Zahra Gooya, Mohammad Reza Fadaie, Zeinab A’gah,
Volume 1, Issue 1 (1-2014)
Abstract
The ways that mathematics teachers listen to students’ explanation, influence their understanding of students and their teaching activities. If teachers be informed about different ways of “listening” to students’ ideas and conceptions concerning mathematics, they might be able to use listening as an effective teaching method to enhance students’ mathematical learning. The related literature indicates that teachers’ familiarity with different “listening” approaches, could potentially help them to set up the stage for more interaction between students, teachers, and their learning environments. In such cases, students are gradually become skillful in realistically assessing their ideas, revising them and deepening their mathematical learning. We, thus, designed and conducted a study with five mathematics teachers in grades 6 to 8, to learn more about the ways they listened to students in their mathematics classes. All participants were volunteered female teachers with at least bachelor degree in mathematics. The research paradigm of the study was qualitative and the research method was phenomenography. Therefore, observations and interviews were the main instruments for the data collection. As Marton (1988) suggested, the categories of descriptions made up the main results of this research. So, the findings are three major and distinct categories to reveal the commonality and differences of the nature of “listening” concerning mathematics teachers in their classrooms. These categories had great consistency with Davis’ (1997) theoretical framework of three approaches to “listening” including evaluative, interpretive and hermeneutic.
Mojtaba Eskandari, Ebrahim Reyhani,
Volume 2, Issue 3 (9-2014)
Abstract
Abstract: In the first part of this study, first a brief introduction of problem posing was present and then, some frameworks and classifications of problem posing were reviewed. In the second part of the study the research that has been conducted in Iran was introduced. This quasi-experimental study was conducted with experimental and control groups which aimed to investigate the impact of fostering mathematics problem posing skills on 8th grade students’ ability to solve mathematical problems. The findings of the first part showed that problem posing skills was associated with problem solving ability, creativity and divergent thinking, and they improved each other. Problem posing process also could be used as a tool to gain a greater awareness of what's going on in the minds of students. T-test analysis of the second part of paper showed that doing problem posing activities in the classroom made a significant difference in students' problem solving skills.