• The Mathematical Education
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.155-168
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• 2008

The theory of representation, which has been an important topic of epistemology, has long history of study. But it has diverse meaning according to the fields of argument. In this paper the author set the meaning of mathematical representation as the interrelation of internal and external representations. With this concept, the following items were studied. 1. Survey on the concepts of mathematical representations. 2. Investigation of pedagogical significance of the mathematical representations, taking into account the characteristics of school mathematics. 3. Recommendation of principles for teaching representation to cope with the problems that are related with cause of disliking each domain of the secondary school mathematics. This study is expected to enable the development of teaching methods to help students strengthening their ability to comprehend mathematical sentences.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.59-71
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• 1998

Recently, most classrooms in Korea are fully equipped with multimedia environments such as a powerful pentium pc, a 43″large sized TV, and so on through the third renovation of classroom environments. However, there is not much software teachers can use directly in their teaching. Even with existing software such as GSP, and Mathematica, it turns out that it doesn####t fit well in a large number of students in classrooms and with all written in English. The study is to analyze the characteristics of problem-solving process and to develop a computer program which integrates the instruction of problem solving into a regular math program in areas of quadratic functions and ellipses. Problem Solving in this study included two sessions: 1) Learning of basic facts, concepts, and principles; 2) problem solving with problem contexts. In the former, the program was constructed based on the definitions of concepts so that students can explore, conjecture, and discover such mathematical ideas as basic facts, concepts, and principles. In the latter, the Polya#s 4 phases of problem-solving process contributed to designing of the program. In understanding of a problem, the program enhanced students#### understanding with multiple, dynamic representations of the problem using visualization. The strategies used in making a plan were collecting data, using pictures, inductive, and deductive reasoning, and creative reasoning to develop abstract thinking. In carrying out the plan, students can solve the problem according to their strategies they planned in the previous phase. In looking back, the program is very useful to provide students an opportunity to reflect problem-solving process, generalize their solution and create a new in-depth problem. This program was well matched with the dynamic and oscillation Polya#s problem-solving process. Moreover, students can facilitate their motivation to solve a problem with dynamic, multiple representations of the problem and become a powerful problem solve with confidence within an interactive computer environment. As a follow-up study, it is recommended to research the effect of the program in classrooms.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.419-442
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• 2009

This study was to find the difficulties students faced in their mathematical learning and to identify the instructional dimensions a teacher provided for the students from multi-cultural background. Since the study was focused on the process of students' learning, the qualitative method was chosen through clinical interviews with 2 students in a total of 11 units which played a role of compensating their learning of mathematics as an extra curriculum. The students solved the computational problems relying on formal procedure without understanding of concepts and principles and solved the word problems based on own interpretation of certain words without semantic comprehension out of math sentences. As the instructional dimensions of teaching mathematics, tasks, a tool and classroom norm were found in the activities they performed. For the tasks, situated tasks, challenging tasks, tasks with lack of conditions, and open-ended exploratory tasks were used. As the tool, pictorial representations were very useful to describe their ideas. Finally, as the classroom norm, consider equity for everyone, and cooperate and encourage each other were found.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.637-646
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• 2003

Visual representation is very important topic in Mathematics Education since it fosters understanding of Mathematical concepts, principles and rules and helps to solve the problem. So, the purpose of this paper is to analyze and clarify the various meaning and roles about the visual representation. For this purpose, I examine the status of the visual representation. Since the visual representation has the roles of creatively mathematical activity, we emphasize the using of the visual representation in teaching and learning. Next, I examine the errors in relation to the visual representation which come from limitation of the visual representation. It suggests that students have to know conceptual meaning of the visual representation when they use the visual representation. Finally, I suggest some examples of problem solving via the visual representation. This examples clarify that the visual representation gives the clues and solution of problem solving. Students can apprehend intuitively and easily the mathematical concepts, principles and rules using the visual representation because of its properties of finiteness and concreteness. So, mathematics teachers create the various visual representations and show students them. Moreover, mathematics teachers ask students to design the visual representation and teach students to understand the conceptual meaning of the visual representation.