From Code Theory to Explore the Logical Strategy of Working Class Students in the Relation with Mathematical Performances

• Main Authors: Chang, Pei-Hsin, 張佩馨
• Other Authors: Chiang, Tien-Hui
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/36536037137648924893

碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 教育學系課程與教學教學碩士班 === 104 === Under a tendency to democratization, school education has been assigned functions to increase social mobility. But lots of case studies show that education enhances class reproduction. The code theory, developed by sociologist of education B. Bernstein, provides a lens to dissect and reveal the mechanism of how school education reproduces the class. This thesis employs the code theory to identify the effective ways of improving working class students’ learning. Mathematics is the key subject of further education in Taiwanese education system. As a teacher, I observe that the students from different social classes have differential score drop in text application problems in math exam; therefore, I choose to analyze specific impact of restricted code on the ability of solving text application problems by working class students. By interviewing five working class students of different mathematics performance, I discover that the restricted code has negative impact on students’ three types of abilities highly relevant to solving text application problems: logical thinking, abstract understanding, and thinking habits. My study also shows that working class students with excellent solving ability in text application problems, even though they can lower the influence of it by outstanding qualifications and hard working, they still cannot completely overcome the restriction without improving their language ability. This thesis suggests that if we want to ameliorate the class reproduction magnified by school education, the curriculum and the instruction should be changed. For the curriculum, we should simplify subjects and introduce more integrated classes in low and medium grades to reduce the intensity of curriculum progress. For the instruction, teacher should use student-orientated teaching methods, reduce lectures, and increase the time for students’ oral presentation to encourage working class students develop elaborated code so that they can be more capable of entering the higher level education.