Do Teacher's Ways of Enhancing Discourse in her Class Leave Traces on her Students' Post-test Responses?

The goals of the current study are to investigate if and how the genre of the mathematics teaching-learning discourse in the whole class setting has some longitudinal effect on individual students' knowledge as expressed in a post-test. Specifically, we observed elements of creativity in the whole class discourse and their echoes in students' responses. With this aim we analysed probability learning in two eighth grade classes. We present here data analysis from one lesson and one corresponding post-test item from each class. The differences found in the analysis of students' responses to the post-test item reflect differences in the genre of the whole class discussions brought about by the two teachers. While one teacher opened opportunities for students to express their creative explanations, the other one did not.