TY - JOUR
T1 - Can interactive visualization tools engage and support pre-university students in exploring non-trivial mathematical concepts?
AU - Liang, Hai Ning
AU - Sedig, Kamran
N1 - Funding Information:
This research has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The authors would like to thank Jim Morey for providing the foundational source code upon which this research could be further developed. The authors would also like to thank the students who participated in this study and, specially, the teachers who were so supportive of this research. Finally, the authors would like to thank all the reviewers for their comments and suggestions for improvement.
PY - 2010/5
Y1 - 2010/5
N2 - Many students find it difficult to engage with mathematical concepts. As a relatively new class of learning tools, visualization tools may be able to promote higher levels of engagement with mathematical concepts. Often, development of new tools may outpace empirical evaluations of the effectiveness of these tools, especially in educational contexts. This seems to be the case with educational visualization tools. Much evidence about the effectiveness of these tools appears to be more suggestive than based on empirical evaluations. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap and provide empirical evidence for the use of visualization tools in supporting exploratory and other learning-related activities. In particular, we aim to investigate whether visualization tools can be used to engage pre-university students in exploring non-trivial mathematical concepts. We focus particularly on this age group and content domain because of the difficulty these students may encounter when trying to investigate more challenging mathematical concepts. Also, it is during their formative years before university that students' predisposition and likeness towards mathematical ideas are formed. We report in this paper a study assessing whether a visualization tool, whose design was informed explicitly by research from information visualization and human-computer interaction, could engage pre-university students in their exploration and learning of more advanced mathematical concepts. Students who participated in this study came from multiple grade levels and have diverse cognitive and language skills as well as preferences towards mathematics. The results of this study indicate that visualization tools can effectively engage these students and support their exploration of non-trivial mathematical concepts, only if the tool is designed such that it can cater the diverse needs of these students.
AB - Many students find it difficult to engage with mathematical concepts. As a relatively new class of learning tools, visualization tools may be able to promote higher levels of engagement with mathematical concepts. Often, development of new tools may outpace empirical evaluations of the effectiveness of these tools, especially in educational contexts. This seems to be the case with educational visualization tools. Much evidence about the effectiveness of these tools appears to be more suggestive than based on empirical evaluations. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap and provide empirical evidence for the use of visualization tools in supporting exploratory and other learning-related activities. In particular, we aim to investigate whether visualization tools can be used to engage pre-university students in exploring non-trivial mathematical concepts. We focus particularly on this age group and content domain because of the difficulty these students may encounter when trying to investigate more challenging mathematical concepts. Also, it is during their formative years before university that students' predisposition and likeness towards mathematical ideas are formed. We report in this paper a study assessing whether a visualization tool, whose design was informed explicitly by research from information visualization and human-computer interaction, could engage pre-university students in their exploration and learning of more advanced mathematical concepts. Students who participated in this study came from multiple grade levels and have diverse cognitive and language skills as well as preferences towards mathematics. The results of this study indicate that visualization tools can effectively engage these students and support their exploration of non-trivial mathematical concepts, only if the tool is designed such that it can cater the diverse needs of these students.
KW - Computer-supported mathematics learning
KW - Design of educational software
KW - Human-computer interfaces
KW - Interactive visualization tools
KW - Pre-university education
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77249094473&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.compedu.2009.10.001
DO - 10.1016/j.compedu.2009.10.001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77249094473
SN - 0360-1315
VL - 54
SP - 972
EP - 991
JO - Computers and Education
JF - Computers and Education
IS - 4
ER -