CMTP: Changes in Mathematics Teaching Project

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Activities in class

Interview 1: 41 students
Interview 2: 33 students
Interview 3: 33 students

We asked students to choose the 3 most common activities in mathematics lessons from a collection of photographs downloaded from Google Images.

Variations from year 6 to year 7: FG reported that they did more writing, listening, practical work and shared work on the board in year 7 than in primary school. We noticed that most teachers used shared work on the board as a strategy for including all students in the range of ideas present in the mixed ability classes. FG also reported less use of textbooks, worksheets and computers and less discussion in groups. Our observations suggest that discussion in groups is common in primary classes where students sit in so-called 'ability groups' within a class, whereas in secondary whole class discussion is used more as an inclusive strategy. Use of computers could be influenced by the availability of computer suites and lack of class-based computers in secondary schools. However, above all we learnt that the questions were not well-posed, as we wanted to know about the cognitive challenges of tasks rather than the mode of working, and students did not distinguish between, for example, worksheets which gave a list of routine questions and worksheets that provided a writing frame for a complex task.

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