Supporting students’ development of conceptual understanding in mathematics -

Abstract

Supporting students’ development of conceptual understanding in mathematics through exploratory learning

Early secondary (12 to 15 years) and higher secondary (16 to 18 years)

Mathematical exploration is what mathematicians do and should be how students learn and do mathematics to develop a conceptual understanding of it. As the mathematician Francis Su recently wrote, "At every opportunity we need to counter the idea that mathematics is memorisation and replace it with the idea that mathematics is exploration."

The base of this workshop is on this exploratory perspective of mathematics. It will focus on exploratory mathematics tasks for classroom use and the role of noticing in supporting students' meaningful active learning and development of conceptual understanding in mathematics.

Workshop participants will work on examples of different task types to :

• experience the nature of them and the conceptual understanding they support
• understand how to engage students in them.

Participants will engage in and learn to engage students in pattern talk to develop noticing skills, central to the exploratory learning approach with these tasks. They will also create and share their own examples of these tasks for use in their classrooms. The different task types can be used for middle primary to higher secondary grades, however, the examples illustrated in the workshop will be related to the early and higher secondary grades mathematics content, including numerical, algebraical, and geometrical concepts.