High School Students Function Corresponds To The Understanding Of The Relationship

Our mathematics teaching has deficiencies to improve the student's understanding and it is also in urgent need to solve in the teaching reform today. Studies on the understanding of functions would benefit to remedy the deficiencies since functions are the most complex and important concepts.In the second semester after the teaching on function in senior 1, we investigated the difficulty levels of the identification of functions in different representations of mathematical relations. The relative difficulties associated with functions and developmental levels were examined through a written test administered to 241 senior 1 students in a key-point high school and 92 senior 1 students in a common high school. The results appear to support the assumption that there is a developmental pattern in student's thinking in identifying functions. We found that the student's levels of the identification of functions are generally in low grade and there are few students who are in easy to identify the different representations of functions.Generally, the mathematical achievements together develop with the understanding of functions. Whereas a few students whose mathematical achievements are excellent possibly are in low level of the understanding of functions and a few students whose mathematical achievements are inferior possibly are in relative high level.We found that teaching is the key that affect the understanding of functions by the contrastive study.Firstly we would have the teaching ideas attached importance to understanding in order to improve the mathematical understandings of the students. Secondly we would be good to capitalize on the opportunities to gradually develop the mathematical understandings. We would attach value to the identification and transform of functions in different representations that are very effective to the understanding of functions.