Developing a mathematical strategy recogniser for teachers of Year 3 to 6 primary school students

Abstract

Research indicates that some novice primary school teachers, usually those with less than three years teaching experience, struggle to make sense of students’ mathematical thinking. Although experienced teachers will often recognise the problem solving difficulties within a class, this can be time consuming to work out which level individual students are at. There are many primary school students, and indeed some primary teachers, who struggle with mathematics. This thesis explores the possibility of whether software can be designed for teachers to use with assisting them in understanding their students’ mathematical thinking. The research indicates that in order to understand a student’s mathematical thinking, the first step is to recognise the mathematical strategies used for solving mathematical problems. Therefore, the objectives for this thesis are: 1. to develop a software that can guide teachers with recognising the mathematical learning levels within a class; 2. to explore how well this software can detect the strategies within a primary school student’s working process This thesis demonstrates a framework that can be used to recognise correct mathematical strategies by detecting the formation of numbers between two steps. Once the strategies are detected with high accuracy, the teacher can then identify the level(s) at which the class is at. This thesis introduces an interactive desktop application called Mathex to assist teachers. Mathex is written in Java, because it is a popular cross-platform language containing many libraries, which can add more features easily in the future. Some of the features that Mathex provides are: comparing students, comparing assignments, showing individual student’s statistics with the class average or median, and determining outlier students for teachers to pay extra attention to during the class. With this information, teachers are able to recognise students’ thinking more quickly and with more confidence.