Lee, Ngan Hoe

In order to prepare students for the 21st century, it is important to foster critical thinking in students. This paper explores the teaching of critical thinking during mathematics lessons at the primary level in Singapore. It suggests lesson features of primary mathematics lessons that could further encourage students to think critically, which include the kind of tasks used, the use of Socratic questioning by the teacher, supportive behavior of teachers as well as communicating assessment criteria to students. The identified lesson features have been enacted in a Primary 4 mathematics classroom. In this paper, students' work showing elements of critical thinking in a lesson on the topic of decimals are presented and discussed.

This abstract presentation summarises the work to review the key pedagogical approach advocated in Singapore Primary Mathematics Curriculum – the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract Approach or C-P-A Approach in view of the changes brought about by technological advances. In particular, the Concrete-Virtual-Pictorial-Abstract Approach or C-V-P-A Approach is proposed to take into account the role that virtual manipulatives play in enriching the representations of mathematical concepts in the mathematics classrooms.

This is a workshop on word problems in primary mathematics. The workshop is based on a paper derived from an investigation into children’ responses to standard and non-standard mathematics word problems before and after an intervention programme. Standard word problems can be solved by identifying the correct operation and performing the necessary computation. The story context does not affect the solution. In solving non-standard word problems the story context is important in obtaining a correct solution. Primary Three children in five Singapore schools participated in a year-long intervention where their teachers used several lessons that included non-standard problems. The children were asked to solve standard and non-standard word problems at the start and at the end of the school year. Among these word problems, there were those that were similar to, those that were similar in the mathematical structure to but different in the superficial features from, and those that were different in mathematical structure from the problems in the intervention programme. The responses from four intact classes were selected for analysis. It was found that the children were able to make sense of their computation results. However, in situations that went beyond computation, many children were not able to make sense. Intervention and use of concrete materials were found to encourage sense-making.