A qualitative study in applying mathematical software for mathematics education

수학교육용 소프트웨어의 활용에 대한 질적 연구

This paper introduces a branch of qualitative method, called an in-depth interview method. By collecting data from the stories of Korean middle school students and a 9th grade American girl who used Geometer's Sketchpad and various software respectively for their mathematical problem solving, the qualitative analysis leads us to understand how such software affect their lives with mathematics subject. The unique characteristics and strands of each student's utterances reflect how software plays a role of learning aid for their mathematics learning. The arm of this study is both to get a good picture of each student's self-perceived relationship to mathematics as well as to explore external and objective parameters and factors in each student's internal situations. The qualitative descriptions of the collected data help us guide the students to the points where they could develop their interests and satisfaction with subject matter better. In this way, teachers may have more realistic understandings of how students become interested and motivated by mathematics, so that they are better able to find out ways of grasping the totalities of how the use of technology is interwoven into the school curricular.