Social Interaction In Mathematics Classroom

In Ethiopian context, most of the studies on classroom interaction attempted to investigate the interaction pattern using the vast known Flanders s Interaction Analysis. These studies focused on investigating the freedom and control of the teacher on the learners. However, it is this explanatory qualitative case study which attempted to investigate the nature of mathematics classroom interaction in city Secondary School, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It took the existing mathematics classroom social norms to understand the nature of interaction in to consideration. It aimed to find out and examine factors that could influence teacher-student and student-student interaction from the social constructivists and symbolic interactionists perspectives. This study focused on the nature of interactions that occurred during regular mathematics classroom activities. The study offers empirical and theoretical reflections on the nature of classroom interaction.

In the first BACOMET volume different perspectives on issues concerning teacher education in mathematics were presented (B. Christiansen, A. G. Howson and M. Otte, Perspectives on Mathematics Education, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986). Underlying all of them was the fundamental problem area of the relationships between mathematical knowledge and the teaching and learning processes. The subsequent project BACOMET 2, whose outcomes are presented in this book, continued this work, especially by focusing on the genesis of mathematical knowledge in the classroom. The book developed over the period 1985-9 through several meetings, much discussion and considerable writing and redrafting. Our major concern was to try to analyse what we considered to be the most significant aspects of the relationships in order to enable mathematics educators to be better able to handle the kinds of complex issues facing all mathematics educators as we approach the end of the twentieth century. With access to mathematics education widening all the time, with a multi tude of new materials and resources being available each year, with complex cultural and social interactions creating a fluctuating context of education, with all manner of technology becoming more and more significant, and with both informal education (through media of different kinds) and non formal education (courses of training etc. ) growing apace, the nature of formal mathematical education is increasingly needing analysis.

The book presents a selection of the most relevant talks given at the 21st MAVI conference, held at the Politecnico di Milano. The first section is dedicated to classroom practices and beliefs regarding those practices, taking a look at prospective or practicing teachers’ views of different practices such as decision-making, the roles of explanations, problem-solving, patterning, and the use of play. Of major interest to MAVI participants is the relationship between teachers’ professed beliefs and classroom practice, aspects that provide the focus of the second section. Three papers deal with teacher change, which is notoriously difficult, even when the teachers themselves are interested in changing their practice. In turn, the book’s third section centers on the undercurrents of teaching and learning mathematics, which can surface in various situations, causing tensions and inconsistencies. The last section of this book takes a look at emerging themes in affect-related research, with a particular focus on attitudes towards assessment. The book offers a valuable resource for all teachers and researchers working in this area.

The culture of the mathematics classroom is becoming an increasingly salient topic of discussion in mathematics education. Studying and changing what happens in the classroom allows researchers and educators to recognize the social character of mathematical pedagogy and the relationship between the classroom and culture at large. This volume is divided into three sections, reporting findings gained in both research and practice. The first part presents several attempts to change classroom culture by focusing on the education of mathematics teachers and on teacher-researcher collaboration. The second section shifts to the interactive processes of the mathematics classroom and to the communal nature of learning. The third section discusses the means of constructing, filtering, and establishing mathematical knowledge that are characteristic of classroom culture. This internationally relevant volume will be of particular interest to educators and educational researchers.

This book grew out of a five-year collaboration between groups of American and German mathematics educators. The central issue addressed accounting for the messiness and complexity of mathematics learning and teaching as it occurs in classroom situations. The individual chapters are based on the view that psychological and sociological perspectives each tell half of a good story. To unify these concepts requires a combined approach that takes individual students' mathematical activity seriously while simultaneously seeing their activity as necessarily socially situated. Throughout their collaboration, the chapter authors shared a single set of video recordings and transcripts made in an American elementary classroom where instruction was generally compatible with recent reform recommendations. As a consequence, the book is much more than a compendium of loosely related papers. The combined approach taken by the authors draws on interactionism and ethnomethodology. Thus, it constitutes an alternative to Vygotskian and Soviet activity theory approaches. The specific topics discussed in individual chapters include small group collaboration and learning, the teacher's practice and growth, and language, discourse, and argumentation in the mathematics classroom. This collaborative effort is valuable to educators and psychologists interested in situated cognition and the relation between sociocultural processes and individual psychological processes.

Mathematics teaching and learning have been dominated by a concern for the intellectual readiness of the child, debates over rote learning versus understanding and, recently, mathematical processes and thinking. The gaze into today's mathematics classroom is firmly focused on the individual learner. Recently, however, studies of mathematics in social practices, including the market place and the home, have initiated a shift of focus. Culture has become identified as a key to understanding the basis on which the learner appropriates meaning. The chapters in this timely book attempt to engage with this shift of focus and offer original contributions to the debate about mathematics teaching and learning. They adopt theoretical perspectives while drawing on the classroom as both the source of investigation and the site of potential change and development. The book will be of fundamental interest to lecturers and researchers and to teachers concerned with the classroom as a cultural phenomenon.

This book focuses on aspects of mathematical beliefs, from a variety of different perspectives. Current knowledge of the field is synthesized and existing boundaries are extended. The volume is intended for researchers in the field, as well as for mathematics educators teaching the next generation of students.

Classroom interaction has a significant influence on teaching and learning. It is through interaction that we solve problems, build ideas, make connections and develop our understanding. Patterns in Mathematics Classroom Interaction describes, exemplifies and considers the implications of patterns and structures of mathematics classroom interaction. Drawing on a Conversation Analytic approach, the book examines how the structures of interactions between teachers and students influence, enable, and constrain the mathematics that students are experiencing and learning in school. In particular, it considers the handling of difficulties or errors and the consequences on both the mathematics students are learning, and the learning of this mathematics. The various roles of silence and the treatment of knowledge and understanding within everyday classroom interactions also reveal the nature of mathematics as it is taught in different classrooms. Examples of students explaining, reasoning and justifying as they interact are also drawn upon to examine how the structures of classroom interaction support students to develop these discursive practices. The approach taken in Patterns in Mathematics Classroom Interaction enables the identification of not only what structures exist and pervade classroom discourse, but also how these structures influence teaching and learning. It is the understanding of how these structures affect students' experiences in the classroom that permits the use and development of practices that can support students' learning. This reflexive relationship between these structures of interactions and student actions and learning is central to the issues explored in this book, alongside the implications these may have for teachers' practice, and students' learning.