Discovering mathematical phenomena in primary school mathematics lessons

Abstract

This study examines the discovery work of a pair of primary school students occupied with a mathematical assignment. It describes how third-grade students make their discoveries about “arithmetic triangles,” a task format that is designed for the educational purpose of enabling the recognition of arithmetic patterns and structures (e.g., number relationships). By focusing on how students’ work is interactively accomplished, I show what is constitutive of this work: its material embeddedness, manifested in a coordinated interplay of domain-specific epistemic practices (the practices of noticing, referring, and connecting) and the visual features of the arithmetic triangles as specific objects of school mathematics, and its situatedness in the institutional and social setting of the classroom.