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Technology Adoption in Mathematics Education: A Global Perspective
A Short Article Series
December 2005

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Technologies in Mathematics Education: Korea Case

III. Issues and Concerns in Korea

Korea is one of the most conservative countries concerning technology adoption in mathematics education in spite of the fact that students and mathematics teachers access the internet almost everyday. The issues on technology adoption in Korea deduced from the analysis above can be summarized as follows:

Efficacy of Technology in Mathematics Education

Can technology help students' understanding, abilities, or affection in mathematics? There is still no general agreements among Korean mathematics educators whether technology help mathematics education. The answers depend on the understanding of nature of mathematics and the given tasks. General agreements are that technology can help students' learning in certain tasks under certain circumstances. How can we maximize the merits of the technology?

Technology Integrated Curriculum

Although Korean national curriculum documents encourage technology adoption in mathematics, they include no particular contents or approaches that can be taught effectively by technology. What valuable content can be added to maximize the merits of technologies? What contents can be lessened or deleted under TIC in compensation for new contents or approaches? These are uprising questions in Korea.

Evaluation System and College Entrance Exam

If technology is adopted in teaching mathematics, how can it be used in tests? What kinds of test items are appropriate?

Affordable Softwares and Hardwares

How can the valuable technology be affordable in class and home? The financial support to prepare the softwares or instruments is necessarily required. Web-related softwares, cooperating with the internet, will be a way to enhance the affordability. And, since English is not a second language in Korea, softwares in Korean language are more affordable for students to use.

The situations of technology adoption in university mathematics are not quite different from the secondary cases. In most universities, students access the internet to communicate or search information or to play games, but usually they do not use technology to study or do tasks for their pure mathematics courses. Web related softwares such as Maple or Mathematica have been used in some mathematics courses to exploration or solve problems depending on the lecturer.

During the a past decade, mathematics educators and teachers has given great attention to technology adoption in mathematics class. New technologies have been introduced to mathematics teachers through conferences and teacher training programs. Mathematics teachers voluntarily have organized study groups and developed teaching materials for their class. Compared to the technological improvement of ICT industry and on-line societies in Korea, technology adoption in mathematics education is still superficial and needs to be improved.

References

ITU (2002) ICT Country Case Studies-Korea(Rep.) http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/cs/korea/index.html

MOE (1992) The 6th Mathematics Curriculum. Seoul, Korea.

_______ (1997). The 7th Mathematics Curriculum. Seoul, Korea.

Mullis, I., Martin,M., Gonzalez, E., O'Connor, K., Chrostowski, S., Gregory, K., Garden, R., & Smith, T. (2000) The Mathematics Benchmarking Report. TIMSS-Eighth Grade. http://www.timss.org/

http://www.edunet4u.net

http://www.keris.or.kr

http://www.timss.org

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