Posing questions is a direct way for teachers to push students to verbalize justifications and make connections among ideas—a crucial component of giving students with learning disabilities access to high levels of mathematical reasoning—but this skill is difficult to learn. We recruited four pre-service special education teachers to provide 1-1 algebra tutoring to students with learning disabilities while receiving instruction related to posing mathematics questions and supporting students’ reasoning. The pre-service teachers increased their frequency of questions overall and of questions that probed students’ thinking or explored mathematical relationships. Students gave correct and complete responses to these more complex questions approximately half of the time; however, pre-service teachers most often reduced the complexity of their questions when students gave incomplete responses. The findings of this study illustrate the potential for pre-service special education teachers to develop questioning routines that engage students with learning disabilities in mathematical reasoning while scaffolding their progress toward new understanding.
Preservice Teachers' Questioning and Students' Responses During Algebra Tutoring
Posing questions is a direct way for teachers to push students to verbalize justifications and make connections among ideas, but this skill is difficult to learn. We recruited four pre-service special education teachers to participate in a semester-long professional development focused on developing mathematics knowledge and asking questions, while concurrently providing 1-1 tutoring to students with learning disabilities. The pre-service teachers increased their frequency of questions overall and of questions that probed students’ thinking or explored mathematical relationships. The pre-service teachers also developed strategies for shifting among different types of questions when students struggled. The findings of this study illustrate the potential for pre-service teachers to develop questioning routines that challenge students while scaffolding their progress towards new understanding.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1813903
- PAR ID:
- 10438523
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual meeting program American Educational Research Association
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.3102/1691717
