Introduction
As we embark into the new century, there is a call to rethink our basic tenets of education. There is a need to see education not as a process for the transmission of knowledge to children, but as a process of the opening of children’s minds to the world around them. To do this we need to enable children to think for themselves (Schank, 2004).
As a result, the improvement of students’ has become one of the major goals of education all over the world. In line with the rest of the world, Malaysia also realized the need to develop and improve students thinking (Malaysian Ministy of Education, 2001). In fact Lipman (2003) believes that we should help children to think well and to think for themselves for reasons of social utility but because children have the right to receive nothing less.
We expected that through learning subject matters like mathematics, students will be provided with the opportunities develop their thinking. Unfortunately, based on the common practice in many traditional classrooms today, students do not have adequate opportunity to develop mathematical thinking while in the mathematics classroom. Mathematics teachers will not be able to fully develop their students thinking by only teaching students with the skills and knowledge of using mathematical procedures in solving routine problems and exercises.
To develop student’s mathematical thinking, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has proposed that there should be more emphasis in the process of problem-solving, reasoning and communication in the mathematics classroom (NCTM, 2000). According to Goos (2004), mathematical thinking is an act of sense-making and rest on the processes of specializing, generalizing, conjecturing, and convincing. She also believes that mathematical thinking can be generated and tested by students through participation in equal-status peer partnerships. Therefore to engage students in mathematical thinking, they should be allowed to experience the actual processes through which mathematics develops.
In Malaysia, this emphasis towards development of student’s mathematical thinking is fairly new and not much is known about the extent of the development of students’ mathematical thinking and what is going on in the classroom that is helping in this development. Therefore, the study was aimed assessing the students’ lavel of mathematical thinking.