文档介绍：Relevance as MacGuffin in Mathematics Education
Dylan Wiliam
King’s College London School of Education
0 Abstract
Alfred Hitchcock’s metaphor of a MacGuffin—a plot device primarily intended to motivate the action in a film, and to which relatively little attention is paid—is used to analyse the use of ‘realistic’ contexts in mathematics education. Contexts used for mathematics teaching are classified into three kinds:
contexts which bear little or no relation to the mathematics being taught, and which serve primarily to legitimate the subject matter (‘maths looking for somewhere to happen’);
contexts having an inherent structure with elements that can be mapped onto the mathematical structures being taught (‘realistic mathematics’);
contexts in which the primary aim is the resolution of a problem in which no particular (or even any!) mathematics need necessarily be used (‘real problems’).
Since examples of the last of these three paratively rare, and of the first mon, but difficult to justify, attention is focused on the second, and examples from Dutch and British curricula are discussed. ‘Realistic’ contexts are characterised by the extent to which the contexts are shared by students, and their fit with the mathematical structures being taught, and suggestions for strategies for choosing such contexts are made.
1 Introduction
This paper explores the use of contexts a