Paying Attention to Students and Promoting Students' Mathematics Understanding

Promoting students' mathematics understanding is an important research theme in mathematics education. According to general theories of learning, mathematics understanding is close to active learning or significant learning. Thus, if a teacher wants to promote his/her students' mathematics understanding, he/she should pay attention to the students so that the students' thinking is in active situation. In the first part of this paper, some mathematics teachers' ideas about paying attention to their students in Chinese high school are given by questionnaire and interview. In the second part of this paper, we give some teaching episodes about how experienced mathematics teachers promote their students' mathematics understanding based on paying attention on them.