Sharing your scrap paper: The role of visual communication in mathematics learning
Date of This Version
March 2013
Abstract
Pictures of students’ solutions for mathematics problems are a useful way to analyze students’ learning process for researchers. Similarly, this paper used such pictures for students themselves to analyze each other’s thinking process as a heuristic teaching method. A project called “Sharing Your Scrap Paper” was conducted for students to take pictures of their homework scrap paper with their cell-phone, and share these pictures in a piece of online chat cell-phone software. The role of such kind of visual communication was examined in three high school Advanced Placement (AP) statistics classes for learning permutation and combination. 80 students were randomly assigned to either an experimental group with visual communication or a control group with traditional learning. After a week of simultaneous learning in two lectures with the same homework assignment, students took post-tests assessing their learning achievement. Students in the visual communication group exhibited significantly greater gains than the control group in algebra achievement of permutation and combination, including the aspects of analysis, computation, and generalization. The implications of this design and its favorable effects for pedagogy and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) were discussed.
Recommended Citation
Lu, Min, "Sharing your scrap paper: The role of visual communication in mathematics learning" (March 09, 2013). Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers. Paper 957.
https://services.bepress.com/feem/paper957