What Research Says About Teaching Mathematics Through Problem Posing

There has been increased emphasis on integrating problem posing into curriculum and instruction with the promise of potentially providing more and higher quality opportunities for students to learn mathematics as they engage in problem-posing activities. This paper aims to provide a synthesis of what research says about teaching mathematics through problem posing. In particular, this paper addresses the following questions: (1) What does teaching mathematics through problem posing look like? (2) What is problem posing, anyway? (3) What is a problem-posing task? (4) How should teachers handle students’ posed problems in classroom instruction? (5) How can teachers be supported to learn to teach through problem posing? (6) What is the effect of Problem-Posing-Based Learning (P-PBL) instruction on teachers and students? Throughout the sections, various related unanswered questions are raised, and the paper ends with a proposed P-PBL instructional model. Hopefully, the ideas presented in this paper can serve as a springboard to encourage more scholars to engage in problem-posing research so that we can provide more opportunities for students to learn mathematics through problem posing.