engleski

Student competence for solving logical tasks

Logical tasks do not require a great knowledge of math, but only require knowledge of basic concepts and logical considerations and conclusions. By inspecting math textbooks for primary and secondary schools we have noticed a considerably small number of them. Even when we did find such a task, it was conceptually or procedurally connected with the contents of the current learning. In order to find out whether the formal mathematical education is preparing students for solving of this kind of problems we have offered them five tasks. Surprisingly, we have discovered relatively small differences in the success of the primary and secondary schools, which indicates that the factual formal education does not contribute to the development of this skill. The analysis of some tasks has shown some surprising results such as, for example, that some of the early primary schools are more successful than older students.

problem solving tasks ; primary school ; secondary school ; formal mathematical education ; logical conclusion

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