USE OF COMPUTER ALGEBRA SYSTEMS IN MATHEMATICS TEACHING AT UNIVERSITY: A TEACHING EXPERIMENT


DOST Ş., SAGLAM Y., UGUR A. A.

HACETTEPE UNIVERSITESI EGITIM FAKULTESI DERGISI-HACETTEPE UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, sa.40, ss.140-151, 2011 (SSCI) identifier

Özet

The ever-increasing presence of computers and other technologies that come along with them has affected mathematics education, and it resulted in the development of software in this field. Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) occupies a very important place among such softwares. A careful integration of CAS with the education environment would contribute to any learning environment of any level. However, the most important point to focus during this integration is to contribute to students' development of expected mathematical skills. These skills have been expressed by different researches under different classification systems. The aim of this study, which has been realized in two stages, is to determine the changes in the activities of students, who have enrolled in a mathematics teacher training program, in a teacher experiment design, in CAS-supported and without CAS-support class environments. To this end, a worksheet on Taylor polynomials was prepared. In the preparation process of this worksheet, which was integrated with Maple, a CAS software, MATH taxonomy was taken into consideration. As a result of the study it was observed that the participants in CAS-supported environment frequently used different representations, had a critical point of view for gathered results and the interpretation and generalization abilites came into prominence.