College calculus students' experiences with, attitudes towards, and uses of the graphing calculator: Interactions from cognitive flexibility perspective
Ocak, Mehmet AkifView Profile. State University of New York at Albany, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2006. 3221094.
The main aim of this study is to investigate the effect of graphing calculators on college students' graphing abilities for calculus topics. This study examined graphing calculators as a recent innovation on the nature of learning ill-structured calculus topics. Three issues about graphing calculators for students' graphing abilities were addressed in this study: (a) patterns and modes of graphing calculator use (b) relationship between these patterns and students' prior knowledge of and attitudes toward graphing calculators (c) how the use of graphing calculators facilitate understanding and flexibility in ill-structured calculus tasks. A qualitative case study has been done for the purpose of the study. This study was guided by cognitive flexibility theory. Twenty students were identified within seven Calculus I classes, based on their prior knowledge and attitude toward the graphing calculators. Three different levels of tasks (low level, medium level, high level) were chosen around the first five topics of Calculus I and were administered to the students in clinical interviews. Data was gathered from the video-taped interviews with students to determine how the graphing calculator was used in the tasks and to get a deeper understanding of college students' engagement process with graphing calculators.
The results indicated that students who had more experience and knowledge of graphing calculators were more flexible in solution strategies than students who had limited experience with the graphing calculators. Students with low experience with the graphing calculator did not give adequate attention to critical analysis of the tasks. Low experience groups ( negative attitude-low experience and positive attitude-low experience ) and the negative attitude-high experience group were more successful in solving medium-level tasks than low-level tasks. However, while moving from medium-level tasks to high-level tasks, these three groups were less successful than medium-level tasks and there was a decrease in solving high level tasks. On the other hand, subjects in the positive attitude-high experience group scored higher on high-level tasks than on medium-level tasks.
This study found that mere availability of the graphing calculator in the problem solving process does not affect or change students' solving problem strategies. Rather, the results suggest that using the graphing calculator and mathematical understanding must work together for the solution of the problem.