A Study On Tendency For Method Selection When Solving Solid Geometry Problems For Senior High School Students

At present,the problem solving methods in the teaching process of solid geometry in senior high school are mainly Euclidean Geometry Method and Space Vector Method.In the actual teaching process,the two methods have their own merits and demerits with no obvious difference between good and bad.However,due to the heavy learning task,students cannot master the two methods well at the same time,provoking a problem that with limited learning energy,how should students analyze and solve problems related to solid geometry better? The scope of this study was limited to Hohhot,Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.Through the survey of ten senior high school math teachers in five senior high schools and 304 senior high school students in senior two and senior three,the following questions were aimed to be explored by the researcher:1.How did the teachers and students view Euclidean Geometry Method and Space Vector Method and what were their advantages and disadvantages?2.Would the objective factors such as students’ grades,gender and personality have an impact on the choice of the two methods?3.How could teachers make better teaching designs based on students’ different situations?The author conducted a research on the above issues through questionnaire survey,classroom observation,classroom test,interview and other research methods and drew the following conclusions:1.The teachers reckoned that Euclidean Geometry Method required higher ability of students,but the writing steps were relatively simple,helping students to solve problems with high quality and high efficiency.The calculation of Space Vector Method was relatively complicated,which was the reason why students tended to make mistakes.But it required relatively lower ability of students since most students could write some steps when solving solid geometry problems.The students held the view that the threshold of Euclidean Geometry Method was high,but it took less time and amount of writing to solve solid geometry problems.Once students had an idea,few points were lost eventually.With a low threshold,Space Vector Method helped students gain lots of scores.However,due to its large amount of calculation,students were prone to make mistakes in calculation.2.In the course of this study,through the analysis of the questionnaire survey(see figure 4)and the analysis of the classroom test data(see table 4),the following conclusions could be reached.From the perspective of students’ performance,students with good grades were more inclined to use Euclidean Geometry Method,the number of whom accounted for 67.8% in all the high level students,while students with medium grades and lower grades preferred Space Vector Method,whose number took up 74.4% and 74.2% respectively.Viewing from the perspective of gender,most boys would like to choose Euclidean Geometry Method,the number of whom constitutes 63.5% of all.In contrast,girls were more inclined to use Space Vector Method,the percentage of which was 69.2%.As for the perspective of personality,extroverts tended to use Euclidean Geometry Method,with the proportion of 57.3%.While introverts tended to use Space Vector Method,the ratio of which was68.7%.From the point of grade,students in Grade 2 preferred Euclidean Geometry Method slightly.Nevertheless,no obvious trend was shown in Table 4.Students in Grade 3 were accustomed to adopt Space Vector Method,whose number took up 63.2% of all.3.Under the premise of ensuring the integrity of the overall teaching design,teachers could help students solve problems better by analyzing students’ objective attributes and consciously training a certain kind of problem solving method.