Journeys towards sociomathematical norms in the Foundation Phase

Samantha Morrison,Hamsa Venkat,Mike Askew

doi:10.4102/sajce.v11i1.927

Abstract

Background: The co-establishment of social and sociomathematical norms in the microculture of South African classrooms and its possible effects on early number learning has largely been unexplored. Social norms are considered to be general classroom norms that are relevant in any teaching and learning space, whilst sociomathematical norms are specific to the mathematical aspects of students’ working.Aim: In the midst of poor numeracy outcomes in South African schools, our interest lies in the connections between the establishment of particular norms and the affordances or constraints for learning that they provided. Part of our interest, in a context where sense-making, co-operative working and mathematical progression beyond one-by-one counting have been described as infrequent in Foundation Phase mathematics learning, was to explore whether it was possible to institute norms related to these aspects.Setting: We report on the social and sociomathematical norms established within group intervention sessions with two groups of four Grade 2 learners across 9 weeks of intervention in a suburban school which serves a historically disadvantaged learner population.Methods: The frequency of specific norm codes was used to determine the normative behaviour within groups across intervention lessons.Results: Two significant inferences are drawn from study results: a culture of co-operative working based on social norms was needed in the grouped learning space before sociomathematical norms could be foregrounded within the same space; and one particular sociomathematical norm – ‘use the structure of 10’ – was particularly important as the ‘hand hold’ that allowed for progression in participants’ early number skills.

Highlights

This article describes the normative behaviour of two groups of South African Grade 2 learners during grouped intervention that focused on improving their early number skills
Drawing on the work of Cobb, Yackel and colleagues (Yackel & Cobb 1996; Yackel & Rasmussen 2002), we refer to two distinct types of norms that were established within the microculture of each group, namely, social norms (SNs) or general classroom norms and sociomathematical norms (SMNs) that refer to norms associated with classroom mathematical activity
The greater difference in proportion indicates that a greater number of all the norms established in both groups over time were SMNs, pointing to an emphasis in the intervention on mathematical learning, but in ways that were supported by attention to the SNs of working in the small group environments

Summary

Introduction

This article describes the normative behaviour of two groups of South African Grade 2 learners during grouped intervention that focused on improving their early number skills. Social norms are considered to be general classroom norms that are relevant in any teaching and learning space, whilst sociomathematical norms are specific to the mathematical aspects of students’ working The background of this story is the first author’s doctoral thesis (Morrison 2018) that reported on how small-scale intervention based on MR scaled up the early number skills of 10 second graders, eight of whom received grouped intervention (two groups of four), in a South African public school. As part of the MR programme, individual video-recorded task-based interviews using MR assessments were used to determine participants’ most advanced additive strategies before and immediately following the intervention (Wright et al 2006).

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