Promoting Students’ Mathematical Reasoning: a design-based research

Abstract

How to enhance students’ mathematical reasoning is an important but little researched issue. This article presents the first intervention cycle of a design-based research about enhancing students’ mathematical reasoning. It aims to understand how a set of design principles concerning the tasks proposed and the teacher's actions in the classroom may contribute to enhance students’ mathematical reasoning. Data analysis is based on those design principles and focus on students’ reasoning processes of generalizing and justifying and on the teacher's actions of inviting, guiding, suggesting and challenging. The results suggest that the design principles contribute for reasoning processes to emerge on moments of whole class discussions of exploratory tasks.

Keywords:
Mathematical reasoning; Teacher's actions; Generalization; Justification; Design-Based Research