Open Mathematical Education Notes

65-104

Authors: Sergei Abramovich, Jonathan Burns, Scott Campbell and Arcadii Z. Grinshpan

The paper shows that mathematics as an applied tool – when used consistently at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational levels – has true potential to improve the teaching of the subject matter, increase students’ interest in STEM disciplines, and bridge the gap between the formal and engineering approaches to mathematics education. The adoption of the action learning techniques that have successfully been used in academia in the contexts of business management, social sciences, and teacher development is proposed as signature pedagogy for K-20 mathematics education. The appropriate use of technology and hands-on activities as an enhancement of mathematical applications to real-life projects of different degrees of complexity is discussed. Many examples are given.

19-39

Authors: María Ángeles Navarro and Pedro Pérez Carreras

Starting with an intuitive understanding of the idea of one-to-one correspondence via counting collections, we develop the notion of functional relationship in discrete and continuous settings. This concept image build up enables us to pursue the study of growth and rate of growth in the context of sequences and simple functions given by analytic expressions as well as the study under which conditions growth and its rate coincide, triggering the appearance of the number e as an added bonus. Under the constructivist perspective which focuses in individual thinking and the continuing act of creating learning opportunities, we shall use a carefully planned semi-structured Socratic interview in conjunction with a computer-generated tool. The dialog tests the solidity of those ideas and arguments, which students bring and that are based in prior educative experiences, when challenged to dig out and verbalize their own beliefs and questioning techniques try to ease the difficulties most students have with concept translations to and from verbal representations (some more considerable than others) which are the key to understanding and communicating effectively. The tool, apart from easing the burden of calculations, promotes higher levels of engagement encouraging students‟ participation, provides them with numerical data and visual realizations which, paradoxically as it may sound, facilitate abstraction by linking the processes of discovery, understanding and conceptualization.