A Study On Mathematics Conjecture Ability Of The Students In Senior Grade Two

Mathematic conjecture is very important to the development of people's thinking, especially the creative thinking. In our traditional teaching, the students are badly lack of the training of mathematics conjecture ability. Now we should pay special attention to that. In this research, we'll examine students' (1) attitude to the ability of conjecture (2) the ability of guessing the mathematics conclusions (3) the ability of validating or refuting the mathematics conjectures, by questionnaire investigation and individual interviews to 197 students from two senior high schools. Here are some conclusions:1. About 84.8% of the students think the ability of mathematics conjecture is important to them. But 43.1% of the students who engage in the investigation think it is helpful for them to take an exam or to work out a problem, 39.6% of the students think it is helpful for them to train their ability, raise their interests of mathematics or it is useful for the development of science. The teachers' attitudes to it affect their students'.2. For different mathematical problems, students perform differently. The students' abilities of conjectures are affected by cognitive structure, the understanding of mathematical content, the character of students' thinking and so on.3. Most students can properly use the counterexamples to refute the conjectures, and refuting can generate conjectures. In the process of validating the conjectures, for different mathematical problems, students perform differently and performances of students in different schools are also quite different. The level of cognitive and the students' brief in proof are important factors that affect the students' levels of validating the conjectures.To improve students' abilities of mathematics conjectures and cultivate their creative thinking, mathematics educators should pay special attention not only to developing students' basic knowledge but also to training their abilities of mathematics conjectures, and apply graphic calculator properly.