Page 67 - Children’s mathematical development and learning needs in perspective of teachers’ use of dynamic math interviews

Impact of child and teacher factors on mathematical development
difficulties responding to the questionnaires in writing their responses as opposed to other methods of measuring such as oral response on a questionnaire. One recent exception is a study by Viljaranta et al. (2014) in which a written self-concept scale was used in combination with the posing of a single question by an interviewer with fourth grade children and just a written questionnaire with seventh grade children. They still found children’s math self-concept to not be predictive of subsequent mathematics achievement. In addition, the limited number of questions used to address math self-concept, math self-efficacy, and math anxiety limit the generalizability of the present results. In future research, alternative means of measurement and using a greater number of questions, should be considered.
Second, the use of exclusively quantitative methods to assess both the teacher and child factors may not have fully captured the underlying character of the factors. Observational rating, for example, may not capture the richness of actual behavior during the teaching of a mathematics lesson. Some examples of information that might have been missed are the exact nature of the questions posed by the teachers, the reaction of the teachers when the children adopt an approach that differs from the expected approach to solving a mathematical problem, or the use of specific mathematical terminology by the teachers. The adoption of both quantitative and qualitative measures in the future might thus be fruitful (Lund, 2012). In such a manner and as recommended by Kyriakides et al. (2013), exactly what the teacher and the children do during a mathematics lesson can be explored along with just how they interact. Another limitation to mention is that the outcome measure of mathematics teaching behavior is at the classroom level while our measures of the child factors are at the individual level.
Finally, observation of only a mathematics lesson concerned with fractions and proportions may have limited our results. The teaching of various domains of mathematics should thus be examined in the future and thereby allow us to compare the teaching of arithmetic fluency with the teaching of mathematical problem-solving. In line with the design of the present study, it is important in future research to recognize the possible specificity of the influences of various child and teacher factors depending on the particular domain of mathematics teaching and mathematics task being considered.
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