The growth of school mathematics : Korean secondary gifted students' collaborative problem solving using the Wiki

Electronic networks have provided new intellectual environments where people can accumulate their cognitive power and have increased the necessity to provide students opportunity to learn together in online CoI (Community of Inquiry) beyond classroom walls. In this respect, this study, as a design experiment, investigated the applicability of the Wiki as a collaborative problem solving tool in Korean secondary gifted educational environments. Fourteen Korean secondary gifted students enrolled in a calculus II course, including two females, in a gifted school in Korea collaboratively solved ten calculus problems for 70 days. In this study, the Wiki functioned as a collective cognitive tool by coalescing individual thinking processes into collective thinking processes on the one hand and by distributing cognitive loads of problem solving over individual cognitions along the logic of solutions and refutations on the other hand. This study provides evidence that the Wiki provided Korean secondary gifted students opportunity to experience collaborative learning and growth of school mathematics and thus realized connected knowing via mathematical contents in online CoI in spite of the inconvenience of writing mathematical expressions using the Wiki. CHAPTER