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Questioning in Mathematics Education

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Definition

Questioning means here the use of questions and other prompts offered to students so as to help them get unstuck or to direct their attention in a potentially useful way so that they make mathematical progress.

Introduction

On the face of it, being taught mathematics consists mainly of responding to mathematical questions posed either by a text or a teacher. Support for how to respond comes from worked examples and exposition in the text and from questions and exposition by the teacher. But whether something said or written is actually a genuine question or a question masquerading as instruction is not always easy to discern. Furthermore, student responses to apparent questions may themselves be questions rather than answers.

Mathematical Perspectives

James Stigler and James Hiebert (1999) observed that whereas in American (and indeed in most English speaking) mathematics classrooms, students are asked to obtain the answers to mathematical questions, in Japan it is more...

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Mason, J. (2020). Questioning in Mathematics Education. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15789-0_132

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