Cheng Lu Pien

In this paper the teachers’ learning journey on designing a mathematics problem that involves a real-life context is reported. This is part of a larger project undertaken in a primary school in Singapore where the teachers were engaged in planning, observing and critiquing mathematics lessons to investigate teaching and learning. These unique features from laboratory class cycles were used to facilitate the design and implementation of mathematics problems involving real-life context. Based on one cycle of a laboratory class of an authentic classroom lesson, the teachers’ construction of the mathematics problems embedded in real-life context is reported. The children’s solutions to one of the problems are also discussed in this paper.

This paper documents how a team progressed through the five stages of team development as a result of a school-based professional development program using a laboratory class cycle. Six Grade two teachers and their administrator in a primary school in the south eastern United States participated in the study. All the teachers were interviewed at the end of each laboratory class cycle. Their administrator was interviewed after the program ended. A grounded theory approach and constant comparative method were used. The study revealed how the teachers' participation in the program progressed according to Tuckman and Jenson's (1997) model of team development in the laboratory class cycle. Establishment of trust among teachers and team support over an extended time were identified as important factors in shaping the team development.

The Riemann-integral of a function defined on [qb] is well known. It is also well known though not easily found in literature that the Riemann integral can be defined as the limit of Riemann sums using divisions as "directed sets". Many properties of the Riemann integral will then have straightforward proofs. We shall develop equi-Riemann convergence and D-onvergence using such an approach called the Moore-Smith limits or Generalised limits.

In this article, an adaptation of a secondary school mathematics comics-based instructional package for primary school mathematics classroom, and the teachers' and students' perceptions about the use of comics in the classroom are discussed. Further suggestions by the teachers on fine-tuning the package are also discussed.

In this article, we present a case study of six Singaporean elementary school teachers working in a Lesson Study team that prepared them for problem solving instruction. The Lesson Study process included preparing, observing, and critiquing mathematics lessons in the context of solving fractions tasks. By conducting Lesson Study, we anticipated that these teachers would develop greater insight into students’ mathematics, which would influence their classroom practices. Through the process of planning, observing and critiquing and by purposefully listening to students’ explanations, the teachers began to better understand their students’ learning, which in turn could help them develop their students' mathematical knowledge.

This paper focuses on one major component of the project which examined the enactment of the Singapore mathematics curriculum in the Secondary Schools: the design and use of instructional materials by the teachers. We define instructional materials to be classroom-ready materials that teachers incorporate into their lessons for students’ direct access for their learning. We make a distinction between instructional materials (IM) and reference materials (RM). The latter are resources (including textbooks) which teachers refer to while planning for lessons; the former are the actual materials that are brought into their classrooms for use in their mathematics instruction. For most teachers which were the subjects of our study, their instructional materials differ substantially from their reference materials – it is this ‘transformational space’ that is an area of interest to us. For the rest of this paper, we will briefly describe a few such transformational moves as illustrated by some teachers in our study and their underlying intentions.

As part of a mathematics teacher's skillset, knowing what kinds of assessment, when and how to assess, and for what purposes, are important. Although there have been frameworks outlining the various facets of teacher assessment literacy, recent literature suggest that gaps exists on the theoretical underpinnings as well as in psychometric claims of the measures. A framework of assessment literacy is proposed in this paper, informed by the mathematics education literature: (1) knowledge about assessment concepts; (2) skills in applying the knowledge in actual assessment practices; (3) communication and action in providing feedback or changing instructional practices based on assessment information; (4) attitudes and beliefs about assessment and its role in mathematics teaching and learning; and (5) meta-cognition and self-regulation of teachers' own assessment literacy.