Making Good Practice Common Using Computer-Aided Formative Assessment

Rich technological environments present many opportunities for guided inquiry in the mathematics classroom. This chapter focuses on the teacher’s role in supporting the formation and justification of conjectures by students during whole-class discussion. I examine the practice of an expert teacher who conducts a classroom discussion based on students’ conjectures formed while working in pairs in a dynamic geometry environment (DGE). The way the teacher categorizes the different conjectures, then addresses them during the whole-class discussion is analyzed. Using this example and extending it to other guided-inquiry examples, I show how this type of categorization may be offloaded onto a technological platform that would do it automatically, making the categorization of student answers an option not only for teachers who could perform this categorization on the spot, but also for those who cannot.