They are building on their student’s strengths and what their children know. It might be the case that earlier emphasis on symbolic representations in U.S. classrooms
would do more harm than good since students may not be accustomed to reasoning in this way and therefore would
simply be confused or intimidated by this instruction.2
The findings from this study suggest that when teachers allow students to construct their own representations of
mathematical concepts, rules, and relationships, they also should encourage students to be able to use representations
that go beyond concrete cases. For example, teachers may start with concrete representations or physical manipulatives
to encourage students to use their own strategies for solving problems and making sense of mathematics. But,
the students’ further conceptual development requires that teachers help students develop more generalized solution
representations and strategies.
There is one clear lesson to be learned from this study: mathematics teaching is a local practice that for the most
part takes place in settings that are both socially and culturally constrained. The fact that the Chinese teachers in this
study overwhelmingly used symbolic representations for the solutions of instructional tasks, whereas the U.S. teachers
relied almost exclusively on verbal explanations and pictorial representations, can be taken as evidence of the social
and cultural nature of pedagogical practice.