There is compelling support for the argument that the teacher and his/her professional practice in the classroom constitute one of the most important, if not the most important, factors in lesson effectiveness (Rice, 2003; Sanders & Horn, 1998). The classroom teacher's intended and implemented practice is guided by the values and beliefs he/she subscribes to (see, for examples, Barkatsas & Malone, 2005; Seah, 2005), and much of this professional practice presents itself in the form of mathematical tasks, each of which is "a classroom activity, the purpose of which is to focus students' attention on a particular mathematical idea" (Stein, Grover, & Henningsen, 1996, p. 460). Specifically, this paper reports part of an exploratory study into students' perspectives of the types of tasks that are regarded as being especially helpful in their studies, situated in the middle years of schooling in the city of Chongqing, China. The research design of this exploratory stage of the study is based on the recently-concluded Task Types and Mathematics Learning [TTML] research project conducted in Australia by Peter Sullivan, Doug Clarke and Barbara Clarke. The findings of this project will be briefly reviewed in the next section. A case that relatively little is known about the Chinese mathematics classroom will be put forward. The research design will then be presented, accompanied by a reflection on what we learn in the process of translating the questionnaire used from the English language to the Chinese language. This will be followed by a report of the results obtained, ending with a discussion of the findings.
History
Start page
389
End page
403
Total pages
15
Outlet
Proceedings of the Second Asian Conference on Education 2010