Abstract
Students find mathematical proving a challenging task and often perform poorly in proving despite its importance in developing students’ critical thinking and reasoning skills. The purpose of the study is to determine if instructional scaffolding can improve students’ conceptual understanding, proving skills, and attitudes and perceptions towards proving. The instructional scaffolding strategies used were providing hints, examples, and questions for the students to develop ideas, showing how to perform a task, and letting the students provide feedback, ask questions, and show support to their fellow peers. Foundations or preliminaries prior to proving integers were also tackled first. The study used mixed methods quasi- experimental design where twenty-six Grade 11 STEM students participated in surveys involving attitudes and perceptions on proving, an odd/even concept test, and a proving test. Students generally had positive attitudes and perceptions towards proving even prior to the intervention and these further improved due to the intervention as the t-test result shows a significant improvement. A rubric was used to score students’ proofs. Nine students were able to progress from the beginning level to developing, approaching proficiency, proficiency, and advanced levels in their proving skills although fifteen of them retained their levels. Students’ difficulties in proving were due to improper representations of the integers as arbitrary values and errors in performing operations in simplifying algebraic expressions. Nonetheless, it can be deduced that instructional scaffolding is effective in improving students’ conceptual understanding of integers and proving skills, and attitudes and perceptions towards proving.
Author Information
Audric Curtis P. Dy, De La Salle University, Philippines
Minie Rose C. Lapinid, De La Salle University, Philippines
Paper Information
Conference: ACEID2023
Stream: Teaching Experiences
This paper is part of the ACEID2023 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Dy A., & Lapinid M. (2023) The Effects of Instructional Scaffolding in Students’ Conceptual Understanding, Proving Skills, Attitudes, and Perceptions Towards Direct Proofs of Integers ISSN: 2189-101X – The Asian Conference on Education & International Development 2023 Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2189-101X.2023.6
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2189-101X.2023.6
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