EDU 370: TEACHING METHODS - MATHEMATICS

S CHOOL OF E DUCATION

L ECTURE N OTES

January, 2021.
2 LECTURE TWO:
PSYCHOLOGY AND MATHEMATICS TEACHING
If our students are to be taught mathematics effectively, then we as mathematics teach-
ers have to clearly understand how children learn mathematics. I hardly need to remind
you that if we want to understand human behavior, we need to go back to the early
years of a child’s life. Similarly if we have to teach our learners competently, we need
to understand what capacities for learning our student’s posses from early years in
mathematics learning. Psychologists have provided us with a lot of information about
the nature of our learners and how they learn mathematics. It is the objective of this
UNIT to explain some psychological bases for mathematics learning.

2.1 Self diagnostic Test

1. Discuss three factors which affect learning of mathematics;

2. Discuss Piaget’s stages of intellectual development;

3. Differentiate between the lower and higher levels of bloom’s taxonomy.

2.2 Specific Objectives

After studying this unit, you should be able to:

1. Explain the term “learning”;

2. Explain Piaget’s’s stages of intellectual development;

3. Explain Bruner’s and Diane’s stages concerning the learning of mathematics;

4. Identify factors which influence students’ ability to learn mathematics.

2.3 The Learning Process

In the general methods course which you covered in year one, the concept of learning
as well as the various levels of learning were explained to you. I believe you are now
clear in your mind concerning the definition of learning as a change in behavior of an
organism. Let us suppose that you are a Form Two mathematics teacher. You might,
prior to going to class to teach your students, prepare an instructional objective such
as: Student will be able to solve simultaneous equations by the substitution method.
It is reasonably assumed that prior to teaching, your students will have no idea at all

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on how to solve simultaneous equations such as:

2x + 3y = 4

4x − y = 3
If however after teaching students for twenty, thirty or even forty minutes and the
student’s can solve simultaneous equations of the type given above, then they are now
behaving differently. They can now do what they were unable to do previously. We
say that there has been a change in their behavior. Whether the change is permanent
or not we can not immediately tell. We may have to wait for a later time when we
shall then test them to find out whether the change in behavior has been permanent
or not.

However, once a student shows a certain behavior which he was unable to exhibit
previously, we say that learning has occurred. There are many ways of learning. We
obviously don’t have to teach students everything in the classroom in order for them
to learn. We learn through trial and errors from which we built a store of experiences’.
You don’t for example have to poke your fingers twice into the fire to learn that fire
burns. A single experiment with a fire or razor blade is more than enough.

2.4 Psychologists and intellectual growth

The branch of knowledge concerned with how human thinking develops is an extremely
interesting one in which a lot of work has been done by many psychologists. It is a
course impossible to discuss the views of most of these people. What is important
is that the studies done by these psychologists have been tremendously helpful to us
in understanding how children learn mathematics. We will consider the studies of
only three psychologists namely, Piaget’s, Bruner and Dienes to give us some insights
into how the teaching of mathematics should be tackled. Piaget’s, a developmental
psychologist, with his colleague called Inhelder, and has done more than any other
psychologist, to help us understand the nature of the learner. Naturally, we begin by
discussing quite at length, Piaget’s studies on cognitive development.

2.5 Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development

You have I believe in one of the units in psychology taken a course of child development.
In that course you covered quite extensively intellectual or “cognitive development”.
We are revising this area as mathematics teachers for reasons which I have already

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mentioned. Let us begin by considering a situation you are familiar with.
We are quite familiar with what I call “physical development” of the child from the
birth up to the age of five for example. We can identify various stages of “physical
development” quite easily. Thus from birth a baby can only lie on his back. After
some months he can sit down. The sequence of stages for a normal child is therefore
as follows:

Lies on his back ⇒ Sits ⇒ Crawls ⇒ Stands ⇒ walks ⇒ Runs.

Common sense tells us that a child cannot run before he has started walking.
Similarly he cannot walk before he has sat up. This looks fairly obvious because it
is something which we can visually observe. A child cannot do something for which
he has not matured. When it comes to intellectual development we realize that is
not something that can be observed as easily as physical growth, but according to
Piaget’s who worked with children in his general clinic, he assents that human in-
tellectual development from childhood to adulthood goes through a series of four stages.

Stage I − Stage II − Stage III − Stage IV

Using the analogy of physical growth, we see then that a learner whose thinking
can be described as ‘stage II’ thinking cannot be expected to solve a problem which
requires stage iv thinking .This is as much as expecting a child who has not yet
begun walking to run: put it the other words, we cannot expect a child whose level of
thinking is stage II to be able to solve simultaneous equation requiring level IV thinking.

This look so obvious yet how many teachers often demand from their students what
they are intellectually incapable of doing? If a child for example is still confused
when he is giving some object to classify, we cannot expect him to do arithmetic
operations. Classification is an infralogical operation whereas multiplication or addition
is a logical operation. Only when a child has competence to do infralogical operation
can competently perform activities which demand higher levels of thinking. The four
stages of intellectual development as suggested are as follows:

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As teachers of mathematics in secondary schools our secondary school students will
generally be over 13 years, hence we might expect their intellectual development to
be at stage four. However you should be well aware that children do not develop
intellectually just as it is with physical development .A child may be eleven years old
yet he may be still at stage two in cognitive development. Again student could be 14
years old yet he may still be at the concrete operational level. Because of different
rates of development, not all students in a form one class will be at formal operation
stage.
Let us therefore briefly descried Piaget’s’s stages of intellectual development after which
we shall consider the implications of the view of Piaget’s and other psychologists on
students learning on mathematics.

Sensory – Motor Stage

Beginning right from birth, a child interacts with his environment through reflex ac-
tions. The process of sucking and crying are reflex action necessary for a child survival.
Through seeing, touching, moving and handling objects and child get to learn about his
physical environment. It is through these senses that the child begins to make sense of
his world. He will acquire the knowledge of permanence of physical objectives, unlike
an earlier period when an object which was out of sight ‘ceased to exist’. For example,
when a one year old child is shown a ball which is then removed from his sight, he will
try to look round where the ball has been taken, something which a four month old
child might not bother about. During the sensory – motor stage the child builds up
a vocabulary of names for objects within his environment. He is able to name objects
such as chair, table, plate, mama, baba, etc. we can say that the child is programming
his brain by storing bits and pieces of information which he will need for more advanced
thinking.

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Pre – Operational Stage

The child cannot perform mental operations. In other words the child cannot do
thinking in his head. The cutting of a piece of wood with a saw is a physical operation
so is kicking a ball. The addition of two numbers on the other hand is a doing activity
which takes place in the head. It is a mental operation. But let us be careful here. If
you ask a nursery school child what is 3 + 4 he will probably rattle back the answer
7. Has he done a mental operation? Definitely no. most likely he is merely recalling
what he has memorized from nursery teacher’s drilling. As an adult you might wonder
whether we are not really underrating the child’s ability since according to you the task
is trivial. However for a child, a feat such as adding two numbers is monumental.
The truth of the matter is that if a child has no concept of “threeness” and “fourness”
he will not be able to add the two numbers yet. But if you aid the child by giving
him physical objects such as oranges to use, he will use the oranges to combine three
oranges and four oranges to get seven oranges. During this stage the child’s thinking
is superficial and is easily deceived by what he sees. Thus experiments done with
children at this stage have shown that children‘s thinking is easily affected by the
physical appearance of the objects. For example, if you pour exactly the same amount
of soda in two different shapes of glasses, you might find a child insisting that one glass
has more soda than the other! Even if you demonstrated it right before his eyes he
might still insist that quality of liquids are different.
The child is unable to reverse his thinking to the starting point when the two qualities
were considered equal. Needless to say, it is pointless to tell a child in this stage “Let
us imagine” or let x represent 2. Such statements would not make sense. Further,
the child’s conception of space is not yet developed so he is easily deceived by the
orientation of objects in space. Try this type of activity with a five year old child.

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2.6 Activity

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The implication of all these is to learn that if a child is not intellectually ready and is
still handicapped by such problems, he will really not be able to learn effectively. For
instance, in secondary schools some students are very seriously handicapped in their 3
– dimensional perceptions. A mathematics teacher needs to be aware of the problems
which some of his students may face when they are being taught geometry in classroom.
This is a point to bear in mind.

Concrete – Operational Stages

The child begins to perform logical operations during this stage. Whereas at the
pre-operational stage the child is easily conduced by an activity such as classification,
and his perception of space is not yet developed. A child at this stage can make
more careful observations. He can classify things using a consistent attribute without
being idiosyncratic in sorting. The process of classification is fundamental to learning
mathematics, if the child is able to divorce his thinking from concrete experiences. At
some time he can think independent of concrete objects but at other time he will need
objects to kind of “boost “his thinking.
For example, whereas to a child in the pre-operational stage the concept of fourness
is directly related to physical objectives to a concerete- operational child, the concept
of fourness can now exist independent of concrete objects. During this stage, the
child’s understanding is likely to be deceived by perceptual impressions. This is when
the amount of liquid is poured into two differently shaped containers appear to have
different volumes. The amount of liquid in the two containers must be equal since
nothing has been taken away from or added to them. This to him is now a purely
logical issue. It is this capacity of a child to do these kinds of mental activities’ that
indicate the state of a Childs preparedness to do mathematics “in this head” instead
of depending on sticks, stones and bottle tops to do arithmetic operations. If therefore
we find that a ten years old has to count his fingers to make stokes on the desk to do
these operations, to do mathematics, probably his intellectual development is lagging
and it may be some time before he can perform logical operation without concrete aids.
His development may depend on the way he has been taught.

Formal Operations Stage

We expect the majority of our students in secondary school to be in this stage of

intellectual development. However because the rate of intellectual development cannot
be expected to be uniform for all children, and also because the age ranges for these
stage are not rigid and fixed limits. There are normally children who begin their

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secondary school education when they have not reached the formal operations stage.
These children are not necessarily less bright. It is just normally a child at this stage
is stimulus free” by this we means that he no longer needs physical objectives in order
to think about logical operations. This does not mean that physical objectives are
unnecessary or undesirable in helping a person in learning. They are necessary for
aiding learning. But the formal operations is capable of imagining and supposing. In
short he is capable of hypothetical – deductive reasoning. The pupil can do what is
called reflective thinking such as “what can I do to improve this” problem.

A learner at this stage can now think in teams of probabilities. He therefore formulates
hypotheses in his mind as things which are testable even if they are not real. Thus for
a formal operations thinker a statement such as “all swans are white” which is true for
all that we know, is seen in the light of probability that there could be one which is
not white: This is a brief of Piaget’s’s theory or intellectual development. Before we
discuss the implications of Piaget’s’s theory to learning mathematics, let us consider
what other psychologists tell us about students learning of mathematics. Let us first
consider Bruner’s position on this issue.

Brunner View on Learning Mathematics

In stating his view on how students should be taught mathematics. Brunner makes
the following important remarks:
We would suggest that learning mathematics reflects a good deal about intellectual de-
velopment. It begins with instrumental activity a kind of definition become represented
and summarized in the form of particular images. Finally, and with the help of sym-
bolic notation that remains invariable across a grasp the formal or abstract properties
of the things he is dealing with.
Even if this statement seem difficult to understand, Bruner is asserting that learning
mathematics should be undertaken on stage by stage basis, his view support that of
Piaget’s in that learning should be interacting with the environment. Learning mathe-
matics should be done with activities in which a learner interacts with objects. Through
such activities the learner acquires mental images which will help him to cope with the
third stage, when he will be able to grasp the abstract ideas of the thing that he has
been dealing with.
According to Brunner learning mathematics should be best achieved through a child
discovering to discover mathematical relations such learning will be much more reward-
ing. Brunner therefore is a very strong exponent of the make the learner to discover

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identify relations such as
(x ± y) = x ± 2xy + y.
Once we represent content in an intellectually honest way, and then such content can
be taught to any child at any stage, contends Brunner.

Learning Mathematics – Dienes Position

Dienes view related to learning mathematics is close to those of Piaget’s and Brunner’s.
Fundamentally, the six stage mentioned by Dienes begins with that of free play he
develops some concepts important in mathematics learning. During the second stage
the learner engages in structured games is led to discover the common rules have been
abstracted, they are then represented in some form or the other. The purpose of this
is to prepare the learner for the final stage. This is the stage when the mathematics
axioms and rules and proofs are formulated.

Implication of Psychological Theories to Learning Mathematics

The three psychologists whose view we have explained here are in uniform agreement
on one important issue. The basic for learning mathematics takes place through the
child’s own activities when he interacts with his own physical environment. This
means that to teach mathematics effectively we have to involve our learners more in
the doing of mathematics because it is through doing that the child learns.

Concrete materials are important in the learning process. Whether or not our learning
are on the formal operational stage, the use of aid to clarify some concepts is very
important.

Since our focus is on secondary students, we ill not concern ourselves with the
implication of these theories in teaching mathematics to primary school children.
However it is important to note that some problems which secondary pupils experience
may have to do with their earlier experiences in the primary school. If primary
school gives students adequate learning experiences coupled with good teaching, many
problems with more abstract concept such as topological and Euclidian notion of
space may be considerably reduced when students meet them in secondary school.

Finally, it may be that some of the slow learners in our mathematics classes are not
slow because of any inherent inability, but because of their development, children ex-
periencing great difficulties in learning mathematics, we should be able to understand

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that it may have to do with slower pace of development rather than due to permanent
intellectual disability.

2.7 Summary
In the teaching – learning process, the need to understand that our learners are critically
important. When we understand the development of intellectual capacities in our
learners, it is contended that we shall teach them more effectively. Children have
capacities for learning but this capacity has to develop. In teaching mathematics, we
have to bear this issue in mind. Stress the importance of providing experience for
learning. In learning mathematics, students should get opportunities to interact with
physical objects so that learning mathematics becomes an activity-oriented and much
more enjoyable to our learners.

2.8 Assignment

1. Compare Piaget’s and Brunner’s stages of cognitive development. (15 marks.)

2. What are the implications of psychological theories to learning mathematics? (5

marks.)

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