Polish teachers’ conceptions of and approaches to the teaching of linear equations to grade six students: an exploratory case study

Abstract

In this article we present an exploratory case study of six Polish teachers’ perspectives on the teaching of linear equations to grade six students. Data, which derived from semi-structured interviews, were analysed against an extant framework and yielded a number of commonly held beliefs about what teachers aimed to achieve and how they would achieve them. In general, teachers’ aims were procedural fluency founded on students understanding the equals sign as a relational rather than an operational entity and the balance scale as a representation supportive of students’ understanding of an equation as the equivalence of two expressions. The analyses also indicated that the ways teachers proposed to conduct their lessons, whereby they pose single problems for individual work before inviting whole class sharing of solutions, resonates with the didactical traditions found in other East and Central European countries previously influenced by the Soviet Union.

Keywords:

• Polish mathematics teaching
• linear equations
• balance method

Notes

1 In the interests of consistency, we refer to operational and relational perspectives on the equal sign.

2 See, for example, the discussions on the teaching of linear equations in the Czech Republic (Novotná & Hošpesová, 2010) and Hungary (Andrews & Sayers, 2012).