Special Colloquium
Gloriana Gonzalez
University of Michigan
Remembering and forgetting in a geometry class: How do geometry teachers manage students' prior knowledge?
Abstract: Teachers must make important choices regarding how to make use of students' prior knowledge in teaching. Students remember ideas from previous mathematics classes and from other experiences outside of school that could be relevant when solving a mathematical problem. However, students also forget things that a teacher expects they would know. In this talk I present the results of the analysis of different kinds of data collected by GRIP. These records include videos of classroom instruction, videos of focus group sessions where geometry teachers watched video-episodes from geometry classrooms, and videos of study group sessions where geometry teachers watched animated stories about geometry instruction. I have found that geometry teachers set boundaries to the resources that students could draw upon when working on a problem, limiting students' prior knowledge to that of resources and operations studied in the immediate past of the geometry class. My analysis reveals different tactical moves in teaching for activating or for suppressing students' prior knowledge. There are things that a teacher expects students to remember, but there are also things that students have to forget in order to work on a problem in a geometry class. I illustrate with examples from geometry instruction how a teacher manages students' prior knowledge by shaping the collective memory of the mathematics class.
There will be a meet and greet right after the talk in SEO 300. Coffee, tea, and cookies will be provided.
Tuesday February 12, 2008 at 3:00 PM in SEO 636