Singapore mathematics teachers' design of instructional materials

Abstract

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.