Abstract
The purpose of mathematics education includes two important areas; cognitive area that emphasizes mathematical knowledge and understanding and affective area that stresses mathematical interest and attitude. The purpose of mathematics education is not only in acquiring the contents and knowledge but also rousing up interest and attention toward mathematics. Therefore, effort to accomplish this affective purpose has to be made. Introducing history of mathematics to teaching can be a important method for the students to arouse interest and attention toward mathematics. History of mathematics can help the students who are familiar to only manipulation of the symbols to develop a new way of thinking and mathematical thoughts arousing reflective thinking. According to the survey, although the effect of using mathematics history has been recognized, the mathematics history has neither been developed as teaching materials nor reflected in the courses of study. The purpose of this research is to develop the reading materials into suit for the mathematics curriculum to extract contents of the mathematics valuable in using in elementary mathematics teaching, and to investigate the effect of reading materials using the history of mathematics on learning attitude in elementary school. The way of developing materials in this study is as follows. First, to select the interesting and instructive subject for the elementary students such as the story and life of a mathematician, developmental stages of mathematical theory and calculation currently used and finding the patterns of the rules that requires mathematical thoughts. Second, to classify the selected items according to mathematics curriculum. Third, to reorganize the classified items of the appropriate grade with the reading materials of dialogue pattern in order to draw attention and interest from the students I developed 18 kinds materials in accordance with the above procedure and applied 5 materials among them to one class in 4th grade. Analysing the student's responses, First, using history of mathematics helps the students to arouse interest and confidence on mathematical learning attitude. And the students became better attitude of studying by oneself and attention on class. Second, as know by opinions after lesson, most students have a chance refresh one's thinking of mathematics, want to know the other content of history of mathematics and responded to study hard in mathematics. As a result, the reading materials on the basis of the history of mathematics motivates students for mathematics and helps them become confident in mathematics. If the materials are complemented properly, they will be useful and effective for students and teachers.