Supervision meeting
Mood:  bright
Now Playing: Wild Child (Enya)
Topic: Meetings
Yesterday afternoon I had my supervision meeting, and strangely enough all three of them were there. Now that was surprising since I only expected Doug and James.

Anyway, we got to talking about how to developed the mathematical tasks to see what occurs when using the black-box and white-box software. I told them, I had spoken to Jonathan and he had suggested checking for the strategies that student's may employed. James was all so pleased to hear this, he was going to say something I imagine on strategies but I pre-empted him because he was saying probably it might not be sufficient just to check and see if students get these tasks right or wrong ... so just jumped straight in and told him about the strategies.

So, told them about the article I was reading by Artigue (2003) about the profiling of strategies she spoked off by a doctoral student. There are five profiles that a student may undertake when using software and mathematics. These profiles were theorist (references, interpretation and analogy), rationalist (paper&pen, inference and proof), scholastic, tinkerer (calculator, investigation and accumulation) and experimentalist. Got to find the original work by Trouche (2000) to further understand these profiles. But thought these might something be good to look at - although James suggested I could develop and determine my own strategies.

I was also reading a paper by Galbraith (2002) this morning and there is also a profiling of attitudes of students towards technology and he reported on some of these - originally done by Goos et al (2000) - I've got to find that paper. There is four: technology is considered as the master, servant, partner and extension of yourself. Like this idea as well but think it is two different approaches need to see how they can be combined.
(Anyway got to go now - its my birthday and meeting Tina in 6 mins - got to run!)