Where There's a Model, There's a Metaphor: Metaphorical Thinking in Students' Understanding of a Mathematical Model

The central question addressed in this article concerns the ways in which applied problem situations provide distinctive conditions to support the production of meaning and the understanding of mathematical topics. In theoretical terms, a first approach is rooted in C. S. Peirce's perspective on semiotic mediation, and it represents a standpoint from which the notion of interpretation is taken as essential to learning. A second route explores metaphorical thinking and undertakes the position according to which human understanding is metaphorical in its own nature. The connection between the two perspectives becomes a fundamental issue, and it entails the conception of some hybrid constructs. Finally, the analysis of empirical data suggests that the activity on applied situations, as it fosters metaphorical thinking, offer students' reasoning a double anchoring (or a duplication of references) for mathematical concepts.     

Analyzing Student Work as a Professional Development Activity

When worthwhile mathematical tasks are used in classrooms, they should also become a crucial element of assessment. For teachers, using these tasks in classrooms requires a different way to analyze student thinking than the traditional assessment model. Looking carefully at students' written work on worthwhile mathematical tasks and listening carefully while students explore these worthwhile tasks can contribute to a teacher's professional development. This paper reports on a professional development activity in which teachers analyzed mathematical tasks, predicted students' achievement on tasks, evaluated students' written work, listened to students' reasoning, and assessed students' understanding. Teachers' engagement in this way can help them develop flexibility and proficiency in the evaluation of their own students' work. These experiences allow teachers the opportunity to recognize students' potential, strengthen their own mathematical understanding, and engage in conversations with peers about assessment and instruction.     

The development of children's understanding of mathematical patterns through mathematical activities

In this paper we report how children (aged 8) developed their mathematical understanding through number tasks based on the Fibonacci sequence (Bamboo numbers) used in the context of a Substantial Learning Environment (SLE), which is designed to be mathematically rich, have a clear purpose and give opportunities to utilise mathematical thinking. The flexible nature of the SLEs makes it possible for teachers and children to explore various mathematical patterns. To capture children's activities when working within SLEs, we make particular reference to Pegg and Tall's work in 2005, and consider a theoretical framework based on the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs and Collis 1982) and the developmental process of understanding mathematical concepts. It was found that the key progression to be made through learning using our Bamboo number-based SLEs is from Multi-structural to Relational levels. It was also suggested that it is difficult for many children to understand the structural aspects of number patterns.     

Understanding a Teacher's Reflections: A Case Study of a Middle School Mathematics Teacher

The purpose of this research was to understand how one teacher reflected on different classroom situations and to understand whether the teacher's approach to these reflections changed over time. For the purposes of this study, we considered reflection as the teacher's act of interpreting her own practices and students' thinking to make sense of student understanding and how teaching might relate to that understanding. We investigated a middle school mathematics teacher's reflection on her students while watching videotapes of her classroom and categorized the reflection as Assess, Interpret, Describe, Justify, and Extend. The results show a higher percentage of Extend instances in later interviews than in earlier ones indicating the teacher's increasing attention to her own teaching in how her students developed their understanding. In addition, her reflection became clearer and better integrated as defined by the Cohen and Ball's triangle of interactions.     

Challenging Preservice Teachers' Mathematical Understanding: The Case of Division by Zero

Preservice elementary school teachers' fragmented understanding of mathematics is widely documented in the research literature. Their understanding of division by 0 is no exception. This article reports on two teacher education tasks and experiences designed to challenge and extend preservice teachers' understanding of division by 0. These tasks asked preservice teachers to investigate division by 0 in the context of responding to students' erroneous mathematical ideas and were respectively structured so that the question was investigated through discussion with peers and through independent investigation. Results revealed that preservice teachers gained new mathematical (what the answer is and why it is so) and pedagogical (how they might explain it to students) insights through both experiences. However, the quality of these insights were related to the participants' disposition to justify their thinking and (or) to investigate mathematics they did not understand. The study's results highlight the value of using teacher learning tasks that situate mathematical inquiry in teaching practice but also highlight the challenge for teacher educators to design experiences that help preservice teachers see the importance of, and develop the tools and inclination for, mathematical inquiry that is needed for teaching mathematics with understanding.     

On the teaching and learing of Dienes' principles

Zoltan Dienes' principles of mathematical learning have been an integral part of mathematics education literature and applied both to the teaching and learning of mathematics as well as research on processes such as abstraction and generalization of mathematical structures. Most extant textbooks of cognitive learning theories in mathematics education include a treatment of Dienes' seminal contributions. Yet, there are no available studies at the tertiary level on how students internalise the meaning of Dienes' principles. This paper explores post-graduate mathematics education student's understanding of Dienes' principles and their ability to reflexively apply the principles to their own thinking on structurally similar problems. Some implications are offered for university educators engaged in the training of future researchers in the field.     

An Exploratory Study of College Students' Views of Mathematical Thinking in a Historical Approach Calculus Course

Heuristic training alone is not enough for developing one's mathematical thinking. One missing component is a mathematical point of view. This study reports findings regarding outcomes of a historical approach calculus course to foster Taiwanese college students' views of mathematical thinking. This study consisted of 3 stages. During the initial phase, 44 engineering majors' views on mathematical thinking were tabulated by an open-ended questionnaire, and 9 randomly selected students were invited to participate in follow-up interviews. Students then received an 18-week historical approach calculus course in which mathematical concepts were problematized to challenge their intuition-based empirical beliefs about doing mathematics. Near the end of the semester, all participants answered the identical questionnaire, and we interviewed the same students to pinpoint any shifts in their views on mathematical thinking. We found that participants were more likely to value logical sense, creativity, and imagination in doing mathematics. Further, students were leaning toward a conservative attitude toward certainty of mathematical knowledge. Participants' focus seemingly shifted from mathematics as a product to mathematics as a process.     

How do they know it is a parallelogram? Analysing geometric discourse at van Hiele Level 3

In this article, we introduce Sfard's discursive framework and use it to investigate prospective teachers' geometric discourse in the context of quadrilaterals. In particular, we focus on describing and analysing two participants' use of mathematical words and substantiation routines related to parallelograms and their properties at van Hiele level 3 thinking. Our findings suggest that a single van Hiele level of thinking encompasses a range of complexity of reasoning and differences in discourse and thus a deeper investigation of students' mathematical thinking within assigned van Hiele levels is warranted.     

Mathematics in Children's Thinking

The human mind inevitably comprehends the world in mathematical terms (among others). Children's informal and invented mathematics contains on an implicit level many of the mathematical ideas that teachers want to promote on a formal and explicit level. These ideas may be innate, constructed for the purpose of adaptation, or picked up from an environment that is rich in mathematical structure, regardless of culture. Teachers should attempt to uncover the mathematical ideas contained in their students' thinking because much, but not all, of the mathematics curriculum is immanent in children's informal and invented knowledge. This mathematical perspective requires a focus not only on the child's constructive process but also on the mathematical content underlying the child's thinking. Teachers then can use these crude ideas as a foundation on which to construct a significant portion of classroom pedagogy. In doing this, teachers should recognize that children's invented strategies are not an end in themselves. Instead, the ultimate goal is to facilitate children's progressive mathematization of their immanent ideas. Children need to understand mathematics in deep, formal, and conventional ways.     

Young children's recognition of quantitative relations in mathematically unspecified settings

Children have been found to be able to reason about quantitative relations, such as non-symbolic proportions, already by the age of 5 years. However, these studies utilize settings in which children were explicitly guided to notice the mathematical nature of the tasks. This study investigates children's spontaneous recognition of quantitative relations on mathematically unspecified settings. Participants were 86 Finnish-speaking children, ages 5–8. Two video-recorded tasks, in which participants were not guided to notice the mathematical aspects, were used. The tasks could be completed in a number of ways, including by matching quantitative relations, numerosity, or other aspects. Participants’ matching strategies were analyzed with regard to the most mathematically advanced level utilized. There were substantial differences in participants’ use of quantitative relations, numerosity and other aspects in their matching strategies. The results of this novel experimental setting show that investigating children's spontaneous recognition of quantitative relations provides novel insight into children's mathematical thinking and furthers the understanding of how children recognize and utilize mathematical aspects when not explicitly guided to do so.     

Problem solving heuristics,affect, and discrete mathematics

It has been suggested that activities in discrete mathematics allow a kind of new beginning for students and teachers. Students who have been “turned off” by traditional school mathematics, and teachers who have long ago routinized their instruction, can find in the domain of discrete mathematics opportunities for mathematical discovery and interesting, nonroutine problem solving. Sometimes formerly low-achieving students demonstrate mathematical abilities their teachers did not know they had. To take maximum advantage of these possibilities, it is important to know what kinds of thinking during problem solving can be naturally evoked by discrete mathematical situations—so that in developing a curriculum, the objectives can include pathways to desired mathematical reasoning processes. This article discusses some of these ways of thinking, with special attention to the idea of “modeling the general on the particular.” Some comments are also offered about students' possible affective pathways and structures.     

Teacher Questioning to Promote Justification and Generalization in Mathematics: What Research Practice Has Taught Us

This article explores the teacher's role in classroom environments that center on learning through student exploration, and reinvention, of important mathematics. In such environments, teachers will often work to create situations where students are invited to express their thinking, most especially to peers. How is this done? In the work reported here, both teacher questioning and teacher listening will play important parts, as does the teacher's background understanding of the mathematics and the children. This study focuses especially on teacher questioning in third- and fourth-grade classrooms associated with a longitudinal study now in its eleventh year. Analyses of videotaped data indicate a strong relationship between (1) careful monitoring of students' constructions leading to a problem solution, and (2) the posing of a timely question which can challenge learners to advance their understanding. What a teacher needs to know in order to work well with student explorations has important implications.     

Using Prediction to Promote Mathematical Understanding and Reasoning

Research has shown that prediction has the potential to promote the teaching and learning of mathematics because it can be used to enhance students' thinking and reasoning at all grade levels in various topics. This article addresses the effectiveness of using prediction on students' understanding and reasoning of mathematical concepts in a middle school algebra context. In the treatment classroom, prediction questions were utilized at the launch of each algebra lesson, and in the control classroom such questions were not used. Both classrooms were taught by the same teacher and used the same curriculum. After completing each of the linear and exponential units, the two classrooms were compared in terms of their mathematical understanding and reasoning through unit assessments. Overall, the treatment classroom outperformed the control classroom on the unit assessments. This result supports that prediction is a valid construct with respect to enhanced conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning.     

Metaphor Clusters: Characterizing Instructor Metaphorical Reasoning on Limit Concepts in College Calculus

Novice students have difficulty with the topic of limits in calculus. We believe this is in part because of the multiple perspectives and shifting metaphors available to solve items correctly. We investigated college calculus instructors' personal concepts of limits. Based upon previous research investigating introductory calculus student metaphorical reasoning, we examined 11 college instructors' metaphorical reasoning on limit concepts. This paper focused on previous research of metaphor clusters observed among students to answer the following: (a) Do college instructors use metaphorical reasoning to conceptualize the meaning of a limit? (b) Can we characterize instructor metaphorical reasoning similar to those observed among students? (c) Will an instructor's self‐identification of metaphor clusters be consistent with our metaphor coding? We found that college instructors' perspectives vary, either graphical or algebraic, in their explanations of limit items. All the instructors used metaphors, and instructor metaphorical reasoning aligned with student metaphor clusters. Instructors tended to change their metaphors with respect to the limit item. Instructors were not aware of their use of metaphors, nor were they aware of their inconsistency in their choice of metaphor. We believe that instructor awareness of their own distinct perspectives and metaphors would assist students' understanding of limit concepts.     

Using Sociocultural Theory to Teach Mathematics: A Vygotskian Perspective

This study describes an elementary teacher's implementation of sociocultural theory in practice. Communication is central to teaching with a sociocultural approach and to the understanding of students; teachers who use this theory involve students in explaining and justifying their thinking. In this study ethnographic research methods were used to collect data for 4 1/2 months in order to understand the mathematical culture of this fourth‐grade class and to portray how the teacher used a sociocultural approach to teach mathematics. To portray this teaching approach, teaching episodes from the teacher's mathematics lessons are described, and these episodes are analyzed to demonstrate how students created taken‐as‐shared meanings of mathematics. Excerpts from interviews with the teacher are also used to describe this teacher's thinking about her teaching.     

Writing as a Tool to Demonstrate Mathematical Understanding

In this study, I examine how using a writers' workshop model in mathematics creates a space for students to write about their mathematical thinking and problem solving and how their writing impacts instruction. This case study of one classroom with one teacher spanned 6 weeks and included 18 implementations of an adapted version of the Writers' Workshop (WW) in a fourth‐grade mathematics class. On a biweekly basis, the data were reviewed and changes made to the model. The analysis of the students' writing revealed (a) their understandings and misunderstandings of the mathematical content, (b) their readiness for more challenging tasks, and (c) their connections to prior knowledge. Students used writing to demonstrate their understanding of mathematics and show their mathematical processes. In some cases, examining only the numerical work failed to illuminate the students' understanding, their writing provided deeper insight. Students recognized writing as a tool for learning; this was evident in interview responses.