0000000000484590
AUTHOR
Jorunn Reinhardtsen
The Fifth Lesson: Students’ Responses to a Patterning Task Across the Four Countries
The chapter reports a comparative analysis of problem-solving activities in classrooms in the four countries. The problem students work with is a patterning task, taken from a major international comparative study. The idea of analyzing this group work across countries is to see what traces of algebra learning may be discerned in the work of the students. The results show the complexities of early algebra learning by presenting in detail the obvious variations in how students tackle the problem in more or less algebraic ways. In the small-group work in classrooms, students pool their ideas allowing for the discourse to build on itself in a cumulative manner.
The introduction of algebra : comparative studies of textbooks in Finland, Norway, Sweden and USA
Masteroppgave i matematikkdidaktikk- Universitetet i Agder, 2012 This master thesis is a comparative analysis of textbooks from four different countries, Finland, Norway, Sweden and USA (California), concerning the introduction of algebra. The topic for this research was inspired and initiated in connection with the international project VIDEOMAT, which I have been involved with since its planning phase. Following the design of this project, two mathematics textbooks of two consecutive grades from the four different countries have been analyzed. The focus in these has been the 60 first tasks presented in the algebraic chapters. The review of literature includes a look at the origins of alge…
Capturing learning in classroom interaction in mathematics: Methodological considerations
International audience; This paper discusses issues of how to transcribe and analyze video-recordings when studying learning in small group work in mathematics. Since bodily features of interaction and the use of artefacts play important roles in mathematical reasoning, a multimodal approach to transcribing is necessary. Thus, the theoretical grounding for transcriptions has to be in accord with the perspective on learning adopted in the analysis. In the paper, the principles for studying what Radford (2000) refers to as knowledge objectification processes when learning mathematics will be discussed.
Designed Examples as Mediating Tools: Introductory Algebra in Two Norwegian Grade 8 Classrooms
A critical element in the introduction of algebra is to focus student attention on the basic ideas of algebraic reasoning including the use of concepts such as variable and algebraic expression. In the Norwegian classrooms, representing a student-centered instructional philosophy, the teachers utilized examples and problems that they themselves had designed, and the examples involved resources such as concrete objects and body movements in order to make algebra accessible to students. When designing these examples, teachers thus used their own previous experiences of teaching algebra in an attempt to articulate the passage from arithmetic to algebra.
Student meaning making in elementary algebra teaching : An in-depth study of classrooms in four countries
Paper II and III are not available as a part of the dissertation due to the copyright. The research presented in this thesis is based on observations and analyses of classroom data from four countries. The data were collected through a collaboration of local research teams in Finland, Norway, Sweden and the USA (California) and the shared topic of interest is the learning of elementary algebra. This thesis is concerned with the meaning making of students as they are introduced to, and engage in, tasks, symbols and ideas belonging to the highly abstract discourse of algebra. Further, as a response to the complexity of classroom learning, the thesis also seeks to advance analytical approaches…