Metacognition in the Maths Class

A 6-9 month pilot project between The Mathematical Association and The Association of Teachers of Mathematics to set up a model based on the French IREMs (Instituts de Recherche sur L'Enseignement de Mathematiques), bringing together teachers, teacher trainers and local authorities to learn through research into teaching methods in mathematics.

The topic for the group to consider is metacognition - how teachers can help students become more aware of the thinking processes and strategies needed to solve mathematical problems, and how the way in which the problem itself is framed can encourage or inhibit mathematical thinking.

Key findings of the evaluation carried out by the University of Cambridge are:

• Student scores from SATs or tests carried out in the four schools seem to indicate that their students achieved more highly than might normally have been expected. Indeed, the significance levels achieved in some cases suggest that differences in achievement are highly unlikely to be due to chance.
• Initial indicators suggest that students' behaviour had changed during the course of the project. They were making more thoughtful contributions, they were listening better and discussing their work in more mature ways than at the outset. In some cases they were offering sophisticated, relative to their age and purported developmental levels, contributions to the mathematical discourse of their classes.

This raises the question, of course, what are they due to? It is impossible to assert that such differences are due to the work of the project - after all, it lasted only six months. However, other evidence would suggest that the project has had an impact on how teachers work with and students respond to mathematics. Indeed, one of the most interesting and reassuring issues to emerge from the data was that several colleagues commented that they were worried that the project emphases - on mathematical thinking and reasoning rather than explicit curriculum content - might militate against their students' assessment performance. This was clearly not the case.

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