In general, our minds need to contextualise or conceptualise the information it receives in order to proceed them for understanding. In the video, \u2018A private universe\u2019 I will argue that Heather who has little training about astronomy used the information she had to create a mental representation to help her understand how the weather changes. After a formal lesson on astronomy. The way she conceives the weather changes has improved as she was able to replace some wrong mental representation she had with the right ones.<\/p>\n
In fact, based on their prior knowledge, the students need to conceptualise the instruction given by the teacher in order to understand and retain them. Students\u2019 experiences are different as they all have different cognitive approach to learning mostly depending on how information is presented to them.<\/p>\n
Ball (1993) observes that \u201ccurrent proposals for educational improvement are replete with notions of \u2018understanding\u2019 and \u2018community\u2019 \u2013 about building bridges between the experiences of the child and the knowledge of the expert\u201d (p. 374). She then inquires,<\/p>\n
How do I create experiences for my students that connect with what they now know and care about but that also transcend the present? How do I do value their interest and also connect them to ideas and traditions growing out of centuries of mathematics exploration and invention? (p. 375). \u00a0(Paul Cobb, Where Is the Mind? Constructivist and Sociocultural Perspectives on Mathematical Development, p 14). <\/em><\/p>\n I believe we should give time to our students to cognitively process the information they receive. Also, technology is a good mean to help the students to mentally represent their knowledge. In mathematics, my students usually struggle to represent the phase shits of a sinusoidal functions on a graph. \u00a0Their misconceptions are generally cleared out with the use of math software such as Geogebra and Demos, where we can visualize dynamic graphs. Also, graphic display calculators (GDC) is a great tool to make mathematics accessible to the students. When I was in high school we were not allow to use GDC to represent and interpret function, and solve algebraic equation. I used to be confused with function transformations. In math and science, collecting and processing data should be done with fastidious care, in order to avoid errors while solving problems. This stage in problems solving can take quite lots of time while we still need to analyze and interpret our results. GDC helps a lot in reducing the time spend on collecting and processing data and provide good opportunity for analyses and interpretation.<\/p>\n Technological environment helps to develop good understanding of concepts taught in math and science. The challenge remains to find activities rich in skills and experiences to help the students develop their own cognitive approach.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jere, Confrey. A Review of the Research on Student Conceptions in Mathematics, Science, and Programming. Review of research in Education, Vol. 16 (1990), pp. 3-56<\/p>\n Paul, Cobb. Where is the Mind? Constructivist and Sociocultural Perspectives on Mathematical Development. Educational Researcher, Vol 23, No. 7 (Oct., 1994), pp.13-20.<\/p>\n Sara, Hennessy., Pat, Fung., Eileen Scanlon. The Role of the graphic calculator in mediating graphing activity. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In general, our minds need to contextualise or conceptualise the information it receives in order to proceed them for understanding. In the video, \u2018A private universe\u2019 I will argue that Heather who has little training about astronomy used the information she had to create a mental representation to help her understand how the weather changes. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53876,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1669382],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-conceptual-challenges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53876"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4498,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4496\/revisions\/4498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}