Over the past decade it has been frequently reported that East Asian students are outperforming their Western counterparts in international tests of mathematics at middle-school level. This paper probes classroom discourse in an attempt to shed some light on this phenomenon. Data were collected from a sample of Chinese Year 8 students in a normal…

Pedagogical reform in Australia over the last few decades has resulted in a reduced emphasis on the teaching of computational algorithms and a diversity of alternative mechanisms to teach students whole number computations. The effect of these changes upon student recording of whole number computations has had little empirical investigation. As…