iCTLT 2016

As mathematics educators, how do we help students make sense of the concepts in Measurement in ways that are meaningful to them? For many years, teachers have exposed students to the use of manipulatives in the learning and teaching of these concepts but students’ reasonable sense of length, mass, volume and time remains a constant challenge. Students still face difficulties when they are in upper levels with their understanding of measurement, especially in upper primary topics like Area and Perimeter and Volume.

In this paper, Mayflower Primary School seeks to understand how lower primary students can acquire deeper conceptual understanding of Measurement through the reframing of reasoning and communication opportunities in the ICT-enriched mathematics classroom.

The team will share the experience of how the teachers had re-framed the lens in designing learning experiences which focused on providing opportunities for students to be engaged in inductive reasoning and communication processes to enhance the conceptual understanding of three fundamental principles of Measurement: Conservation, Transitivity and Unit Iteration (P.L. Koay, “Teaching Primary School Mathematics”) in an ICT-enriched learning environment. In particular, two iterations of lesson units (1.Time, 2.Volume) were designed and conducted in two Primary Two classes. In the lessons, manipulatives and concrete experiences were used to allow students to construct meaning and understanding.

The team has leveraged an ICT-enriched classroom to provide opportunities for mass engagement of students in making their thinking visible to the teachers and peers as opposed to a traditional mathematics classroom. The affordances of ICT have greatly strengthened the ‘Processes’ component of the Singapore Mathematics framework which includes reasoning, communication and connections (Primary Mathematics Teaching and Learning Syllabus, 2013).

The team will share with participants how teachers made use of the teacher-directed inquiry approach to engineer classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that lead students to explore, investigate and find their own answers. Evidence of learning was elicited by providing guidance through carefully crafted questions and tasks hosted in purposefully selected ICT platforms. With the learning made visible in such a classroom, students benefitted from the immediate feedback provided by their teachers and peers. The teachers were able to provide timely feedback real time to move learning forward. Opportunities for collaboration among the students have also increased as they were activated as learning resources for one another (W. Dylan, “Embedded Formative Assessment”) to provide peer feedback.