Analyzing students’ difficulties in understanding real numbers
Tipo de documento
Autores
Lista de autores
Voskoglou, Michael y Kosyvas, Georgios
Resumen
This article reports on a study of high-school and of technologist students (prospective engineers and economists) understanding of real numbers. Our study was based on written response to a properly designed questionnaire and on interviews taken from students. The quantitative results of our experiment showed an almost complete failure of the technologist students to deal with processes connected to geometric constructions of incommensurable magnitudes. The results of our experiment suggest that the ability to transfer in comfort among several representations of real numbers helps students in obtaining a better understanding of them. A theoretical explanation about this is obtained through the adoption of the conceptual framework of dimensions of knowledge, introduced by Tirosh et al. (1998) for studying the comprehension of rational numbers. Following in part the idea of generic decomposition of the APOS analysis (Weller et al. 2009) we suggest a possible order for development of understanding the real numbers by students when teaching them at school. Some questions open to further research are also mentioned at the end of the paper.
Fecha
2012
Tipo de fecha
Estado publicación
Términos clave
Comprensión | Conjuntos numéricos | Desde disciplinas académicas | Entrevistas | Simbólica
Enfoque
Idioma
Revisado por pares
Formato del archivo
Referencias
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