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Teacher's Questions Scaffold Students' Math Reasoning

August 6, 2007

Analyzing instructional conversation in a middle school mathematics class, Mitchell Nathan and Suyeon Kim observed how teachers regulate student participation in classroom discussions, and how this regulation affects students’ mathematical talk and conceptual reasoning. When they looked closely at the teacher’s questions and provocative statements intended to invite student participation, they found that the teacher systematically regulated the level of cognitive complexity of his elicitations in reaction to students’ responses. The teacher scaffolded students’ classroom participation and mental processing to help them advance from the factual-knowledge level to the metaprocessing level of mathematical discourse. (WCER Working Paper No. 2007-4).