Web-based Mathematics Education Research Articles

MATEMATİK ÖĞRETİMİNDE SEMANTİK WEB TABANLI İKNA TEKNOLOJİSİ KULLANIMI

Bu calismada ikna teknolojisi kavraminin matematik ogretimi baglaminda betimlenmesi amaclanmistir. Kuramsal cerceve icerisinde Web tabanli matematik egitiminin yani sira yeniliklerin yayilmasi kurami ve teknoloji kabul modelleri ele alinmis; bu baglamda matematik ogretiminde kullanilan ilgili teknolojiler irdelenmistir. Ozellikle gunumuz Web tabanli teknolojilerinden biri olan semantik Web'in enformasyon edinimi baglaminda potansiyeline deginilmis; bu yonde ozellesmis bir uygulama olan Wolfram Alpha'nin matematik ogretimindeki yeri ve ogretimde ikna potansiyeli degerlendirilmistir.

Graduate Students’ Opinions about Usage of Web-based Mathematics Education in Primary Education

In recent years, technology assisted learning has got a new feature by the name of “web based education”. This new approach has been given to educators’ hands with qualified advantages. For instance, web based education allows us to contact with students out of classrooms and evaluate them online. Besides, some homeworks and short projects constructed on open-ended real world problems may be given to students by the aid of this subject. In this work, we investigate opinions of graduate students about web based mathematics education and usage of wolframalpha website in primary classrooms. This research is descriptive study. The study was conducted in a government university with seven graduate students on mathematics education enrolled to institute of educational sciences in Turkey in the 2010-2011 academic years. In the work, first wolframalpha website was introduced to the working group and thereafter to collect data an interview form, which contains six open-ended questions about research problem was used. Before interview process, questions were given to an area expert to evaluate questions validity. With each student, interviews cost 15-20 minutes, and they are recorded via a tape. The obtained data has been analyzed by each researcher in different times. The results have been categorized with respect to each researcher’s analysis report. We also used frequencies to explain students’ special expressions.

DMAS

Assessing student performance and understanding is very important in education generally and in Mathematics education in particular. DMAS is a Web-based Distributed Mathematics Assessment system that can be of great value to teachers and students of Mathematics. Features of DMAS include: DMAD (the core Distributed Mathematics Assessment database), test authoring tool for teachers, online taking of tests, grading and results administration, comprehension diagnoses and linking to remedial materials. DMAS supports many problem types and allows mathematical formulas/expressions as well as geometry drawings/graphs to be part of questions and answers. Furthermore, DMAS supports the use of test taking as a teaching method. A teacher can monitor all students from the teacher terminal in real-time and either verbally guide the whole class on certain points or interact privately with one or more students via the Teacher-Student Interaction Mechanism (TSIM), an instant text-messaging provided by DMAS. A new Assessment Markup Language, MAML, is designed to make tests and test questions easy to share widely on the Web. Although developed as a sub-system of WME (Web-based Mathematics Education), DMAS is an independent Web system easily interfaced to any Web page through a well-defined API. The DMAS system consists of local databases at individual school websites. Teachers may publish new or improved questions to their local DMAS database to be shared with other teachers in the same school and in different schools. Teachers can use the powerful search engine (DMASEngine) to search for assessment questions. Search can be narrowed by subject, topic, grade-level, question type, keyword, and author. DMAD is designed to work as one distributed database while providing power, unity, and convenience at each participating school. The system helps create, revise, administer, and grade exams that can contain various types of questions: multiple choices, true-or-false, extended (essay) questions, short answers, two-columns matching, and fill-the-blank. Questions use a well-designed representation (encoding) allowing correct answers, rubrics, formulas, images, geometrical objects (SVG), and multimedia as well as interactive contents. DMAS system provides different views (modes): teacher and student modes. It also supports two types of testing: online and paper testing. The teacher can set Assessment test display options: display questions by a given order, by random questions none-random options, or by all questions/options are in random order. Tests taken online can be graded automatically and stored for teacher review, analysis, and printing. DMAS Assessment system has been piloted into seventh grade students at Kimpton Middle School, Stow, Ohio on 10/05/2007 for real-life testing and apparently teacher and student's feedback gave good impression and encouraging feedback about the DMAS system. However, our goal is to put DMAS system under extensive trial in schools and collecting feedback and suggestions from teachers, students, school administrators and education experts to help evolve DMAS. As more schools adopt DMAS, the distributed nature of DMAS will be demonstrated in realistic situations. Because DMAS has been designed in consultation with middle school teachers and education experts, the underline DMAS system design and framework is easy and flexible for future changes, requirements, expansions, and customizations. DMAS provides features to support real-life test giving such as loss of power to a laptop and retaking of tests.

A solution for online entering and editing mathematical formulas (abstract only)

The ability for users online creating and editing mathematical expressions is very important for Science Computing Systems, Science Communication Systems, and Web-based Mathematics Education Systems. Lanzhou university/China and Kent University/USA are jointly developing a mathematical expression editor. The editor MathEdit, implemented in JavaScript and MathML, is a web-based visual interactive editor for mathematical expressions. Figure 1 shows the end-user view of the MathEdit architecture. In MathEdit the MathML Content code is the core code of being edited mathematical expression. User actions, inserting, deleting and editing sub-expressions by mouse clicks and keyboard input, are treated as commands. The commands will invoke JavaScript functions in the command processing module to modify the MathML content code by revising DOM tree of expression. The MathML Content will synchronously convert to MathML Presentation code and Math Infix code. The user will intuitively see the changed math expression displayed by MathML Presentation.