Fischbein on Intuitive thinking
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Intuition
• Intuitive thinking is a feeling (a sense)
that doesn’t use rational processes
such as facts and data.
• Intuition, a phenomenon of the mind,
describes the ability to acquire
knowledge without inference or the
use of reason.
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• Intuition is using information and making judgments
based on skills, rules, and/or knowledge without
conscious awareness
• Eg. Scientific and popular literatures, feelings, pattern
matching, spiritual insight
• The Oxford dictionary defines "intuition" as: the power
of knowing without learning or reasoning .
• Intuitively, intuition may be conceived as self- evident,
self-consisted, cognition.
• Some refer to intuition as a source of knowledge, while
others refer to it as a method.
• Good intuition comes from years of knowledge and
experience that allows you to understand how people
and the world works. Many situations are intuitive.
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Fischbein on Intuitive thinking
According to Fischbein (1987) intuition is a cognition
characterized by the following features;
self-evidence and immediacy (in that extrinsic justification is not
needed),
intrinsic certainly (note that self-evidence and certainly are not that same),
perseverance
coerciveness
theory status
globality (in that intuitions offer a unitary global view)
implicitness (so that although the result of selection, globalization and inference,
intuitions will appear to be implicit).
The behavioral task of intuition is to prepare and guide
our mental or practical activity.
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• An intuition arrives whole in the mind and it may
be difficult to separate the components into a
logical deductive order.
• Indeed, visual information is processed
simultaneously; only the result of this processing
is made available to the conscious self
• The existence of different modes of thought
suggests a distinction between intuitive thought
processes and the logical thought demanded by
formal mathematics.
• Intuition involves parallel processing quite
distinct from the step by step sequential
processing required in rigorous deduction.
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Implications
• Fischbein suggested that there are "problem
solving intuitions", for which, he provides no
empirical evidence.
• Teaching strategies like discovery oriented
learning and use of manipulatives can help to
foster new intuitions about repeating
structures and patterns.
• Intuition should be an integral part of the
learning process.
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Example for intuition through discovery learning
• Problem: Determine the amount of money in the
bank account of a person at the end of 10years,
for an initial deposit of 100 with 6% interest rate,
compounded annually.
• Students often initially attempt to manipulate
the patterns and relationships in the problem
with a calculator by engaging in repeated
calculations involving multiplication and
addition, students get a sense of problem
statement and articulate a solution.
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Exa ple for i tuitio ………………………………..
• Further generalization can be encouraged by
what happens, if question changes as the initial
deposit is 500.
• By using and manipulating a variable for the
principal, students can begin to get a sense of
relationship between the initial deposit and the
ending balance.
• This process can be repeated in way that
encourages students to continue generalizing
and thus to develop intuitions about the
patterns and relationships in this particular
problem.
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