AERA 2012 - afterthoughts

The 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association is history, and I enjoyed it a lot! The conference started off Friday morning, April 13, with a number of interesting sessions. In the afternoon, the opening plenary lecture by Professor Linda T. Smith marked the official opening of the conference. In this session, a particular focus on indigineous education was made. To me, this represented a fairly new and very interesting set of perspectives. A refreshing start of such a huge conference!

I am not going to present a full overview of all the sessions I attended, because there is simply far too much to say about that! Instead, I will share some of my favourite moments from the conference.

I attended quite a few sessions from SIG-Research in Mathematics Education. I particularly enjoyed the one on "Mathematical Teachers' Beliefs and Knowledge". The presentation by Cindy Jong–where she told us about the MECS instrument–was of particular interest to me, but I found all papers and presentations in this session quite interesting.

Another very interesting session for me was the one on "Conceptual and Methodological Issues and Advances in Research on Epistemic Beliefs". After this session, I got the opportunity to meet Barbara Hofer (who is one of the major names in this area of research). Among the papers presented in this session, I was particularly interested in the one that was presented by Krista R. Muis.

Finally, I went to a session where Wolff-Michael Roth was discussant. I must be honest and admit that the reason I went wasn't because I found the focus of the session particularly interesting (somewhat, but not extremely)–I went to see Professor Roth live. He is one of those scholars who has a list of publications that is far beyond my comprehension (makes you wonder if he has more hours in his days than the rest of us...), and from the moment he started talking it was easy to understand that he had a knowledge and overview that was both wide and deep. Impressed!