Graduate Students’ Opinions about Usage of Web-based Mathematics Education in Primary Education

Abstract

In recent years, technology assisted learning has got a new feature by the name of “web based education”. This new approach has been given to educators’ hands with qualified advantages. For instance, web based education allows us to contact with students out of classrooms and evaluate them online. Besides, some homeworks and short projects constructed on open-ended real world problems may be given to students by the aid of this subject. In this work, we investigate opinions of graduate students about web based mathematics education and usage of wolframalpha website in primary classrooms. This research is descriptive study. The study was conducted in a government university with seven graduate students on mathematics education enrolled to institute of educational sciences in Turkey in the 2010-2011 academic years. In the work, first wolframalpha website was introduced to the working group and thereafter to collect data an interview form, which contains six open-ended questions about research problem was used. Before interview process, questions were given to an area expert to evaluate questions validity. With each student, interviews cost 15-20 minutes, and they are recorded via a tape. The obtained data has been analyzed by each researcher in different times. The results have been categorized with respect to each researcher’s analysis report. We also used frequencies to explain students’ special expressions.