LEARNING OUTCOMES

The main goal of the course is the development of the prospective teachers’ awareness of the relevance of argumentative activities in mathematics, with reference to both present National Guidelines for Curriculum, and their intrinsic formative value. Such awareness will be developed through activities that will be aimed: to identify (by using Toulmin’s model) argumentation in pupils’ texts; to task design, in order to promote pupils’ argumentative competencies; to exploit argumentative activities in order to review basic mathematics concepts in the classroom. Proposed activities will be referred to the present National Guidelines for Curriculum; specific attention will be paid to pupils’ approach to argumentation in kindergarten and in the early grades of primary school.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

With reference to the “Goals for the development of competencies” of the National Guidelines for Curricula in mother school and in primary school, the course aims at the development of competencies that are crucial for basic enculturation in Mathematics, for further studies and for citizenship, by selecting objectives that are suggested by the main teachers’ planning and students’ learning  difficulties identified in the school. The development of students’ argumentative competencies will  be the main thread of the course; such competencies will be connected to the students’ operational and reflective mastery of basic mathematics contents already dealt with in previous course (see Program).

PREREQUISITES

The contents of the courses

• MATEMATICA I 67638
• MATEMATICA 2 67666

TEACHING METHODS

By continuity with previous courses, the lectures will include individual students’ work on worksheets (other worksheets will be filled at home), classroom  discussions (guided by the teacher) on students’ productions,  and teacher’s explanations.

Students will be requested to produce (in groups) detailed field notes on classroom activities; those field notes will be revised by the teacher and finally will be the reference for students’ homework and their preparation to the final evaluation.

Students with DSA, disability or other special educational needs are recommended to contact the professor at the beginning of the course to agree on teaching and exam methods which, according to the course’s objectives, take into account the modalities individual learning and provide suitable compensatory tools”

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Argumentation: Toulmin’s model to characterize it; Toulmin’s model as a tool for task design and for the analysis of students’ argumentative productions.  In such a perspective argumentation will be connected to the development of students’ operational and reflective competencies on the following contents:

- numbers and digits (particularly as concerns the decimal-position number representation system)

- properties in the set of natural numbers and arithmetic operations (multiples and sub-multiples, prime numbers, etc.): examples and counter-examples, general properties

- key geometry concepts (angle, parallelism, perpendicularity, length and surface measures) and key elementary probability concepts.

During the course peculiar attention will be addressed to the synergy between the development of argumentative competencies in mathematics and in other disciplines (sciences, grammar).

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

The worksheets of the course (which also provide elements of theory) and the field notes revised by the teacher are the basic references for students.

According to their interests further texts and websites will be suggested.

For international students, texts and articles in English are available on request. The exam can be taken in English in the prescribed manner”