The Effect of Employing Paradoxes in Teaching and Learning Mathematics in Correcting Students' Common Mistakes in Solving Equation

Paradoxes create a special challenge to learners and the incoherence involved causes great problems in their mind. Students" facing paradoxes provide an invaluable chance for the teachers to direct their attention towards the point and help them resolve the problem of concern. Therefore, because of the importance of paradoxes, the present paper aims at studying the effect of paradoxes in teaching and learning mathematics, specially, in cases in which students make frequent mistakes which are here referred as "common mistakes". To do this, 150 students 14-15 years old, participated in the study to investigate the efficiency of paradoxes in two most frequent errors: "simplification in equations" and "eliminating the radical from square expressions". The study lasted about four months during which the researcher taught relevant concepts in relation to the problems through paradoxes. The analysis of the data collected from a pre-test and a post-test showed that employing paradoxes is quite efficient in teaching and learning mathematics as for correcting "common mistakes.(Ahmad Shahvarani, Ali Barahmand , Asghar Seif, The Effect of Employing Paradoxes in Teaching and Learning Mathematics in Correcting Students' Common Mistakes in Solving Equation. Life Sci J 2012;9(4):5789-5792) (ISSN:1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 862