Open Mathematical Education Notes

1-15

Authors: Ilhan M. Izmirli

If one were to sum up the major premise embodying this paper in one paradigmatic sentence, it would have to be the following: integrating the historic development of mathematical concepts in the educational practice of mathematics plays a vital role in the cognitive development of students. For, by following the path of these developments, some of which have instigated bona fide transformations in the history of mathematics and even of sciences in general, the students are not only exposed to creative problem solving techniques, but also to many false starts, incorrect solutions, and flawed and even erroneous theories, and consequently, to the essentially non-absolutist nature of mathematical research. As a matter of fact, decades ago Bradis, Minkovskii, and Kharcheva (1963) showed that a unique and effective system for teaching mathematical reasoning was to lead students toward a clearly false conclusion and then make them analyze the lapses. In this paper we will present the results of an extensive study conducted on two hundred nineteen college students to show that integrating history-based research projects in the undergraduate curriculum significantly improves students’ understanding of and attitudes towards mathematics

31-41

Authors: Zlatan Marković and Daniel A. Romano

In the Republic of Srpska elementary school system there no any official evaluation of mathematics education outcome exists. This work is a part of our broader research on students’ geometrics knowledge in the primary schools. The goal is to investigate geometric competencies of children from six to ten years old at the elementary school level in the Republic of Srpska, Bosnia & Herzegovina. Towards this end, the authors offered geometric tasks about parallelograms to a small number (15) of elementary school students via interviews. In this paper, some selected results are presented with the focus on students’ conceptualization of geometric shapes. The emphasis of this study is on classification, identifying differences, and defining geometric objects.