Abstract:

This is a research that analyzes how a focus group formed by three students of electronic engineering tackle an interdisciplinary contextualized event. Particularity, the case that occupies this research report is the interdisciplinarity between mathematics and the electrical circuit theory, with students who are not familiar with the mechanics of the interdisciplinary work. The research is founded in the Mathematics in the Science Context theory, which has developed a line of thought towards integrated knowledge, linked with society, and takes the learning process and the teaching as a system where the five phases of the theory are involved: curriculum, didactic, epistemological, educational and cognitive. Tackle is to understand the cognitive processes used by students to undertake contextualized events (Camarena, 2002). The tackle analysis of interdiciplinarity affects the cognitive phase of the theory, where concepts are intertwined in a network and keep relations between them, hence the complexity of the interdiscipinarity. Research is qualitative kind, through the comparison between novice and expert, the analysis axes are the cognitive processes of knowledge construction and characteristics of the experts, to reach the construction of the mathematical model, those area taken at each stage of the methodological process of contextualization. The analysis shows the differences between experts and novices to be of special relevance the knowledge construction, which have not been built in novices (students) compared with experts (professionals). It is also identified that the knowledge of novices are not organized, they are not able to identify important information of an event, they are not able to recover important aspects of knowledge, they have not developed the identification of error control points and do not face events with expertise, showing the wide breach between novices and experts, however, there was a moment when we could identify the potential tending to expertise of two of the students.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinarity, knowledge construction, novices-experts, mathematics in context.