Exploring Authentic Contexts with Ubiquitous Geometry to Facilitate Elementary School Students' Geometry Learning

Abstract

Although geometry is important and strongly related to our surroundings, students still have few chances to learn it through practicing in authentic contexts. Therefore, ubiquitous geometric (UG) APP in mobile devices was developed in this study and allowed students to apply and practice geomety in authentic contexts. This study focused on the influence of measurement behaviors in authentic contexts on learning achievement and estimation ability with UG support. Furthermore, the relationship among measurement behaviors, their learning achievement and estimation ability were also deeply investigated. This 1-month experiment was conducted with three groups, experimental group with UG (EG), control group with rulers (CG-R) and control group using traditional teaching approach (CG-T). The results showed that EG got significantly better performance than CG-T only in learning achievement while EG performed significantly better than CG-T and CG-R in estimation ability. It demonstrated that measurement in authentic contexts can indeed help geometric learning and estimation ability. Regarding students’ perception, most of them perceived that measurements in the real situation can stimulate their motivation, then effectively improve their geometric learning. Besides, students also expressed their high satisfaction toward the proposed system and learning activities in authentic contexts. Thus, we strongly suggested that geometry learning should be applied to authentic contexts with UG support to consolidate geometry concept learning and facilitate geometry problem-solving.