Narrow Results

I examine the question of why language diversity matters in mathematics education, offering four responses, illustrated with examples drawn from my research. The four responses look at the nature of language diversity, its role in learning and teaching mathematics, its connection with social stratification, and its connection with the ecological crises faced by our planet.

Mathematics education in eastern Asian countries emphasizes the importance of foundations, and in Mainland China the principle of "basic knowledge and basic skills" was explicitly put forward for the teaching of mathematics. This chapter analyzes in a detailed way the benefits and inadequacies of this principle and the practice arising from it from four aspects, namely, its historical roots and social environment, the goals of classroom teaching, teaching characteristics and underlying psychological principles, and education reforms and development in China. The different characteristics of Eastern and Western mathematics education can be complementary to each other, helping strike a balance between foundation and development concerning classroom teaching.

Does a national script exist? We have reservations about an affirmative answer to this question for two major reasons. First, it is dangerous to attempt to identify a teacher's "script" from a selection of "snapshot" lessons. Second, such a characterization may suggest implicitly that a teacher's approach is almost invariable from lesson to lesson. Our detailed analysis of a sequence of lessons by a teacher in Shanghai has shown that variation between lessons certainly does occur but, despite such variation, we can identify a "pattern" of teaching over time that characterizes a teacher's approach. We define a "pattern of teaching" to mean: The identifiable features of a teacher's classroom practice, occurring in a repeated manner over a period of time, that together constitute the characteristics of the teacher's style.

Based on a field study of four schools in rural and urban regions in northeast China, this chapter describes how Chinese primary school teachers teach mathematics and how teachers organize learning activities in the classroom in rural and urban primary schools in Mainland China. The communalities and differences in rural and urban mathematics classrooms were analyzed, which were demonstrated in both preparations of lessons and actual teaching. Inspirations for improvements of mathematics learning and teaching in Mainland China were discussed.

This chapter aims to provide readers with a comprehensive review of related literature on how Chinese mathematics teachers pursue preservice training and in-service professional development, and how they teach in classrooms. The results suggest that China (Mainland) has established a highly unique and unified pre-service mathematics teacher education system; pre-service teachers learned more advanced mathematics courses and showed better motivation toward their training as compared with other countries such as the UK and US. China has also established its unique and well-institutionalized teacher professional development system for in-service teachers, with Teaching Research Groups (TRG) at the school level and Teaching Research Office at different government levels playing a crucial role. About teaching, it was found that Chinese mathematics teachers planned their lessons carefully; they adopted more whole-class teaching strategies, emphasized two basics (basic knowledge and basic skills), teacherstudent interaction and students' engagement academically and the method of teaching with variation, and assigned homework daily for reinforcement as well as assessment of students' learning. Some issues and suggestions on future research in these areas are raised at the end of the chapter.

This study is to investigate the fourth grade teachers' mathematics teaching behaviors in Taiwan. A large scale of two-staged stratified cluster sampling of fourth-grade math teacher teaching in the whole Taiwan was conducted. Video survey was applied, and the videos were taped within one semester. Usually, it took one day to tape one teacher's instruction in one school; altogether, 60 teachers' instructions in the participating schools were recorded. Instructional videos were recorded and digitized, coded and analyzed. The results showed that in the fourth-grade mathematics classroom teaching, concept statements, problem statements and solving questions each took about 30%, 20% and 50% of the time, respectively. In Content strand, the mathematics problems teachers taught were mostly of low complexity and repetition problems. In Mathematical ability, stating concepts and using procedures were the majority. In Mathematical power, connections with real-life were the majority.

In the past few decades, research on teaching has significantly shifted its focus from seeking effective teaching behavior to exploring teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and thinking behind their actions. Numerous empirical studies have revealed that teachers' beliefs about mathematics and mathematics learning are strong influences on their views of effective mathematics teaching, which in turn influence students' learning. These beliefs come into play when teachers shape students' learning experience and affect their learning outcomes. Although extensive research studies have been conducted on how Chinese learn and teach mathematics, much more needs to be done to explore how beliefs and knowledge influence teaching among mathematics teachers in the Chinese context. This chapter first reviews the literature that concerns how beliefs and knowledge influence teaching among mathematics teachers, with a particular focus on studies conducted in the Chinese regions. We then describe a series of our studies on how beliefs and knowledge affect teaching. Finally we suggest inspirations and directions for future research.