Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Research Publications

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 792
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    Speaking as 'Other'
    Illesca, B ; DOECKE, B ; Homer, D ; Nixon, H (Wakefield Press, 2003)
    As a Chilean born Australian, Septmeber 11th holds a significance for me that is perhaps different to the significance that is currently a part of the media created collective consciousness. It was on this date in 1973 that the world's first democratically elected socialist government was toppled in a bloody coup. These events set in train processes that eventually lead to the murder and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Chilean citizens. My family was amongst those sent into exile.
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    Student inclination to work with unfamiliar challenging problems: The role of resilience
    WILLIAMS, G (The Mathematical Association of Victoria, 2003)
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    Teacher Research can Enrich Teaching Practice: An Example
    WILLIAMS, G ; CAVALLIN, N (The Mathematical Association of Victoria, 2004)
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    Teaching and Learning in the Middle Years of Schooling: Having Faith in Students
    TADICH, B ; WILLIAMS, G (The Mathematical Association of Victoria, 2004)
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    The Nature of Spontaneity in High Quality Learning Situations
    WILLIAMS, G (Bergen University College, 2004)
    Spontaneity has been linked to high quality learning experiences in mathematics (Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1992; Williams, 2002).This paper shows how spontaneity can be identified by attending to the nature of social elements in the process of abstracting (Dreyfus, Hershkowitz, & Schwarz, 2001). This process is elaborated through an illustrative example—a Year 8 Australian male student who scaffolded his learning by attending to images in the classroom that were intended for other purposes. Leon’s cognitive processing was not ‘observable’ (Dreyfus et al., 2001) in classroom dialogue because Leon ‘thought alone’. Post-lesson videostimulated reconstructive interviews facilitated study of Leon’s thought processes and extended methodological techniques available to study thinking in classrooms..
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    Australia: Significant Characteristics of the School System and the Mathematics Curriculum
    Williams, G ; Mesiti, C ; Clarke, D ; Clarke, D ; Keitel, C ; Shimizu, Y (Sense Publishers, 2006)
    In Australia, states and territories regulate their own education systems, however, national benchmarks representing minimum standards for Numeracy (in the areas of number sense, measurement and data sense, and spatial sense) help inform the individual state curricula. Australia has three school sectors: Government, Independent, and Catholic. As data collection in the Learner's Perspective Study (LPS) was restricted to Government schools, this overview focuses primarily on the types of schools from which the Learner's Perspective Study (LPS) data from Year 8 mathematics lessons was collected: Victorian government secondary schools.
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    Comparing and contrasting methodologies: A commentary
    Bikner-Ahsbahs, A ; Williams, G ; Zaslavsky, O ; Sullivan, P (Routledge, 2009-04-15)
    The term ‘methodology’ is discussed before we consider the methodological contributions of each team of chapter authors (Cobb, Gresalfi & Hodge; Nathan, Eilam & Kim; and Saxe, Gearhart, Shaughnessy, Earnest, Cremer, Itabkhan, Platas & Young) and examine links between them. We generate questions arising from our analyses of the three chapters in this section and formulate views on classroom learning in mathematics that could be researched through complementary analyses. The subsequent discussion of data-collection instruments appropriate to further analyses is informed by our own research perspectives. This commentary concludes with a summary of what we have learnt through comparing the three methodologies and how simultaneously focusing on data from different theoretical perspectives might help to show the way forward in researching the richness of learning in classrooms.
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    Children's mathematical thinking in different classroom cultures
    Wood, T ; Williams, G ; McNeal, B (NATL COUNCIL TEACHERS MATHEMATICS-NCTM, 2006-05)
    The relationship between normative patterns of social interaction and children's mathematical thinking was investigated in 5 classes (4 reform and 1 conventional) of 7- to 8-year-olds. In earlier studies, lessons from these classes had been analyzed for the nature of interaction broadly defined; the results indicated the existence of 4 types of classroom cultures (conventional textbook, conventional problem solving, strategy reporting, and inquiry/argument). In the current study, 42 lessons from this data resource were analyzed for children's mathematical thinking as verbalized in class discussions and for interaction patterns. These analyses were then combined to explore the relationship between interaction types and expressed mathematical thinking. The results suggest that increased complexity in children's expressed mathematical thinking was closely related to the types of interaction patterns that differentiated class discussions among the 4 classroom cultures.
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    Abstracting in the Context of Spontaneous Learning
    Williams, G (SPRINGER, 2007-09)
    There is evidence that spontaneous learning leads to relational understanding and high positive affect. To study spontaneous abstracting, a model was constructed by combining the RBC model of abstraction with Krutetskii's mental activities. Using video-stimulated interviews, the model was then used to analyse the behaviour of two Year 8 students who had demonstrated spontaneous abstracting. The analysis highlighted the crucial role of synthetic and evaluative analysis, two processes that seem unlikely to occur under guided construction.