Authors: Rina Hershkowitz Michal Tabach Tommy Dreyfus
Publish Date: 2016/09/19
Volume: 49, Issue: 1, Pages: 25-36
Abstract
In the course of the last few years we have investigated shifts of knowledge among different settings in inquirybased mathematics classrooms the individual the small group and the whole class community The different theoretical perspectives we used for analysing group work and for analysing whole class discussions and the empirical data led us to hypothesize links between shifts of knowledge and students’ creative reasoning Therefore the goal of the current study is to investigate creative reasoning within the shifts of knowledge in an inquirybased classroom Specifically we ask What is the role of creative mathematical reasoning in the shifts of knowledge between the knowledge agents and their followers in the classroom To this end we analysed a whole class discussion and the subsequent work of a small group Our findings show that creative reasoning has a role in researchers’ characterization of shifts of knowledge in the classroom In particular we found that the students who expressed creative reasoning all had followers and thus became knowledge agents while students’ contributions that were not characterized as creative were not always followed up Finally in cases where both the knowledge agent and the follower expressed creative ideas we named these ideas milestones
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