MICHAEL N. FRIED and MIRIAM AMIT SOME REFLECTIONS ON MATHEMATICS CLASSROOM NOTEBOOKS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE NATURE OF STUDENT PRACTICES ⋆ ABSTRACT. This article considers students’ classroom notebooks, their character and their role in learning. The results presented were found within the framework of a broader international project, the Learners Perspective Study, whose goal is to identify classroom practice from the students’ point of view. Two 8 th grade classrooms were studied. In each, every lesson over the course of three weeks was videotaped. After each lesson, two students were interviewed and their notebooks entrees for that lesson were photocopied; once a week, the teacher was interviewed as well. From the analysis of the data it became apparent that the notebook in the classroom is a public object; it is ever open for inspection and contains only finished work. That it is not a private object, in which the student may freely record preliminary ideas, musings, and reflections, may affect student learning negatively. The categorization of public and private as a categorization of learning activities is dis- cussed. The relationship between the findings on notebooks and research on writing and classroom journals is discussed; in particular, a connection is made between public and private domains and transactional and expressive writing, respectively. KEY WORDS: journals, mathematics classroom notebooks, public and private domains, transactional and expressive writing 1. I NTRODUCTION Of all the accoutrements of mathematics learners hardly any is more con- spicuous or universal than the classroom notebook. For this reason, class- room notebooks are a never neglected source of data about students’ math- ematical work and thinking. Yet, oddly enough, the place of the notebook itself in students’ school mathematical life seems to have been little stud- ied. What kind of object is the notebook? Does it have any universal char- acteristics, or only local ones? Is it one thing for the teacher and another for the student? What function does it serve? This paper will address some of these questions according to findings based on extended observations in two eighth grade mathematics classes. We shall show, specifically, that in these classrooms mathematics notebooks took on an utterly public charac- ⋆ This paper is based on a talk given at the PME26 conference held in Norwich, England in July 2002. Educational Studies in Mathematics 53: 91–112, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.