Realistisch rekenonderwijs aan jonge kinderen onderzocht

Tijdschrift voor Didactiek van de Beta-wetenschappen, uitgegeven door het Freudenthal Instituut, Universiteit Utrecht in de periode 1983-2014

Van den Brink, J. Tijdschrift voor Didactiek van de Beta-wetenschappen 1990 – 8(2), 100-120 Download pdf

It is a principle of realistic instruction in general, and in particular with regard to arithmetic, to have children ‘realising’ their own ideas. Following their own ideas, experiences and imaginations children create visual or mental situations matching the arithmetical tasks they are given. This chaos of different ideas, languages and mathematical models we call ‘realistic context’. In the context of ‘Buses’ this means plays, scenes and stories about people who are boarding and getting off buses, in which the pupil performs one time as an actor or story-teller and another time as a spectator or listener. It appeared that young children don’t think the way adults do about buses and in other contexts. Even on counting and numbers they nourished quite different ideas. To make young children displaying their deviating ideas the method of mutual observation is initiated and applied: the researcher gave the subject all details of the report he was writing down during the observation: so while being dealt with as a research subject one discovered that the text as it was written concerned oneself, and thus started meddling into the research itself, as it was as a co-researcher.