Relations of instructional tasks to student learning outcomes in China’s reformed elementary mathematics classrooms

Abstract

One of the goals for the 2000’s mathematical curriculum reform in the mainland China is to develop in students the competence to solve mathematics problems and the positive attitude towards learning mathematics by employing instructional tasks that set high cognitive demands, use multiple representa tions, and require multiple solution strategies. A recent study of the curricular influence on teaching and learning mathematics in China showed that teachers in the reformed mathematical classes were more likely to use the instructional tasks with high cognitive demand, multiple representational means, and multi-solution strategies than were the non-reformed mathematical classrooms. How do these new features of instructional tasks relate to students’ mathematics learning outcomes? The present study, involving six grade students from 32 reformed mathematical classrooms, examined effects of the features of learning tasks on student learning outcomes. The results indicated that the high-level cognitive demand tasks did not show a direct positive influence on students’ cognitive learning outcomes. Instead, the high-level cognitive demand tasks exerted positive effect on students’ affective learning outcomes including their ex pressed interests in learning mathematics, classroom participation, view of mathematics, view of learning mathematics, which in turn positively affected their cognitive learning outcomes including computation and open-ended problem solving.