The Teaching Practice Of Mathematical Culture As School-based Curriculum In Middle School

With the stress of examinations, many students just pursue high scores blindly but ignore the value of the mathematics itself, leading to lost interest in math slowly. The students’ mathematics literacy and mathematical thinking are missing gradually. Under such situations, many scholars begin to pay close attention to mathematical culture. Many institutions of higher learning are offering mathematical culture courses, mathematical culture as school-based curriculum in the middle school also has emerged, integrating mathematical culture into teaching has become a hot topic in the study of mathematics education. Currently, on the study of the relationship between mathematical culture and mathematics education, there is a lot of discussions about the education value of mathematical culture, but few cases of integrating mathematical culture into teaching at present, especially for secondary school.Mathematical culture as school-based curriculum is still in the exploratory stage, the teachers and students are very confused. What effects this elective course for the students exactly,what is its values? Based on these, the author put forward the following research questions:(1) what the students in the secondary school expect for mathematical culture as school-based curriculum? (2) what’s the impact of the implementation of mathematical culture as school-based curriculum for the students and teachers? (3) Is it feasible that mathematical culture emerge as school-based curriculum? The author adopt the action research method, has established the course of mathematical culture respectively with two mathematics teachers from Beijing and Shanghai in the two semesters, and the object of the study is the secondary school students. By determining the theme and teaching design, classroom observation, we have finished 8 themes including "expressing numbers with letters", "geometry in life", "irrational in life"," 0 and π"," the Pythagorean theorem ", "linear equation in one variable", "geometric fallacies", "math and literature and art". And we implemented these in the classroom. At the same time we undertake the pretest and post-test questionnaires, and the students’thoughts and experiences about the course every after class and at the end of term.The author conducts the student questionnaire, interviews and thoughts by the quantitative and qualitative analysis, so we draw the following conclusions:(1) Students’expect for mathematical culture is unilateral, they knew less about mathematical culture before. (2) Mathematical culture influence the students’ affections and belief, their affections, believes, attitudes for mathematics and mathematics learning are improved obviously. (3) Mathematical culture plays an active role in the cognition for the students, it has a great role in promoting mathematics knowledge for future learning. (4) This process of this course process is helpful for teacher’s professional development. (5) Mathematical culture as school-based curriculum is necessary in the middle school, the students and teachers both show their like and recognition for this curriculum.Based on the above conclusions, the practice of offering mathematical culture as school-based curriculum provide the reference and the suggestion for the secondary schools and provide some practical cases on integrating mathematical culture into mathematics teaching.