EDUCATION TI NSPIRE STUDENT PROFESSIONAL

This 'Function Focused Session' was six hours long and provided review on the TI-Nspire, specific training about teaching the function concept with the TI-Nspire, and time to create lesson plans and activities for this study.

EDUCATION TI NSPIRE STUDENT PROFESSIONAL

The week prior to the study, the teachers attended another day of professional development activity taught by a Texas Instruments Trained Cadre member. Teachers were then given a TI-Nspire, TI-Nspire emulator and access to online Atomic learning video training (Atomic Learning, 2011), to continue their exploration of the TI-Nspire. During the summer prior to this study, all teachers attended 12 hours of training over the course of two days with a National Texas Instruments Instructor in which they were trained to use the TI-Nspire graphing calculator. Vignettes employed classroom observations, document analysis, and thick description to triangulate the results of the qualitative analysis. The study included a 90 minute classroom observation of each class as well as document analysis of weekly questionnaires, daily lesson plans, and daily assessments. The researcher gathered and analyzed pre-test, post-test, and post post-test data on student performance on function concepts. The TI-Nspire is designed to link together multiple-representations within a single problem, so the concept of functions is an ideal context within which to study the impact of the TI-Nspire. Since it is a relatively new tool, there is a limited amount of research on the classroom use of the TI-Nspire. Other studies have shown how graphing calculator use has engaged students in higher level thinking skills (Dessart, DeRidder, Charleen, and Ellington, 1999 Ellington, 2006 Graham and Thomas, 1998 Keller and Hirsch, 1998 Huntley, Rasmussen, Villarubi, Sangtong, and Fey, 2000 and Ronau et al., 2008). Research also showed that students can effectively use a graphing calculator as an instructional tool to make and understand different types of representations (Choi-Koh, 2003 Colgan, 1993 and Drijvers and Doorman, 1996). A review of the literature found that the emergence of calculators and computers has changed the way mathematics is both done and used (Ellington, 2006 Thorpe, 1989 and Kieran, 1992). This study investigated the teaching of functions by teachers using the TI-Nspire graphing calculator versus teachers using a non-graphing scientific calculator.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of TI-Nspire graphing calculator use on student achievement and on teacher behavior variables of planning, teaching, and assessing.

Education ti nspire student