This paper is from Session 3G: Developing understanding of statistical concepts: From undergraduate students to pre-service mathematics teachers
which comes under Topic 3: Statistics education at the post-secondary level
Paper 3G1 (Thursday 12th, 16:00-17:30)
An analysis of patterns of classroom talk in an IT environment
Presenter
- Ken Li (Hong Kong Institute of Vocatinal Education (Tsing Yi), China)
Co-author
- Merrilyn Goos (The University of Queensland, Australia)
Abstract
Classroom talk plays a significant role in a teaching and learning process, but how classroom talk promotes statistics learning and statistical thinking is not clearly known. An observation study was therefore conducted to analyze student talk while collaboratively working at computers. When attempting the task of deriving the meaning of a scatterplot, the talk was cumulative as utterances built up ideas without critique. When handling more sophisticated tasks, i.e., assessing the strength and direction of data relationship and quantifying the relationship, exploratory talk was used for taking knowledge and understanding to more refined levels via critical evaluation. There were some discrepant features between these two types of talk; cumulative talk was affectional and reproductional in nature, whereas exploratory talk displayed expositional feature and external thinking.