Capitalizing on Errors as "Springboards for Inquiry": A Teaching Experiment

Abstract

Although teachers and researchers have long recognized the value of analyzing student errors for diagnosis and remediation, students have not been encouraged to take advantage of errors as learning opportunities in mathematics instruction. The study reported here was designed to explore how secondary school students could be enabled to capitalize on the potential of errors to stimulate and support mathematical inquiry. The article provides a case study of the proposed strategy of ''using errors as springboards for inquiry'' in action, identifies some important variations within the strategy, and discusses its potential contributions to mathematics instruction.