Teachers’ Error-handling Practices Within and Across Lesson Phases in the Mathematics Classroom

Abstract

Multiple studies have been conducted regarding teachers’ error-handling practices, and how errors can be treated as opportunities for learning, albeit in the context of whole-class discussions. The aim of the present research is to continue to investigate teachers’ error-handling practices as they occur in different phases of maths lessons: introduction of the task, when students are working alone, and when students are working in pairs and finally, as part of the whole-class discussion. The study included 51 lessons from twelve teachers. A cross-case analysis was made across the individual teacher cases to look for similarities and differences between different teachers’ error-handling practices across the lesson phases in order to create teaching profiles with similar handling of student errors across the lesson phases. Five error-handling teaching profiles were identified; correcting errors throughout all phases, correcting errors during students’ work while few errors are brought up in whole class, correcting errors during students’ work while using a variety of practices in whole class, ignoring errors while using some of them in whole class, and discussing and explaining errors.