Abstract
According to the views of social constructivism, learning takes place when individuals engage socially to talk about and act on shared problems or interests. In recent years, this approach has been very popular for the teaching and learning of mathematics in primary and secondary education. On the contrary, in tertiary education, it seems that most teachers still prefer the traditional way of delivering explicit mathematics instruction, sometimes combined with challenging questions and mathematical discourse with the students to promote conceptual understanding and critical analysis of the mathematical context. The paper at hand presents a classroom experiment comparing those two teaching methods at university level. The outcomes of the experiment were assessed and compared with the help of the Grade Point Average index to evaluate the student quality performance and by using grey numbers to evaluate their mean performance. Further empirical research is needed to obtain definitive results on the effectiveness of those two methods for teaching mathematics at university level.
Highlights
The constructivist views about learning and the socio-cultural approach have recently become very popular in school education for teaching and learning mathematics.The idea that knowledge is a human construction supported by experience, first stated by Vico in the 18th century and further extended by Kant, greatly affected the epistemology of Piaget, who is considered to be the forerunner of the theory of constructivism for the process of learning
The results of the classroom experiment underline the superiority of the experimental group with respect to the control group
Taking into account that the “constructive” teaching method was a new experience for the students of the experimental group, we have a strong indication that this method could further improve student performance
Summary
The constructivist views about learning and the socio-cultural approach have recently become very popular in school education (primary and secondary) for teaching and learning mathematics. The idea that knowledge is a human construction supported by experience, first stated by Vico in the 18th century and further extended by Kant, greatly affected the epistemology of Piaget, who is considered to be the forerunner of the theory of constructivism for the process of learning. EMI is a systematic approach where students are guided through the learning process with clear statements about the purpose for learning the new skill, clear explanations and demonstrations of the instructional target, and supported practice with feedback until independent mastery has been achieved. The combination of EMI with the challenging questions will be referred to in the rest of the paper as the “explicit” method, whereas the approach based purely on the principles of the social constructivism will be referred as the “constructive” method for teaching mathematics.
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