During my time as a student of education I have learnt that it is my responsibility, as a teacher, to adjust the ways in which I teach to the needs, abilities, experiences, and thoughts of each individual child. What I have not yet gained much knowledge on is how to go about finding the children’s thoughts. In this thesis I investigate the interview as a method of finding out how sixth graders think about their mathematics education. Four children were interviewed. In addition to these inter-views, as a means of giving a broader perspective to and a greater understanding of the chil-dren’s answers, one math lesson was filmed and the math teacher was interview on two sepa-rate occasions. What I found was that a number of factors seemed to influence the children’s thoughts and answers, and that their answers were most likely not always a mirror of their thoughts. From this follows that we, as teachers, must be careful and not assume that we know about a child’s thoughts when, in fact, what we know is what the child chooses to communicate about his or her thoughts. I also found that the children seemed unaccustomed to speaking about mathe-matics in the way that I wanted them to. One reason for this seemed to be the way in which their teacher organized the lessons.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-843 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Harris, Carolina |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Lärarutbildningen, Lärarutbildningen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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