Young children's explorations of average through informal inferential reasoning

This study situates children's early notions of average within an inquiry classroom to investigate the rich inferential reasoning that young children drew on to make sense of the questions: Is there a typical height for a student in year 3? If so, what is it? Based on their deliberations over several lessons, students' ideas about average and typicality evolved as meaning reasonable, contrary to atypical, most common (value or interval), middle, normative, and representative of the population. The case study reported here documents a new direction for the development of children's conceptions of average in a classroom designed to elicit their informal inferential reasoning about data

Prospective teachers' attention on geometrical tasks

This study investigates early childhood prospective teachers' attention to geometrical tasks while designing and using them in the classroom. This is explored in the context of the teaching practice of 11 prospective teachers who taught geometry in early childhood classrooms during the last semester of their university studies. The teaching practice was organized into four stages: design of a lesson plan; classroom implementation; discussion of the lesson with the school practice instructor; and self-assessment report and revision of the lesson. Analysis of data using the Teaching Triad framework (Jaworski, 1994) shows that although the prospective teachers attended to issues of mathematical challenge, sensitivity to students, and management of learning in their planning, in their actual teaching and after class reflection, their attention was focused mainly on management issues. The findings also show that prospective teachers' attention on geometrical tasks can be developed through a process of reflection on their teaching. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht