A Digital Wire for the Fostering Mathematical Medication Learning in Vocational Education

Abstract

When I started this dissertation, mathematics in vocational education was government policy: there was a great deal of money spent on implementing policies, but little attention paid to the goal of mathematics in vocational education. Visions from mathematics in primary education were used vocational education, and teachers were given training to become mathematics teachers. They practised hard with their students, but it was hard to find motivation for mathematics among the students, and it was a tough job to lift students to a standard level. Many students needed more time to reach this standard. However, the school system does not give them that time. I therefore started to design digital environments with instructional clips, and collaborated with ICT professionals in vocational education to implement these clips in school learning platforms. To me, technology was the solution for those students who needed more time to reach the standard required to succeed in vocational education. Technology enabled the students to follow mathematics lessons independently of time and place, so that they could upgrade their mathematics knowledge and skills. This entailed a great deal of work, but it felt like a democratic protest against the system: all students should have the opportunity to succeed. That is where this dissertation begins: its start is the further development of mathematics in vocational education using digital learning material, and its destination is training in the concept of mathematics for students' tasks in the future. A digital wire of digital learning materials (DLMs) with structured content, goals, assignments, procedural knowledge clips, instructional knowledge clips, and a discussion board, moves on to a computer-based virtual learning environment (CBVLE) with learning tasks and instructional activities that support information for cognitive schemas, information for procedures, transfer tasks for automation, and cognitive feedback such as reflection on learning.