Investigating the levels of teachers’ use of student thinking in mathematics classrooms

Gaziantep University, Faculty of Education Department of Elementary, Gaziantep 27100, Turkey

^a Corresponding author: bilqe.yilmaz@gmail.com

Abstract

In the present study, it was aimed to explore the extent to which teachers’ use of student thinking in mathematics classrooms. Two mathematics teachers working at public middle schools participated in the study. One of the teachers had six years of teaching experience and a master’s degree in teaching mathematics. The other teacher was an inexperienced teacher with two years of teaching experience. Five lessons of each teacher, ten in total, were video-recorded. Transcripts of the video recordings were analyzed to answer two questions: Do the teachers attend to and remediate student difficulty? and To what extent does each teacher use student thinking? Analysis of the transcripts showed that the teacher with the graduate degree received higher scores with regards to attending to and remediating student difficulty, the second teacher received considerably lower scores on these aspects of teaching. It was observed that the first teacher frequently attended to student thinking and their answers regardless of correctness and made use of his lesson by turning them into an opportunity as well as constructing the target concepts, question types and descriptions. On the other hand, the second teacher failed to take student thinking further rather than using them and sometimes even disregarded their ideas