The Investigation Of The Status Quo Of The Eighth Grade Students' Consciousness Of Mathematical Symbols And The Research On The Countermeasures For Their Cultivation

Mathematical symbol plays an important role in the development of mathematical subject and the solution of mathematical problems.In 2011,as one of the ten core concepts,symbol sense was first proposed in<mathematics curriculum standards of compulsory education>.From the second period,the logic and abstractness of the math course were significantly enhanced.This stage is the key period for students to develop their symbol sense,but there are many problems in the symbol learning for junior high school students.This paper focuses on three issues:the definition of the connotation dimension of symbol sense,the status quo of students' symbol sense in grade eight and the strategies to develop students' symbol sense.Bibliography,questionnaire survey and interview were used for the research.By means of literature review,the author divides symbol sense into three connotative dimensions:the establishment and representation of mathematical symbols,the reasoning and operation of mathematical symbols and the association and expansion of mathematical symbols.Then,questionnaires with different dimensions of secondary indicators were prepared,and students from four classes in two schools were selected by random sampling in Xi'an.Part of the students and teachers were interviewed.To sum up in conclusion:the eighth grade students perform best in the reasoning and operational dimension of mathematical symbols,followed by the establishment and representation dimension of mathematical symbols,which are above the average level.There is great room for improvement in the association and expansion on dimension of mathematical symbols,the overall performance of the students was poor.After data statistics and analysis on questionnaire,It's found that the main difficulties students development symbol sense are the following three point:(1)Students are unfamiliar with the language system of symbols,and their thinking of using letters to represent Numbers has not been fully formed.(2)students' understanding of symbolic meaning is based on intuition and experience,and there exists the phenomenon of"functional fixation"(3)students are not good at transferring between the representation of mathematical symbols.In the view of the main problems,the author puts forward the following strategies and suggestions for teachers.(1)Help students build a effective knowledge network.(2)Develop students'ability to acquire symbolic meaning by combining specific situations.(3)In the process of problem solving,students should develop the ability of switching between symbolic representations.(4)In the process of mathematical modeling,students' symbol sense should be comprehensively developed.Finally,a specific example is used to illustrate the strategies.