1,721,004 research outputs found

    Matematica e oggetti concreti: alcuni limiti della costruzione geometrica della radice di 2 come diagonale di un cortile quadrato

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    In questo breve lavoro, dedicato senza alcuna pretesa ma con il massimo affetto a Bruno D’Amore in occasione del convegno in suo onore, discuto alcune criticità da un punto di vista didattico legate alla scelta di un esempio concreto per l’introduzione dei numeri irrazionali nella scuola secondaria di secondo grado, facendo riferimento alla letteratura di ricerca e a una ricerca in cui sono stati intervistati insegnanti di matematica di tale livello scolastico con diversa formazione iniziale e in servizio.In this brief paper, written with no ambitions but great affection for Bruno D’Amore in occasion of the conference organized for him, I discuss some critical aspects of using concrete examples to introduce irrational numbers in the high school, taking in account results from the literature and from a research in which mathematics high school teachers with different backgrounds have been interviewed

    Conceptual Change in Group Discussion: An Exploratory Study

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    In this contribution, we discuss conceptual change in mathematics, as it takes place during social interaction in group-work in the classroom. We rely on a socio-cultural perspective, according to which the learning of mathematics takes place in a social context (Radford, 2006, 2011). We argue that conceptual change, as part of mathematics learning, may be a social act deeply related to the subjectivities of students involved in group activity. Students’ interactions are analyzed by means of an integrated frame, encompassing the construct of subjectification (Radford, 2008), identity (Sfard & Prusak, 2005) and rational behavior (Boero & Morselli, 2009). The analysis shows that, during the group activity, there is a continuous interplay between social interaction and individual identity; each student, by means of his rationality, engages in the construction of coherent structures. Conversely, each individual contributes to the construction of group coherent structures. Thus, a sort of “group-coherence” turns out to be a necessity in the subjectification process. In both processes, (change at individual level and construction of a group coherence) communicative rationality plays a key rol

    Teaching and Learning Mathematics. Some past and current approaches to mathematics education

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    Today mathematics education arouses the interest of various subjects: not only insiders, such as mathematicians, teachers, pedagogists, philosophers, and psychologists, but also policy makers and entrepreneurs. Although the debate on mathematics education is lively and multi-faceted, it is often its socio-economic impact, more than other aspects, that comes under the spotlight. Mathematical competence, problem solving, mathematical skills required for technological development and in everyday life are indeed the keywords of mathematics education today. However, looking into the past or to the future, other issues and new challenges are brought into light, and we are led to recognize some surprising resemblances between the approaches in different historical periods or even, mutatis mutandis, some common structures or similar concerns. The contributions collected in this volume present different perspectives (past and present) on mathematics education. Some contemporary theories are taken into account and analyzed in order to bring out and clarify the key points of the current debates and stimulate discussion in view of future developments. Since the topic is complex and involves different disciplinary areas, we have invited mathematicians, historians of mathematics, psychologists, philosophers and researchers concerned with these issues to lead us in the exploration of the different aspects of mathematics education

    Identity and rationality in group discussion: An exploratory study

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    In this contribution we study group work in mathematics adopting a socio-cultural perspective and combining two theoretical lenses: the construct of identity and that of rational behavior. More specifically, we show how individual identity and dimensions of rationality in interaction may influence conceptual change. Data analysis is performed on excerpts from a group work (age of the students: 12) on negative numbers

    Content Analysis for Recognizing Threads in Conceptual Change Research

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    Since its origins - the publication of the milestone paper of Posner, Strike, Hewson and Gertzog in 1982 - conceptual change has been one of the main research issues in science education. The literature on conceptual change is wide and some researchers have already tried to identify the main threads in this research strand. In some review papers the main articles have been classified according to different criteria, like “fragmentation and coherence”. Our work stems from these overview papers and aims at contributing to the literature review on conceptual change research. In particular, we will present and discuss a new method for identifying research threads or currents of thought. The analysis of the collection uses both a quantitative linguistic software and an algorithm inspired by the classical information retrieval procedure LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). The selection of the terms to build the reference dictionary needed for the algorithm is semi-automatic. In the paper, we discuss the extent to which such software and algorithm are useful for (i) aggregating and classifying similar papers in terms of topics; and (ii) checking the coherence between the results of the automatic classification procedure and the effective differences among the papers, in order to visualize more deeply the trends in conceptual change research
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