Abstract
Students’ engagement in lessons not only determines the direction and result of the lessons, but also affects academic achievement and continuity of follow-up learning. In order to provide implications related to teaching strategies for encouraging students’ engagement in elementary mathematics lessons, this study implemented lessons for middle-low achieving fifth graders using open-ended tasks and analyzed characteristics of students’ engagement in the light of the framework descripors developed based on previous research. As a result of the analysis, the students showed behavioral engagement in voluntarily answering teacher's questions or enduring difficulties and performing tasks until the end, emotional engagement in actively expressing their pleasure by clapping, standing up and the feelings with regard to the topics of lessons and the tasks, cognitive engagement in using real-life examples or their prior knowledge to solve the tasks, and social engagement in helping friends, telling their ideas to others and asking for friends’ opinions to create collaborative ideas. This result suggested that lessons using open-ended tasks could encourage elementary students’ engagement. In addition, this research presented the potential significance of teacher’s support and positive feedback to students’ responses, teaching methods of group activities and discussions, strategies of presenting tasks such as the board game while implementing the lessons using open-ended tasks.
Figures & Tables
Figure 1.Examples of the criteria established by student 3 (top) and student 4 (bottom)