Impact of Inquiry Approaches to Mathematics Teaching on the Development of Skills to Analyse and Interpret Relationships Between Variables

Abstract The development of inquiry skills to analyse and interpret data from tables and graphs, identify, understand and use relationships between variables represents an important goal of mathematics teaching. Our research is currently focused on the development of high school students’ inquiry skills in mathematics teaching and diagnosing the quality level of their acquisition. The first phase of the research was oriented on the development of innovative methodical and learning materials based on inquiry approaches to mathematics teaching. In the paper, we present interactive learning activities implemented in the system Geogebra, which enable students to analyse graphs of functions, formulate and test hypotheses, express relationships between variables and generalize mathematical findings. As a part of our research we conducted a pedagogical experiment in six Slovak high schools focused on application of inquiry approaches to mathematics teaching. The main purpose of the pedagogical experiment was to assess the effectiveness of inquiry-based mathematics teaching in the development of inquiry skills to analyse and interpret relationships between variables. The levels of the development of the inquiry skills were diagnosed using pre-test and post-test. The pre-test was answered by 332 students from 1st or 2nd grade groups (fifteen and sixteen year old students) of six high schools. The post-test has been given to the same groups after applying innovative teaching methods based on the inquiry approaches to learning. The post-test was answered by 288 students. The basis of quantitative analysis of the test results was a statistical testing of the hypotheses that our innovative teaching method induces a significant improvement in selected inquiry skills.