Providing or designing? Constructing models in primary maths education

The goal of this exploratory study was to uncover the construction processes which occur when pupils are taught to work with models in primary maths education. Two approaches were studied: ‘providing models’ versus ‘designing models in co-construction’. A qualitative observational study involved two groups of pupils of a primary school in the Netherlands. A series of lessons involving problem-oriented tasks was given. For this article’s purpose, we studied the learning processes of one pupil per condition in detail. Interpreting the results it is assumed that upper-grade pupils may be able to design models in co-construction as long as they receive sufficient teacher guidance.