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Educational leaders have sought to change the prevailing teacher-centered pedagogy to a student-centered approach. Despite the widespread awareness of the reform agenda, there is an increasing concern of whether a real instructional change happens in a way to promote students' mathematical development. This paper deals with successes and difficulties a teacher goes through as she moves on to student-centered instruction. The analysis draws on classroom observation and interviews to illustrate how the teacher and students establish social and sociomathematical norms that emphasize mathematical sense-making and justification of ideas. As such, this paper paves a way by which teachers and reformers open toward possibly subtle but crucial issues with regard to implementing reform agenda. [For complete proceedings, see ED496851.]

The current mathematics education reform requires substantial changes toward student-centered instruction. In contrast to the widespread awareness of the reform agenda, there is a concern that many teachers do not quite grasp the vision of the reform. This study explored the breakdown that may occur between teachers' adoption of reform objectives and their successful incorporation of reform ideals by comparing and contrasting two reform-oriented Korean classrooms. Given that the two classes established similar social participation patterns but different mathematical culture, this study highlights the importance of sociomathematical norms in the analysis of reform-oriented practices and discusses implications for reform at the classroom level. [For complete proceedings, see ED500858.]

This study probes in what ways the teacher and students create unequally successful student-centered mathematics classrooms and what kinds of learning opportunities arise for the students in these classrooms. A general guideline to the understanding of mathematics classroom culture is an emergent theoretical framework that fits well with the reform agenda for instruction. Findings of mathematics teaching and learning in five different classrooms, importance of sociomathematical norms, and implications for reform in mathematics education are discussed in this report. (KHR)

This study explored the possibility of positioning the sociomathematical norms construct to more centrally reflecting the quality of students' mathematical engagement in classroom processes. Given the challenges of implementing reform ideals, the sociomathematical norms construct can be critical in understanding whether reform-oriented teachers use classroom social structure effectively to develop students' mathematically significant beliefs and values, and to enhance their conceptual understanding of mathematics. The classroom practices of 17 reform-oriented second grade U.S. teachers were observed and analyzed. This study supports the growing realization of the reform community that reforming mathematics teaching involves reconceptualizing how students' engagement in the social fabric of the classroom may enable them to develop increasingly sophisticated ways of mathematical knowing and valuing. (Contains 26 references.) (ASK)

This study compares and contrasts the classroom social norms of two Korean and two U.S. second grade teachers who aspired to implement reform. Despite similar social participation structures, the two classes within each country were remarkably different in terms of sociomathematical norms. In one class in each country, students experienced mathematics on the basis of a rather fixed procedure that the teacher consistently emphasized. The students' mathematical ways of thinking and valuing were limited to finding out the pre-determined rules. In contrast, the students in the other classes learned mathematics on the basis of their own sense-making processes. A specific solution method or idea was scarcely emphasized over students' various ways of approaching a given mathematics problem. The students were continually engaged in significant mathematical processes by which they could develop an appreciation of characteristically mathematical ways of thinking, communicating, arguing, proving, and valuing. The similarities and differences between the two teaching practices within each country clearly indicate that students' learning opportunities do not arise from the general social norms of a classroom but from its sociomathematical norms. This study also supports the growing realization of the reform community that reforming mathematics teaching is neither a matter of changing the social structure of instruction nor of adding a few new techniques to an existing repertoire. (Contains 57 references.) (ASK)

This study is based on a cross-cultural investigation of how teachers understand the objectives of the reform movements and how they characterize reform relative to their own experiences and priorities. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the classroom social norms and student learning opportunities of two U.S. second grade classes that are attempting to implement student-centered instructional methods in mathematics. The principal concern in implementing reform ideas is the extent to which changes in teaching practice translate into changes in the learning opportunities that students will encounter in their mathematics classes. The teacher in a reform classroom in the U.S. is envisioned as a facilitator of students' individual and collective problem solving based on their own sense making about mathematics. Reform involved reconceptualizing the relationship between the social processes of the class and the psychological states of the students. (Contains 19 references.) (ASK)