A conceptual look at instructional questioning and its use in teaching mathematics.

Abstract

Even in today’s society with electronic devices abundantly available to most western world learners to aid their learning, classroom instruction and discussions still are the most common practices of teachers everywhere. There have been many reports and studies on the instructional aspect of teaching. Mathematical discourse is one of these aspects and questions definitely are an integral part of discourse. Some researchers have identified several tasks that are common for the work of teaching mathematics. Fewer have contributed with a conceptual view on the nature of instructional questioning in the teaching of mathematics. The purpose of this thesis was to show a relationship between questions and the Mathematical tasks of teaching and to point out why elucidating this could be beneficial. To achieve this some segments from a teacher’s plenary questions were analyzed. As part of this analysis they were coded using the Mathematical discourse of instruction framework and selected Mathematical tasks of teaching. By coding in this manner an irrefutable connection was found between many of the Mathematical tasks of teaching and instructional questions. Establishing such a close relation enables questions to be viewed as an integral part of teaching and a core practice that deserves to be paid more attention to in research, in teacher education and in the work of teaching. It was further shown that different types of questions indeed do influence learners’ responses.