Investigating Fifth-Grade Students’ Construction of Mathematical Knowledge through Classroom Discussion

This study is descriptive-qualitative in nature, aims to examine, (1) How do the students construct the mathematical knowledge (i.e. statistics for elementary school) through classroom discussion?, (2)What role are the students and the teacher playing in the discussion?, (3) What impact dotheir contributions have in the construction of new mathematical knowledge? As subjects of thisstudy are 21 fifth-grade students of SD Labschool Unesa. Data were collected by using observationsheets, and by videotaping the class lessons with three cameras. The results suggest that both theteacher and the students participated actively in small group discussion, and played the majority ofroles offered in an effective discussion. At the end of the lesson, there was a whole class discussionthat functioned as meaning negotiation – to facilitate the students to share solutions and strategieswith the whole class, and promote student reflection on the different strategies. This suggests thateven ‘difficult materials’ can be successfully constructed by fifth- grade students using classroomdiscussion. Therefore, it is suggested that classroom discussion can be chosen as one of learningmethods in a mathematics classroom in which the teacher provides appropriate mathematicscontents and uses productive strategies to facilitate the learning processes.