• The Mathematical Education
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.173-187
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• 2002

The purpose of this study through ethnographic inquiry is to describe how an elementary teacher teaches mathematics with understanding. The ways that teachers'beliefs affect instructional activities, what means understanding from the view of cognitive psychology, and ethnographic research tradition were reviewed to anchor theoretical background of this study. A third-grade teacher and his 45 students were selected in order to capture vivid and thick descriptions of the teaching and learning activities of mathematics. Three major sources of data, that is, participant-observation with video taping, formal and informal interviews with the teacher and his students, and a variety of official documents were collected. These data were analyzed through two phases: data analysis in the field and after the fieldwork. According to data analysis, ‘teaching mathematics with understanding’ was identified as the teachers central belief of teaching mathematics. In order to implement his belief in teaching practices, the teacher made use of three strategies: ⑴ valuing individual student's own way of understanding, ⑵ bring students' everyday experiences into mathematics classroom, and ⑶ lesson objectivies stated by students. It is suggested for future research that concrete and specific norms of mathematics classroom for the improvement of mathematics understanding are needed to be identified and that experienced and skillful teachers' practical knowledge should be incorporated with theories of teaching mathematics and necessarily paid more attention by mathematics educators.

• Research in Mathematical Education
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• v.9 no.3 s.23
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• pp.203-231
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• 2005

Students in East Asia have consistently out-performed their counterparts in the West in recent international studies of mathematics achievement. But some studies also show that East Asian students are more rigid in thought, and lack originality and creativity. While different theories have been proposed to account for these student performances, relatively few research studies have been done on classroom practices, potentially a major variable for explaining student performances. This paper will report on the results of two classroom studies: the TIMSS 1999 Video Study and the Learners' Perspective Study (LPS). Results the quantitative analysis of the TlMSS 1999 Video Study data show that the East Asian classrooms were dominated by teacher talk, and the mathematics content learned was abstract and unrelated to the real life. On the other hand, the characteristics of the instructional practices in Hong Kong as judged by an expert panel are that student learned relatively advanced mathematics content; the components of the lessons were more coherent, and the presentation of the lessons was more fully developed. Hong Kong students seemed to be more engaged in the mathematics lessons, and the. overall quality of the lessons was judged to be high. Results of the analysis of the LPS data also show that the classrooms in the East Asian city of Seoul were in general teacher dominated, but students were usually actively engaged in the mathematics learning. Emphasis on exploration of mathematics and practicing exercises with variation was common. It is argued that the quality teaching in the East Asian classrooms laid a firm foundation in mathematics for students, and that constitutes a necessary condition for the development of students' creativity. In order to fully develop the creativity of East Asian students, they need to be given the right environment and encouragement.

• School Mathematics
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.709-726
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• 2014

The purpose of the study was to pay attention to the studies of P. Cobb which have actively been quoted in the international research of mathematics education for the last three decades and to look at the result and effect of his research. In particular, we in-depth studied theories and the methods of the study which he has tried to reduce the gap in the theory and practice and investigated effects of his research to the Korean societies of mathematics education. Cobb made special effort to integrate radical constructivism and social constructivism and used emergent theory and symbolic interactionism as theoretical background of the study. Also he analyzed the mathematics classroom in individual and social perspectives based on the interpretive frames of social norm, sociomathematical norm and classroom-mathematical practices then dealt with equity and identity of the students. Because Cobb contributed significantly to the development of practical theory using design experiment as the method of studies, we presented the definition, characteristics, principles, processes and practices of the design experiment. We anticipate that his ways of research would be used as means of unifying the theory and the practice in school.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.87-98
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• 1997

A practice is classified into the practice as a content and the practice as a method. The former means that the practical nature of mathematical knowledge itself should be a content of mathematics and the latter means that one should teach the mathematical knowledge in such a way as the practical nature is not damaged. The practical nature of mathematics means mathematician's activity as it is actually done. Activities of the mathematician are not only discovering strict proofs or building axiomatic system but informal thinking activities such as generalization, analogy, abstraction, induction etc. In this study, it is found that the most instructive ones for the future users of mathematics are such practice as content. For the practice as a method, students might learn, by becoming apprentice mathematicians, to do what master mathematicians do in their everyday practice. Classrooms are cultural milieux and microsoms of mathematical culture in which there are sets of beliefs and values that are perpetuated by the day-to-day practices and rituals of the cultures. Therefore, the students' sense of ‘what mathematics is really about’ is shaped by the culture of school mathematics. In turn, the sense of what mathematics is really all about determines how the students use the mathematics they have learned. In this sense, the practice on which classroom instruction might be modelled is that of mathematicians at work. To learn mathematics is to enter into an ongoing conversation conducted between practitioners who share common language. So students should experience mathematics in a way similar to the way mathematicians live it. It implies a view of mathematics classrooms as a places in which classroom activity is directed not simply toward the acquisition of the content of mathematics in the form of concepts and procedures but rather toward the individual and collaborative practice of mathematical thinking.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.35-53
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to analyze and confirm the effectiveness of two teacher-centered instruction methods in the context of linear functions: one with emphasis on mathematical thinking processes as an alternative to the more traditional method without such emphasis. The level of achievement of students under the teacher-centered instruction with explicit emphasis on mathematical thinking processes is consistently higher than that of students receiving the more traditional teacher-centered instruction. The alternative instruction method in the current study is expected to encourage and prompt students to better grasp and understand mathematical concepts, principles, as well as problem solving strategies. In contrast to other alternatives, the method offers the advantage of being readily incorporated into the actual teaching practices in the classroom, as the traditional frame of teacher-centered pedagogy familiar to teachers remains in tact.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.735-760
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• 2009

Most of every teachers' life is occupied with his or her instruction, and a classroom is a laboratory for mutual development between teacher and students also. Namely, a teacher's professionalism can be enhanced by circulations of continual reflection, experiment, verification in the laboratory. Professional development is pursued primarily through teachers' reflective practices, especially instruction practices which is grounded on $Sch\ddot{o}n's$ epistemology of practices. And a thorough penetration about situations or realities and an exact understanding about students that are now being faced are foundations of reflective practices. In this study, at first, we explored the implications of earlier studies for discussing a teacher's practice. We could found two essential consequences through reviewing existing studies about classroom and instructions. One is a calling upon transition of perspectives about instruction, and the other is a suggestion of necessity of a teachers' reflective practices. Subsequently, we will talking about an instance of a middle school mathematics teacher's practices. We observed her instructions for a year. She has created her own practical knowledges through circulation of reflection and practices over the years. In her classroom, there were three mutual interaction structures included in a rich expressive environments. The first one is students' thinking and justifying in their seats. The second is a student's explaining at his or her feet. The last is a student's coming out to solve and explain problem. The main substances of her practical know ledges are creating of interaction structures and facilitating students' spontaneous changes. And the endeavor and experiment for diagnosing trouble and finding alternative when she came across an obstacles are also main elements of her practical knowledges Now, we can interpret her process of creating practical knowledge as a process of self-directed professional development when the fact that reflection and practices are the kernel of a teacher's professional development is taken into account.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.61 no.4
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• pp.559-579
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• 2022

Research on lexicon and language provides insights into the interests, values and practices of a community where individuals use the language. The International Classroom Lexicon Project, in which ten countries participated, identified own country's mathematics teaching and learning lexicons by investigating mathematics classroom instruction from teachers' perspectives in a speaking-oriented community. This study, as an extension of the International Classroom Lexicon Project research, investigated pedagogical lexicons used in 「Mathematics and Education」 journals specialized for Korean professional mathematics teachers published by the Korean Society of Teachers of Mathematics. Using the text mining approach, we also traced how these pedegogical lexicons have changed quantitatively over the past 10 years with a diachronic perspective. As a results, several novel terms were found in the writing-oriented community, which were not identified in the speaking-oriented community. In addition, we could discover some pedagogical lexicons have increased statistically significantly and some lexicons appeared(increased) rapidly across years. This implies the teacher community's values and zeitgeist by reflecting these changes in the sociocultural, incidental and social changing (i.e., periodical change) contexts. This study has value as a first step in understanding zeitgeist for mathematics education in Korean mathematics teacher community according to changes of times over the past 10 years. Also, this study contributes to the methodological insights: the text mining technique provides a methodological contribution to researching changes in interests, values and zeitgeist according to these changes in the times.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.143-164
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• 2013

Despite the recent emphasis on mathematical communication, little practical guide has been provided for a teacher with what to do for orchestrating high-quality discussions in a mathematics classroom. This paper analyzed 20 elementary mathematics lessons which were recognized as effective instruction in Korea using an analytic framework with regard to 5 practices for orchestrating productive mathematics discussions (i.e., anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, & connecting) by Smith and Stein (2011) in terms of performance scales from Level 0 to 3. The results of this study showed that the most frequent levels were Level 1 including undesirable practices and Level 2 including insufficient practices. There were only one or two lessons per practice which were assessed as Level 3 of good performance. Specifically, Level 2 was the most frequent with regard to monitoring and selecting, whereas Level 1 was the most frequent as for the other practices. This paper provides some implications for co-ordinating productive mathematics discussions.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.261-275
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• 2016

Many students have dualistic beliefs about mathematics and its learning- for example, there is always just one right answer in mathematics and their role in the classroom is receiving and absorbing knowledge from teacher and textbook. This article investigated some epistemic implications and limitations of common mathematics teaching practices, which often present mathematical facts(or procedures) and treat students' errors in a certain and absolute way. Langer and Piper's (1987) experiment and Oliveira et al.'s (2012) study suggested that presenting knowledge in conditional language which allows uncertainty can foster students' productive epistemological beliefs. Changing the focus and patterns of classroom communication about students' errors could help students to overcome their dualistic beliefs. This discussion will contribute to analyze the implicit epistemic messages conveyed by mathematics instructions and to investigate teaching strategies for stimulating students' epistemic development in mathematics.

• School Mathematics
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.37-63
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• 2011

This research had investigated the teaching practice in the mathematics classrooms with immigrant students to describe how effectively mathematics teachers create inclusive learning environment of mathematics. The analysis of the data from the elementary schools suggests that teaching practice in the class was consistent to the criteria for 'contextualization of students' lived experience' and 'mathematical conversation'. However, while the quantitative results suggested that the teachers showed high expectation to their students in their teaching, the qualitative analysis revealed the teacher's beliefs and attitudes against providing equitable educational opportunity for every student. In the middle school classrooms, it was found that the teaching practices were not compatible to the goals of multicultural mathematics education. The analysis of the survey data regarding teachers' multicultural competence suggests that the teachers possessed rather advan]ced understanding of multicultural mathematics education but they need materials and pedagogy for classroom teaching from multicultural perspectives.