A Study On The Mathematical Plausible Reasoning Ability And Its Cultivation Strategies Of Primary School Students

Plausible reasoning is one of the most obvious features of mathematics, which is essential in primary school mathematics teaching. Students’ mathematical plausible reasoning ability is an important index for the evaluation of their mathematical literacy: it is not only conducive to the cultivation of innovative mindset and divergent thinking, but can also improve the problem-solving ability. However, because not many studies have been conducted to research the plausible reasoning of mathematics education in China,the cultivation of it in current teaching still has no clear direction. This paper attempts to discuss the mathematical plausible reasoning ability of primary school students in theory and explore the problems and improvement strategies of the cultivation of students’mathematical plausible reasoning ability in practice. Besides the introduction,there are four parts in this thesis, which are described as follows.The first part aims to clarify the meaning, components and embodiment of primary school students’ mathematical plausible reasoning ability. The primary school students’mathematical plausible reasoning ability refers to the individual mental characteristics that shown during the process of inferring some reasonable results. More specifically,after the processes of observation, induction, analogy and guess with the mathematical methods such as estimation, drawing and listing, students can infer some reasonable results on the basis of previous knowledge and experience (i.e. original cognitive mechanism) in specific mathematical problem contexts. It consists of the ability to observe,induct,make an analogy, guess, express thoughts clearly in terms of mathematics and the metacognitive ability of plausible reasoning.The second part reviews the arrangement of plausible reasoning in primary school mathematics curriculum, combining with the typical example analysis. The PEP primary school mathematics textbooks were taken as examples, in which the suitable content for permeating plausible reasoning ability was reviewed from two perspectives: different learning stages and course sections. Five class cases were selected to highlight the features of the cultivation of plausible reasoning ability separately.The third part mainly analyzes the problems in the cultivation of primary school students’ mathematical plausible reasoning ability, and the reasons of these problems.Because the definition of ’plausible reasoning ability’ in the curriculum standard is too general, the orientation of current evaluation goal is unclear, and the mathematical literacy level of teachers is limited, teachers have no profound understandings of plausible reasoning ability, do not pay enough attention to its cultivation and lack rigor and creativity during the cultivation process.The fourth part puts forward the improvement strategies in terms of three aspects,focusing on the problems in the process of cultivating primary school students’mathematical plausible reasoning ability. First, teachers should correctly understand plausible reasoning ability. They should not only study the curriculum standard and textbooks, grasp the essence of plausible reasoning, but also update their teaching ideas and realize the importance of the cultivation of plausible reasoning ability. Secondly,teachers should reasonably grasp the features of the cultivation of students’ plausible reasoning ability in different learning stages. Students who are at the first stage should be given more opportunities to observe and guess, and students who are at the second stage should be given more opportunities to practice induction and analogy. Finally, teachers should diversify the cultivation methods in different ways. By creating mathematical problem contexts, encouraging brave guesses and the thinking aloud training to motivate,form and deepen students’ plausible reasoning ability.