How Students Can Interpret Square Roots

Abstract

Mathematics is a complex subject, dealing with problem solving, finding patterns, formulating definitions, analysis of situations using a variety of methods, building models to represent variety of situations. It is also a way of preparing one’s mental skills to effectively and critically think about any situation one may encounter in the future and being able to solve unfamiliar problems. However, testing is showing that often students cannot find any connections, patterns, algorithms, or strategies to solve problems the encounter. This research project is demonstrating alternative teaching methods for solving certain group of problems to improve students’ performance. We concentrate on concepts related to radical functions and operations on. them. As many mathematics education studies show, this topic is one of the most interesting to study, as majority of high school seniors still did not master the fundamental concepts in this area, and many of them plan to enter college level courses. Our experiment involves two groups of students learning radicals two different ways: first starting with computational examples leading to formulation of abstract rules governing radicals, second starting with formulas, and applying them to computations. We collected data and student performance and analyzed them using statistical test. We present our results.

Details

Session 1

9:30am – 11:00am

Grand Salon