The Impact of Mathematical Writing on Students’ Metacognition in Applied Algebra Test

Abstract

Students always use their pens and papers from time to time in their daily routine mathematics lesson to perform activities such as taking notes, performing calculation, doing mathematics assignments or examinations. However, students mainly use writing as a mechanism to demonstrate their computational skills rather than their conceptual thinking. Mathematical writing becomes a powerful learning tool only if it combines language and mathematical algorithm. Thus, this paper intends to explore the impact of mathematical writing on students’ metacognition in an applied algebra test. It attempts to examine the metacognitive behavior of three foundation students in engineering and the qualitative data was the participants’ take-home test after five weeks of mathematical writing intervention. This paper reports the analysis of these students’ writing responses in the test. The findings revealed the quality of the students’ metacognition abilities and their mathematical problem solving skills.