Listening Figures: listening to learners of mathematics at secondary school and above

Edited by: John Mason and Jenny Houssart

ISBN: 9781858564494

Price: £17.99

Quantity:

188 pages
234 x 156mm
June 2009

The underlying principle of this book is listening to people in secondary schools and beyond as they go about discovering, learning and doing mathematics. The contributors report on what is gained by listening to school students, undergraduates and adult learners. Sometimes the listening is informal; sometimes it is based on mathematics lessons or interviews. The accounts are used as models on which to base discussion of issues about mathematical understanding and about the views held about mathematics and approaches to it.

Listening Figures is invaluable for secondary teachers, classroom assistants, adult numeracy tutors and lecturers, and for people preparing for these roles. Teachers of mathematics will be encouraged by the examples here to consider the place of learners’ voices in their own future teaching. Many of the chapters are based on empirical research and will be of particular interest to teachers carrying out small scale research projects of their own.

Contents

Introduction

1. What Students Want: A Friendly Mathematics Classroom (Barbara Allen)


2. Learning to Listen (Helen Drury)


3. Matchbox Algebra (Alan Graham and Roger Duke)


4. Listening to learners working with ROBOTS (Sue Johnston-Wilder)


5. ‘If you don’t know math people can rob you’: secondary students discuss why they learn mathematics (Kenrick Cuffy and Jenny Houssart)


6. Random listenings (Peter Johnston-Wilder)


7. Awareness and Understanding Revealed (Shafia Abdul Rahman)


8. Listening as a relation(ship) (Andy Begg)


9. Listening to Mathematics undergraduates: what are they telling us? (Melissa Rodd)


10. Listening to mathematics students: is our language the same? (Hilary Evens)


11. Learning from listening to yourself (John Mason)

Auuthor Details

John Mason is Professor of Mathematics Education at the Centre for Mathematics Education at the Open University and senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. Jenny Houssart is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Education, London.

The contributors are Shafia Abdul-Rahman, Barbara Allen, Andy Begg, Kenrick Cuffy, Helen Drury, Roger Duke, Hilary Evens, Alan Graham, Melissa Rodd, Peter Johnston-Wilder and Sue Johnston-Wilder. All are experienced in working with secondary and adult students and their teachers and many have connections with the Centre for Mathematics Education at the Open University.

Reviews

These books provide a wide range of insights into not only what learners reveal about their understandings of mathematics and their views on its teaching, but also about research techniques for gathering data, pedagogy, the discourse of mathematics, classroom organisation, ways of eliciting student explanations and understandings, the role of parents and grandparents in children's learning of mathematics, and the 'funds of knowledge' students bring to their learning. - Research in Mathematics Education

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