The aim of this study was to understand how students achieved the concepts of function and the role of representation in visualizing function when blog was used for the functional visualization as a tool, where the internet java graphic calculator was...
The aim of this study was to understand how students achieved the concepts of function and the role of representation in visualizing function when blog was used for the functional visualization as a tool, where the internet java graphic calculator was installed.
In this study, 3 middle school students without prior knowledge of quadratic functions participated in learning about quadratic functions presented in the form of functional formulas and graphs on the internet java graphic calculator. Each instructional material was confined to a single web page, consisting of 14-units. The study was performed entirely through the blog without any assistance from a teacher.
The abstraction of concepts of Piaget who believed that abstraction was a premise of all new knowledge was taken into account as the framework of the study. Piaget's reflective abstraction is obtained through three stages, empirical abstraction, reflective abstraction, and reflection. The stage of reflective abstraction can be summarized as follows. The first stage, empirical abstraction is directly obtained through the senses. The second stage is representation, which involves reflecting on the results of empirical abstraction and subjecting them to cognitive processes. The last stage is reflection. The following conclusions were found by analyzing the results according to Piaget's reflective abstraction which Jiang(1993) scrutinized.
The first conclusion was that even though the development of the concepts of function through the blog might not be sufficient enough for a full understanding of the quadratic function, if the instructional material was presented in a manner in which Piaget's empirical abstraction could be transformed into reflective abstraction, the final aim of learning mathematical concepts could be accomplished. In this study, in the process of the Jiang's 4-Mode(Naive-intuitive, Empirical-intuitive, Initial-systematic, Operational-systematic Mode), of the 5 students who participated in this study, only one student was able to arrive at the third stage(Initial-systematic Mode), whereas, the other four arrived at the second stage(Empirical-intuitive Mode).
The second conclusion was that the representations of graphs and functional formulas through visualizing functions using the internet java graphic calculator enables students to approach the concept of quadratic functions easily, because it led them to observe the relationships between these representations.
The processes of finding the common characteristics between various graphs and expressing them in functional formulas made intuitive understanding of the relation between these two representations much easier and furthermore demonstrated the possibility of improvement for comprehending the relationship between graphs and functional formulas in the classroom.
In summary, if students can be strategically assisted in forming reflective abstraction by guiding them to reflectively thinking on an interactive web space, a visualization tool, they can form mathematical concepts much more effectively. It is necessary to research enough about how to implement such techniques into the present curriculum in order to provide the direction to promote understanding of mathematical concepts for the future called the digital textbooks' era.