The Role of Discourse in Mathematical Inquiry.

This paper describes a collaborative research study designed to determine whether well-constructed tasks in mathematical inquiry with the use of methods in dialogic discourse help students' retention of mathematical concepts in probability. The paper reports on an experiment conducted in two classrooms in an urban school district in the Pacific Northwest. One teacher taught a fourth and fifth grade combination in a low-income area, and the other taught a second grade class in a middle to high socioeconomic status area. Over a period of 2 weeks, students were introduced to activities using penny flips and spinners designed to engage students in inductive learning methods on probability. Dialogic discourse was used to engage students in conversations about the results of their activities. Interviews were conducted of observers regarding their perceptions of student learning from the discourse in which the students engaged. Two weeks later, students responded to a written prompt asking them to describe the activities and what they had learned from them. Responses varied in depth and specificity, but all students responded positively to at least one of the concepts taught using the vocabulary of probability indicating that the activity or the discourse of a combination of the two resulted in retention of a portion of the mathematical concepts presented to the children. (Author/SLD)