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It is important to understand teachers’ views about problem-posing (PP) tasks and the prompts that are used in such tasks to engage students in posing problems. In this study, we explored 15 middle school mathematics teachers’ views about PP prompts. We found that the teachers’ views were motivated by their curricular reasoning around engaging and challenging their students and addressed five main prompt characteristics: openness, promoting critical thinking, providing scaffolding, more or less intimidating, and allowing for differentiation. The teachers’ reasoning suggested they attended to how PP can create opportunities for sensemaking, deepen students’ learning of mathematics, and foster students’ identities as creative doers of mathematics. How- ever, they did not address connecting students’ life experiences to mathematics, another key goal of teaching mathematics through PP. The findings have implications for curriculum developers and researchers regarding the design of PP tasks and the implementation of such tasks in the classroom, and they suggest several directions for future research. 

This study used three pairs of problem-posing tasks to examine the impact of different prompts on students’ problem posing. Two kinds of prompts were involved. The first asked students to pose 2–3 different mathematical problems without specifying other requirements for the problems, whereas the second kind of prompt did specify additional requirements. A total of 2124 students’ responses were analyzed to examine the impact of the prompts along multiple dimensions. In response to problem-posing prompts with more specific requirements, students tended to engage in more in-depth mathematical thinking and posed much more linguistically and semantically complex problems with more relationships or steps required to solve them. The findings from this study not only contribute to our understanding of problem-posing processes but also have direct implications for teaching mathematics through problem posing. 

The importance of curricular coherence has been emphasized by leaders in mathematics education, who explain that coherence enhances deeper understanding by enabling students to see connections between mathematical ideas. Although there are different forms of curricular coherence in teaching and learning mathematics, the coherence within a lesson has received considerably less attention. In particular, little is known about what constitutes coherent lessons or how to measure the degree of coherence. Using lesson data from a larger study in which lessons are intentionally designed for coherence, we propose a tool for examining lesson coherence and describe characteristics of the lessons with different levels of coherence.