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Improving Students’ Algebraic Thinking: The Case Of Talia, Kien H. Lim
Improving Students’ Algebraic Thinking: The Case Of Talia, Kien H. Lim
Kien H Lim
This paper presents the case of an 11th grader, Talia, who demonstrated improvement in her algebraic thinking after five one-hour sessions of solving problems involving inequalities and equations. She improved from association-based to coordination-based predictions, from impulsive to analytic anticipations, and from inequality-as-a-signal-for-a-procedure to inequality-as-a-comparison-of-functions conceptions. In the one-on-one teaching intervention, she progressed from the sub-context of manipulating symbols, to working with specific numbers, to reasoning with “general” numbers, and eventually to reasoning with symbols. Three features were identified to account for her improvement: (a) attention to meaning, (b) opportunity to repeat similar reasoning, and (c) opportunity to explore.
Students’ Mental Acts Of Anticipating In Solving Problems Involving Algebraic Inequalities And Equations, Kien Hwa Lim
Students’ Mental Acts Of Anticipating In Solving Problems Involving Algebraic Inequalities And Equations, Kien Hwa Lim
Kien H Lim
Anticipating is the mental act of conceiving a certain expectation without performing a sequence of detailed operations to arrive at the expectation. This dissertation seeks to characterize students’ problem-solving in terms of two types of anticipating acts: (a) foreseeing an action, which refers to the act of conceiving an expectation that leads to an action, prior to performing the operations associated with the action, and (b) predicting a result, which refers to the act of conceiving an expectation for the result of an event without actually performing the operations associated with the event. Harel’s (in press) triad of determinants—mental act, …