Reflections on ACER Research Conference

I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the ACER conference "Teaching Mathematics? make it count" over the last few days. There were many excellent papers presented, that will all be posted http://research.acer.edu.au/research_conference/RC2010/ in due course. Here are a few reflections:

1. Speaking in and about Mathematics Classrooms Internationally (David Clarke, University of Melbourne)

Research supports my classroom experience of students from a Korean cultural and ethnic heritage. Sometimes we have had students join our school in Year 10 or 11 from Korea who do not seem to engage in the classroom and contribute almost nothing to classroom discussions.

 

One interesting graph showed the number of public utterances (teacher/student) in classrooms from a variety of countries. It showed that there were almost no public utterances from students in Korea, compared with approximately 200 student public utterances from classrooms in Melbourne. So the question is raised of how to modify teaching to assist these students to engage and think through the material rather than simply take the teachers word as gospel.

 

Implications:

• We need to use modified teaching strategies for Korean students.


• Firstly, it is a good idea to address this directly, explicitly and confidentially: "I know you have some very good ideas and it would be good for you to share those ideas with the other students in the class"


• Initially, do not ask students questions in front of the entire class but rather move to students and when they have an answer that is correct, ask them individually if they can share that with the class as this will give the student confidence in their ability.


• Have students work in small groups so that they do not have to talk in front of the entire class, but the setting can be more informal, which will give a greater chance of them contributing.

2. Mathematics Teaching and learning to rech beyond the basics (Kaye Stacey, University of Melbourne)

Year 8 textbook study found good proofs if rules as well as the rules themselves, but once the rue was learnt, the derivations we not referred to again. I do not think that this is a problem - once you understand the derivation, there is no need to repeat this for no purpose. Instead students should be given the opportunity to discover this for themselves in the first instance.

 

There does seem to be a slight improve on the "shallow teaching syndrome", which could be a result of the wonderful applets that can be found on the Internet to help explain rules and the derivation of them.

 

The important point was made that we need to use these derivations more as a thinking tool than simply an explanation tool.

 

Implications

• We need to let students explore the content, make their own connections and attempt to come to their own rules and relationships, thus creating a thinking opportunity.

3. What TIMMS and PISA can tell us

PISA: In 28 out of 41 countries, boys scored had higher 'Mathematical Literacy'. Interestingly there was NO OVERALL GENDER BIAS in Australia. However, boys in Australia were stronger at Space, Shape and Uncertainty.

 

TIMMS reveals that 15 year old girls in Australia had much lower self-belief of their Mathematical capabilities than boys. PISA: Interestingly, although indigenous students scored a whole proficiency band lower than non-indigenous (on average), there were no gender differences in terms of their self belief.

 

Implications:

• Why do non-indigenous girls have lower self belief? I teach boys only, so I can capitalise on their possibly over inflated self belief, but as a society this is a concerning trend as we need strong males and females in mathematical and scientific professions.

 

 

 

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