Abstract
Facilitating mathematical discussions has consistently been identified as beneficial to students’ mathematical learning, with teachers’ use of questioning a primary identifier of appropriate facilitation. Although many teachers report familiarity with appropriate questioning techniques, we hypothesized that some teachers may not work in contexts where they can implement what they understand as best practices in their classroom. To explore this potential interaction, two primary teachers with similar dispositions towards mathematics pedagogy, but dissimilar institutional obligations were observed over a 10-week period. The types and frequencies of teachers’ questioning and their students’ responses during whole class mathematical discussions were observed. Despite both teachers holding similar conceptions of and dispositions towards facilitating mathematical discussion, the effectiveness of teachers’ various prompts in eliciting students’ mathematical descriptions was substantially different. Findings suggest that differences in the respective teachers’ institutional obligations may have affected the effectiveness of one teacher’s probing questions.
Highlights
Students who engage more frequently in talking about, explaining, or discussing mathematics tend to have higher mathematics achievement scores than those students who engage in mathematical discussion less frequently [11, 22]
The ratio between student descriptive response and each teacher question type is displayed in Table 5
Mary and Susan had similar dispositions and beliefs regarding mathematical discussion, quantitative results from the present study suggest that Susan’s prompts were more effective in eliciting descriptive responses from students
Summary
Students who engage more frequently in talking about, explaining, or discussing mathematics tend to have higher mathematics achievement scores than those students who engage in mathematical discussion less frequently [11, 22]. Such positive effects depend greatly on the teacher and Issues and Ideas in Education Vol - 4, No - 2. There is evidence that curricular demands influence how teachers facilitate mathematical discussion through usage of certain questioning types [1]
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