected with ratio, rate, and proportion. Also, there were limited contextualizations of problems and tasks in the textbook so that it might not be enough to develop students' proportional reasoning.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.437-449
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• 2009

The purpose of the study is to meta-analyze research results on Korean students' logical thinking ability. The results of meta-analysis on the research studies between the year 1980 and the year 2000 show that about 40-50% of Korean middle school students have conservation reasoning, proportional reasoning and combinatorial reasoning abilities, and that about 25-30% of them have control of variables and probability reasoning abilities. In addition, only 8% of the Korean middle-school students have correlational ability. When comparing their logical thinking ability results with those of Japanese and American middle-school students, The ratio (32.6%) of Korean middle-school students who have formal thought ability is a little higher than that of American students (30.6%), but much lower than that of Japanese students (50.1%).

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.263-287
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• 2010

The purposes of the study were to investigate how children define a triangle, their reasoning types in identifying examples and non-examples of a triangle, and the relationship between their reasoning types and geometrical levels. Twenty-nine students consisted of 3th to 6th grades were involved in the study. Using the van Hiele levels of geometrical thought, children's reasoning types for identifying a figure as a triangle or non-triangle were categorized into visual reasoning, reasoning based on the figure's attributes and formal reasoning. The figure's attributes were further divided into critical and non-critical attributes. Most children identified a figure as a triangle or non-triangle based on critical attributes of the figure(e.g. closed figure, three, vertices, straight sides etc.) Some children identified a figure based on non-critical attributes of the figure(e.g. the length of the sides, the measurement of the angles, or the orientation of the figure). Particularly, some children who had lower levels of geometry identified a figure using visual reasoning, taking in the whole shape without considering that the shape is made up of separate components.

• School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.819-838
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• 2016

This research analyzed proportional reasoning abilities of the 5th grade students who learned only the basis of ratio and rate and 6th grade students who also learned proportion and cross product strategy. Data were collected through the proportional reasoning tests and the interviews, and then the achievement of the students and their proportional reasoning strategies were analyzed. In the light of such analytical results, the conclusions are as follows. Firstly, there is not much difference between 5th and 6th grade students in the achievement scores. Secondly, both 5th and 6th graders are less familiar with the geometric, qualitative and comparisons tasks than the other tasks. Thirdly, not only 5th graders but also 6th graders used informal strategies much more than the formal strategy. Fourthly, some students can't come up with other strategies than the cross product strategy. Finally, many students have difficulties in discerning proportional situation and non-proportional situations. This study provided suggestions for improving teaching proportional reasoning in elementary schools in Korea as follows: focusing on letting students use their informal strategies fluently in geometric, qualitative, and comparisons tasks as well as algebraic, quantitative, and missing value tasks focusing on the concept of ratio and proportion instead of enforcing the formal strategy.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.110-117
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• 2012

A product family design has received much attention over the last several decades, since a product family-based development shortens lead-times and reduces cost, as well as increases efficiency and effectiveness of the product realization process. It is challenging work, however, to define the product family design in the heterogeneous product development environments, due to myriads of products related information described in different ways across products in any companies. In this paper, we provided a way of defining product family design framework using formal concept analysis and ontology language. Based on this, the specific product family can be derived by ontological reasoning, and the new product concept can be also expanded in the framework. The proposed framework is formalized using OWL (Web Ontology Language) and implemented in $Prot{\acute{e}}g{\acute{e}}$. Actual product family design algorithm is carried out using FaCT++ engine, a plug-in to $Prot{\acute{e}}g{\acute{e}}$, and the benefits of the proposed method are also demonstrated through a case study.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.791-810
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• 2017

This study explored the possibility of using visual models in teaching proportional reasoning based on the review of previous studies. Many studies on proportional reasoning emphasize that students tend to simply apply formal procedures without understanding the meaning behind them and that using visual models may be an alternative to help students develop informal strategies and proportional reasoning. Given these, we re-constructed and implemented the unit of a textbook to teach sixth graders proportional reasoning with ratio table, double number line, and double tape diagram. The results of this study showed that such visual models helped students understand the meaning of proportion, explore the properties of proportion, and solve proportional problems. However, several difficulties that students experienced in using the visual models led us to suggest cautionary notes when to teach proportional reasoning with visual models. As such, this study is expected to provide empirical information for textbook developers and teachers who teach proportional reasoning with visual models.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.21-58
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• 2015

The aim of this study is to look into the didactical background for teaching proportional reasoning in elementary school mathematics and offer suggestions to improve teaching proportional reasoning in the future. In order to attain these purposes, this study extracted and examined key ideas with respect to the didactical background on teaching proportional reasoning through a theoretical consideration regarding various studies on proportional reasoning. Based on such examination, this study compared and analyzed textbooks used in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. In the light of such theoretical consideration and analytical results, this study provided suggestions for improving teaching proportional reasoning in elementary schools in Korea as follows: giving much weight on proportional reasoning, emphasizing multiplicative comparison and discerning between additive comparison and multiplicative comparison, underlining the ratio concept as an equivalent relation, balancing between comparisons tasks and missing value tasks inclusive of quantitative and qualitative, algebraic and geometrical aspects, emphasizing informal strategies of students before teaching cross-product method, and utilizing informal and pre-formal models actively.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.141-150
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• 2000

There are three significant drawbacks in extant fuzzy rule-based expert system languages. First, they lack the functionality of composite object inference. Second, they do not support fuzzy reasoning semantically easy to understand and conceptually simple to use. Third, knowledge representation and reasoning style of their model have a great semantic gap with those of current database models. Therefore, it is very difficult for the two models to be seamlessly integrated with each other. This paper provides the formal specification of a fuzzy object inference model to solve the three drawbacks. GIS(Geographic Information System) application domain is used to demonstrate that our model naturally models complex GIS information in terms of composite objects and successfully performs fuzzy inference between them.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.245-261
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• 1999

Proof is an essential characteristic of mathematics and as such should be a key component in mathematics education. But, teaching proof in school mathematics have been unsuccessful for many students. The traditional approach to proofs stresses formal logic and rigorous proof. Thus, most students have difficulties of the concept of proof and students' experiences with proof do not seem meaningful to them. However, different views of proof were asserted in the reassessment of the foundations of mathematics and the nature of mathematical truth. These different views of justification need to be reflected in demonstrative geometry classes. The purpose of this study is to characterize the types of students' justification in demonstrative geometry classes taught using dynamic software. The types of justification can be organized into three categories : empirical justification, deductive justification, and authoritarian justification. Empirical justification are based on evidence from examples, whereas deductive justification are based logical reasoning. If we assume that a strong understanding of demonstrative geometry is shown when empirical justification and deductive justification coexist and benefit from each other, then students' justification should not only some empirical basis but also use chains of deductive reasoning. Thus, interaction between empirical and deductive justification is important. Dynamic geometry software can be used to design the approach to justification that can be successful in moving students toward meaningful justification of ideas. Interactive geometry software can connect visual and empirical justification to higher levels of geometric justification with logical arguments in formal proof.

• Proceedings of the Korea Society for Industrial Systems Conference
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• 2001.05a
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• pp.184-197
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• 2001

In this paper, we provide the formal specification of a fuzzy object inference language and propose ICOT(Integrated C-Object Tool) as its implementation for knowledge-based programming with the disjunctive fuzzy information. The novelty of our model is that it seamlessly combines object inference and fuzzy reasoning into a unified framework without compromising a compatibility with extant databases, especially object-relational ones. In this model most of the object-oriented paradigm is successfully expressed in terms of relational constructs, tailoring fuzzy reasoning style to be well suited to the framework of the databases. It turns out to be useful in preserving its conceptual simplicity as well, since simple-to-use is one of important criteria in designing the databases. Additionally this model considerably enhanced the semantic expressiveness of data allowing disjunctive fuzzy information.