STUDENT PERSPECTIVE ON EFFECTIVE MATHEMATICS PEDAGOGY: STIMULATED RECALL APPROACH STUDY Berinderjeet Kaur and Low Hooi Kiam Abstract The goals of this study were two fold. It was a special focus project of CRPP and complimented in some ways the research of Panels 3 and 4 of the core research programme (2004 – 2007). It was also a part of an international comparative study, the Learner‘s Perspective Study (LPS), led by David Clarke from the University of Melbourne. The study examined the practices of three secondary two (grade eight) competent mathematics teachers and their classrooms in an integrated and comprehensive manner. This qualitative study adopted the research methodology of the LPS. A significant feature of the methodology was the use of three cameras to capture the data during sequences of 10 lessons for each teacher. The data collected for the study is indeed very substantial. Analysis of the instructional approaches of the teachers, the role of textbook in their classrooms, nature and role of homework, the source and cognitive demands of mathematical tasks the teachers used, the type of teacher questions that were asked during the instruction, what teacher‘s attached importance to in their lessons, what students valued in their mathematics lessons and student‘s perspectives of good mathematics lessons have been carried out and the respective findings reported in several publications as well as this report. Introduction The goals of this study were two fold. On one hand it was a special focus project of CRPP‘s research program. It complimented in some ways the research of Panel 3: What Goes On in Classrooms part II? Coding Practice and Panel 4: What Goes On in Classrooms part III? which formed the core research programme of CRPP from 2004– 2007. On the other hand it was Singapore‘s contribution to an international comparative study initiated by David Clarke at the University of Melbourne (Clarke, Keitel & Shimizu, 2006) namely, The Learner‘s Perspective Study (LPS). Background of the LPS A major premise of the LPS is that teaching and learning are not discrete activities present in a common context, specifically the classroom. This premise arises from a few considerations. The first of which is that learning is a social activity and that Vygotsky in his writings often considered the duality of the terms ―teaching‖ and ―learning‖ which is reflected in the myriad of translations of his seminal work. The following passage from Vygotsky‘s work: ―We propose that an essential feature of learning [teaching] is that it creates the zone of proximal development; that is, learning [teaching] awakens a variety of FINAL RESEARCH REPORT Project No. CRP 3/04 BK April 2009