Questioning Elicits Reasoning and Representations for Combinatorics Tasks

This analytic contains 4 events. The purpose of this analytic is to assist teachers in acquiring pedagogical skill in supporting the development of students’ mathematical reasoning. More specifically, the analytic highlights researchers’ questioning to promote students’ engagement with new ideas, building models, and listening to input from other students. The analytic is also intended to answer the question: “In what ways do students respond to prompting and questioning?” The events highlight researcher interventions from a Rutgers longitudinal study on how children build mathematical ideas. They were chosen to demonstrate the types of responses to prompting and questioning that occur in the context of solving combinatorics tasks and to emphasize that researchers ask questions that encourage students to state their reasoning, clarify their explanation, and use representations to support more convincing arguments.. Related Readings: Martino, A. M., & Maher, C. A. (1999). Teacher questioning to promote justification and generalization in mathematics: What research practice has taught us. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 18(1), 53-78