Justification in Mathematics (JiM)

This JiM project set out to research the current state of understanding of mathematical justification by both Singapore secondary school students and Mathematics teachers across the different content strands in the Singapore secondary Mathematics curriculum. This timely and relevant project was started to complement the current goal of the Ministry of Education (MOE) on fostering reasoning in the learning of Mathematics in schools. While MOE focuses on the reasoning process, our study examined the outcomes of this reasoning process. For many years, mathematical reasoning and communication have been two key process skills in the Singapore Mathematics Framework under the Processes component. Thus, mathematical reasoning and justification are essential components of any mathematical activity that students should be familiar with. Yet from our personal communications with secondary school mathematics teachers between 2013 and 2016 and evidence from GCE O and N Level examiners' reports, we obtained the impression that many students, as well as mathematics teachers, struggled to navigate mathematical justification successfully. Mathematics teachers seemed to point students' difficulties in justification to several student-related factors. Other than those factors, we, however, speculated that there might be other potential obstacles, which contribute to students' poor performance in justification tasks. Therefore, this JiM project was undertaken to explore the quality of written justifications constructed by secondary school students and their mathematics teachers, with the aim of proposing a professional development (PD) programme that would allow the teachers to better engage their students in mathematical reasoning and justification more effectively, thereby improving the quality of written justifications provided by their students.