Abstract
This research reveals the perspectives in the teaching of numerical thinking through a documentary review. The representation of physical elements such as functions, vectors and operators, and their subsequent interpretation through numerical thinking gives meaning to the physical quantities that such elements represent. A documentary sample integrated for 40 sources on numerical thinking such as articles published in indexed journals, postgraduate dissertations, and books is considered. A qualitative content analysis method is used. First, an encoding procedure is applied for tagging the extracted information from the source documents. Then, a split and merge procedure is considered in order to establish from the tags the dimensions and categories that allow determining the conceptual relationships that support the developmental perspectives of numerical thinking. The method reveals that the numerical thinking can be developed in the global context from four perspectives, namely, historical, theoretical, curricular, and social perspectives. From these results, an incorporation of the such perspectives can be institutionalized for promoting curricular, didactic and evaluative new proposals for numerical thinking teaching.
Highlights
The complexity of teaching mathematics in the university context is well known [1], which has led, in recent years, to develop research oriented towards the study of the mathematics learning and teaching approaches and its applications in higher education [2]
The content analysis allowed to generate the set of codes used to synthesize a semantic network of the developmental perspectives of numerical thinking
In this work, a documentary research based on the content analysis method is considered in order to reveal the developmental perspectives for numerical thinking in the process of mathematical teaching
Summary
The complexity of teaching mathematics in the university context is well known [1], which has led, in recent years, to develop research oriented towards the study of the mathematics learning and teaching approaches and its applications in higher education [2]. Among the aspects that increase the complexity of mathematics teaching is that students at all levels reject mathematics, fear and dislike it, and if given the opportunity, such courses are taken as a last resource. Another aspect, despite not being negative, which has increased the complexity in the teaching of mathematics is the great demand for mathematical knowledge of the knowledge society [3].
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