Effects of Reflective Notebooks onPerceptions of Learning in a Mathematics Classroom

Tracie McLemore Salinas, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Despite strong support for writing in the classroom, many mathematics instructors resist including writing in the study of mathematics, even in courses designed for pre-service teachers. How are future teachers expected to utilize writing in the mathematics classroom without having been exposed to its benefits themselves? And what are those benefits?

To answer these questions, I invited students to use reflective notebooks in their course Structure of the Number System, a mathematics course for pre-service elementary teachers. During the semester, students completed assigned writings and were encouraged to reflect daily on their learning experiences. Assignments were loosely structured, allowing students to creatively display their thoughts, opinions, and ideas.

At the end of the semester, all twenty-eight students were surveyed about the experience of using writing in the mathematics course, and four of the students were also interviewed. These results, along with instructor observations and the notebooks themselves, were analyzed using a constant-comparative method, observing recurring themes and allowing the case study to adapt as the themes unfolded. Three themes developed from the data, including students’ development of new understandings of mathematics, an awareness of their roles within the learning community, and an appreciation for self-evaluation in mathematics learning. Students responded with overwhelmingly positive comments on the use of journals, demonstrating an ability to use the journal as a productive instrument in a problems-oriented classroom. They used the journal as a means of discourse with themselves and the teacher, and in so doing recreated their own understanding of the nature of mathematics. Students also found that through their writings and work within their notebooks they could monitor their own learning, could share their own feelings, and could explain their own confusion. Thus, although the notebooks’ effects on performance were not addressed, results clearly demonstrate the notebooks’ positive effects on student attitudes toward mathematics and the learning experience.