Na Li

Talking productively with students and sufficiently integrating technology into mathematics classrooms have long been regarded as two hurdles for mathematics teachers. To enhance preservice mathematics teachers’ dialogic teaching skills and integration of GeoGebra-scaffolded dynamic visualizations, this study proposed and examined the effectiveness of a video-based professional development (PD) approach supported by a digital platform called Classroom Discourse Analyzer. Adopting the QUAL-quan method, one preservice teacher was selected as a representative case. The results showed that the PD approach effectively improved the preservice teacher’s declarative knowledge and teaching practice of using lower-order talk moves. The preservice teacher’s self-awareness and self-reflection on dialogic teaching informed her future practices. Furthermore, the preservice teacher was able to integrate GeoGebra-scaffolded dynamic visualizations into the instructions with different pedagogical decisions, reflecting how she reacted to student errors and the affordances and constraints of dynamic visualizations. This study suggests that the theoretically robust PD approach can serve as pioneering work in simultaneously promoting dialogic teaching and GeoGebra-scaffolded dynamic visualizations among preservice mathematics teachers. It also demonstrates the potential of integrating digital technologies to design hybrid PD programs to enhance preservice teachers’ self-reflection and facilitate improvement in their future teaching practices.

Mathematical thinking (MT) has been one of the most important goals for mathematics education as it can support sustainable mathematics learning. Its role in school mathematics has recently been explicitly identified as one of “Four Basics” in the latest national curriculum standard for compulsory education, which is seen as one of the prominent features of Chinese mathematics education. This paper reviewed definitions, descriptions, and explanations from a historical perspective and aimed to provide a comprehensive and contemporary conceptualization for MT in a Chinese context, which can be applied as a comparison to MT in English works. To achieve this, document analysis was applied in this study. Major official documents, papers, and books were reviewed to see the process of MT conceptualization given by the policy makers and researchers. Results indicated that MT places more emphasis on the process of mathematical methods application in problem solving, such as the method of combination of symbolic and graphic mathematics. Mathematical thought is also recommended by Chinese researchers to help students think like mathematicians. Another major characteristic is that the classification of major types of MT is usually focused on that which can make the concept more understandable.