Follow-up Investigation On Junior High School Students’ Ability Of Mathematical Problem Posing

In recent years,the education community nationwide has raised its concern on the mathematical problem posing ability which has been taken as a strong pillar of the mathematics curriculum.The Mathematics Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022)released by the Ministry of Education of China emphasized that students’ ability to discover and pose meaningful mathematical problems in specific situations should be developed to improve their innovative thinking.Though there have been multiple studies on the mathematical problem posing ability,few focused on the development trend of junior high school students’ problem posing ability.As a critical stage for students’ learning and development,life in junior middle school helps students maintain their curiosity about the world and acquire more mathematical knowledge.That is why it is crucial to cultivate junior high school students’ mathematical problem posing ability.The author tries to understand the development of students’ problem posing ability from Grade Eight to Grade Nine by making a two-year in-depth investigation and research on them and concludes as follows:(1)By and large,regular differences emerge when students are facing four different levels of test questions.Considering they are in the middle school stage,their problem posing ability turns relatively weak.(2)Two years of research on the teaching practice of posing problems reveals that there appear huge gaps for the test questions of all levels among the four samples of the experimental class and the control class of the quality school and the weak school.It shows students in the experimental class at whichever level perform far better than those in the control class in terms of problem posing ability,and the higher the level,the greater the gap will be.(3)The types of mathematical questions posed by students diversify.Specifically,the classified types of problems posed by students of different grades are different and affected by the difficulty of questions.Compared with students in Grade Eight,students in Grade Nine can propose more complex and extensional questions.(4)There shows no significant difference in mathematical problem posing ability with regard to gender.However,Grade Eight and Grade Nine girls scored slightly better than their male counterparts in all level tests.Some boys can only pose simple mathematical problems,and boys are weaker than girls in the aspect of a number of students posing expansive and novel problems.The author seeks to provide references for educators who study this topic through suggestions on improving the ability of junior high school students to pose mathematical problems by combining this research with teaching practices.The strategies are as follows: raising teachers’ concern to cultivate students’ mathematical problems posing ability,improving teachers’ ability to pose problems and fostering an atmosphere for students to pose problems,creating more opportunities for students to pose problems according to problem situation established by teaching material;Building evaluation criteria for problems posed by students in class and for homework.