Abstract:

For more than two years the educational system all around the globe has been going through unknown challenges. The learning process is primary in distance form in a digital environment. Social contacts and face-to-face interaction gave way to digital interaction. The current situation supposes design, organizing, conducting pedagogical experiments, and research on digitalization of the educational process with modern students. They are part of the generation that has got used to the technologies as a part of the learning environment, they overcame the transition from “pen and paper” to the “mouse and screen”. This state gives an opportunity for a pedagogical experiment to be as independent as possible from external factors such as technologies and to refer as much as possible to the essence of learning.

On the other hand, the feature of the school subject mathematics is that the objects of cognition are abstract concepts, and the primary goal is the development of abstract thinking. For example, the cost of visualization of the concepts as point, line, ray is their abstract nature. The methodological question is obvious - what is the leading one? i.e., to introduce the infinite line and to illustrate it with a part which is a segment, or to use the segment as an object from which to extract the abstraction “line”. Hypothetical questions like these stand differently for different age groups and for math topics. Moreover, the individual features of the student and the learning environment are factors.

The question is relevant in the context of the many digital resources concerning mathematics education – websites, learning platforms, individual digital teaching units. There is no established methodology for the usage of these resources, their application in the educational practice is chaotic and without evaluation of their impact and efficiency. In a pandemic situation, these digital resources were a lifeline. The evaluation and conclusions are forthcoming and are ground for serious pedagogical research.

The goal of this article is to introduce a concept for a pedagogical experiment with the students from 5th and 7th grade of the 122 Primary School “Nikolay Liliev”, Sofia, Bulgaria. The school has a good technical base which provides an opportunity for organizing a one-to-one classroom which will ease the conducting of the experiment. The choice of the grades is not random due to the fact that in Bulgarian school in the 5th grade for the first time the mathematics subject is thought by a specialist and in the 7th grade is starting the axiomatic construction of the Euclidean geometry which is the first encounter for the students with abstract concepts and abstract handling with them.

There will be two experimental groups. In the first one, the teacher will use digital resources in the process of teaching the subject. In the second, students will use digital recourse, with the assistance of the teacher, during their independent work. The goal is to diagnose (analyze) the effectiveness of the digital resources as a tool for visualization and demonstration in the teaching process compared to the effectiveness of their application in the acquisition of knowledge.

The expected results are qualitative - opinions, attitudes, attitudes, and quantitative - evaluation of academic achievement.

Keywords:

Abstract thinking, mathematical education, technology in education, pedagogical experiment.