Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICS TEACHER EDUCATION, sa.x, ss.1-34, 2025 (SSCI, Scopus)
Various factors in a classroom environment influence students’ reasoning opportunities. An under-researched area is understanding how teachers’ goals influence their moves to support students' mathematical reasoning. Hence, grounded within activity theory, this study investigated the interplay between two middle-school mathematics teachers' goals and instructional moves while implementing ratios and linear relationship tasks. In attending to the rules and object components of the activity system, we used the Teacher Moves for Supporting Student Reasoning (TMSSR) Framework (Ellis et al., Math Education Res J 31: 107–132 2019) to analyze teachers' moves through shared classroom vignettes, highlighting how their goals and moves led to different reasoning opportunities for students. Additionally, we discuss how teachers’ moves supported students’ reasoning opportunities through the categorical distribution of moves, placement of moves on the low–high-potential continuum, and variety of facilitating moves. Our findings indicate that the depth of mathematics, as interpreted by the teachers during task implementation, was critical in shaping the students’ reasoning opportunities. Specifically, data suggest that high-potential eliciting and low-potential guiding moves will be insufficient to support students’ development of conceptually rich mathematical understanding when the mathematical focus is procedural. Therefore, to understand the effectiveness of teachers’ collection of moves to support students' reasoning, it is essential to understand the mathematics driving the task enactment. Considering teachers’ goals and moves together provides opportunities to identify focus areas to strengthen teachers’ instruction and the resulting opportunities they provide for students to engage in reasoning practices.