Student teachers’ types of probing questions in inquiry-based mathematics teaching with and without GeoGebra

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have produced several typologies of teacher questions in mathematics. Probing questions that ask students to explain are often included in the types of questions. However, only rare studies have created subtypes for probing questions or investigated how questioning differs depending on whether technology is used or not. The aims of this study are to elaborate on different ways of asking students to give explanations in inquiry-based mathematics teaching and to investigate whether questioning in GeoGebra lessons differs from questioning in other lessons. Data was collected by video recording 29 Finnish mathematics student teachers’ lessons in secondary and upper secondary schools. The lesson videos were coded for the student teachers’ probing questions. After this, categories for the types of probing questions were created, which is elaborated in this paper. It was found that the student teachers who used GeoGebra emphasized conceptual probing questions during the explore phase of a lesson slightly more than the other student teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Inquiry-based teaching
• probing
• teacher education
• teacher questioning
• technology

AMS 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification Code:

• 97C70

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.