Pretty Lights And Maths: A Qualitative Study

King, S. (2009). “Pretty Lights” and Maths! Increasing Student Engagement and Enhancing Learning through the Use of Electronic Voting Systems. Computers &Education, 53(1), 189-199.

Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered from staff members that used electronic voting systems (EVS) to provide a way for large groups of students to respond to questions in real time during class. The study was on student perceptions about how useful the EVS use was on student learning and whether it improved student grades. The students were very positive about the use of EVS. They liked the fact that even in large classes they felt like they could contribute to questions by use of EVS. The conclusion was that it did tend to engage students but did not

Technology can not guarantee success in mathematics, the calculators and computers are merely tools that may enable student to acquire and therefore understand new concepts more quickly than without the technology. We need to use technology in the mathematics classroom to help improve our teaching strategies. The study leans towards a student using paper and pencil to a point and then turning to a graphing calculator to do the more mundane calculations. The CAS should be used as a tool to solve a problem that has been evaluated by the students and the appropriate technology chosen. By organizing the many different slight changes in a graph the student may be able to make a prediction about what is expected. The prediction comes about quicker due to the use of CAS and the students can share their results much easier thanks to the technology. The students are encouraged to treat the technology as a tool. Students then extrapolated their results to very large numbers with the CAS which could not be done with paper and pencil. Therefore their predictions could be either verified or found to be

The findings of this study identified how the TI-Nspire was used as an exploratory tool, graphing tool, confirmatory tool, problem-solving tool, visualization tool and calculation tool. The Ti-Nspire enables mathematics to be experienced through multiple representations which encourages students to explore and investigate mathematical concepts. Students used the TI-Nspire Navigator, a wireless classroom network system which connect students’ TI-Nspire handhelds equipped with a wireless cradle to the teacher’s computer and projector. Teachers can see a screenshot of their students’ calculator from her desk top computer to ensure everyone is on task, and collect and analyzes student work to assess student understanding. The quality of mathematics tasks is important to tell if a task engages the students and whether they achieve higher order learning by being given opportunities to explain and justify their reasoning. Worksheets can be designed to guide discovery and inquiry learning to encourage interaction with graphing calculators to helps students develop an understanding of calculus concepts. Students were initially taught how to use the TI-Nspire over several lessons before they became comfortable with them. Students were asked to formulate conjectures and to generalize the results after the guided discovery worksheets were completed. Each time