Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Investigating Students' Conceptual Knowledge and Procedural Skills in the Learning of College Level Trigonometry
1Fui Fui Law, 2Masitah Shahrill and 2Lawrence Mundia
1Paduka Seri Begawan Science College, Ministry of Education
1Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 2015 11:952-962
Received: October ‎28, ‎2014 | Accepted: December ‎18, ‎2014 | Published: April 15, 2015
Abstract
This research study investigated 51 Pre-University (or College level) students’ difficulties in solving trigonometric function problems. It sets to determine the correlation of conceptual knowledge and procedural skills of students’ trigonometry test achievements using pre, post and delayed-post tests on six selected trigonometric questions. Results from the three tests revealed that there were improvements in the questions that tested on procedural skills; however, they did not perform as well as was predicted in the conceptual questions due to the lack in the conceptual knowledge of trigonometry. In contrast, there was evidence on the retention of procedural skills from the delayed-post tests. This indicated that learning had taken place for the students. However, it was noticed that there was also a slight decrease on conceptual knowledge. The greatest obstacle was that students memorize the sequence or steps. The common misconceptions depicted were misinterpreted language, distorted definition and technical mechanical error.
Keywords:
Conceptual knowledge and procedural skills, pre-university students, trigonometry,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2040-7467
ISSN (Print): 2040-7459 |
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