Extent of teacher questioning to promote reasoning during problem solving in high achieving mathematics classrooms

Abstract

Reasoning is an important skill to be honed when doing problem solving, particularly, in non-routine problems. To promote this skill, teachers play a crucial role. According to literature, even high achievers struggled with reasoning when solving non-routine problems in mathematics. Literature has shown that conventional instructional approaches in mathematics classrooms such as lecture style instruction, cloze technique questioning by teachers, recall of facts, and memorization of algorithms may have led to the cause of high achievers to struggle in honing reasoning skills. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate how teachers who teach high achievers in mathematics used questions to promote reasoning through non-routine problem solving. Four high achieving mathematics classrooms were observed on how the teachers used questions to assist their students to reason when working on a particular non-routine problem. The observations were then analyzed using an observation checklist to identify the types of ‘teacher moves’ used in the classroom and its frequency of occurrences, as well as, the components of reasoning displayed by the high achievers in respond to their teachers’ questions. The results of this study showed that the way high achievers reason were actually influenced by the direction of the questions posed by the teachers.