Reasons for change in enrolments

Derek Holton, Eric Muller, Juha Oikkonen, Oscar Adolfo Sanches Valenzuela, and Ren Zizhao have written an article called Some reasons for change in undergraduate mathematics enrolments. This article article was published online in International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology yesterday. Here is the abstract of their article:

Here, we look at the enrolments of students in undergraduate mathematics courses in a number of countries. The data show various increases and decreases and we suggest some common reasons for the fluctuations. These include students' goals of a secure and well-paid job, government actions and the state of the economy in the country concerned. We consider several ways in which departments have successfully approached downturns in numbers by their interactions with students by introducing new teaching approaches, using technology and establishing mathematics centres.

The professional education of mathematics teachers

Springer has recently published a new book on mathematics education. The book is entitled The Professional Education and Development of Teachers of Mathematics, and it is edited by Ruhama Even and Deborah Loewenberg Ball. Here are some of the highlights of the book, as presented by the publisher:

• Focuses specifically on mathematics teacher education development
  
• Provides practical strategies for learning
  
• Addresses the balance between pedagogy and mathematical content
  
• Edited by the world's leading scholars on mathematics teacher education, teacher knowledge, and teacher education
  

Educational Researcher, December 2008

The December issue of Educational Researcher has been published, and it is a special issue on Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel. The issue contains 13 interesting articles with a focus on the Math Panel Report:

• Anthony E. Kelly: Reflections on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Final Report
  
• Hilda Borko and Jennifer A. Whitcomb: Teachers, Teaching, and Teacher Education: Comments on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s Report
  
• Paul Cobb and Kara Jackson: The Consequences of Experimentalism in Formulating Recommendations for Policy and Practice in Mathematics Education
  
• Patrick W. Thompson: On Professional Judgment and the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Report: Curricular Content
  
• Jo Boaler: When Politics Took the Place of Inquiry: A Response to the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s Review of Instructional Practices 
  
• Joanne Lobato: On Learning Processes and the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Report 
  
• Lorrie A. Shepard: Commentary on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Recommendations on Assessment 
  
• Jeremy Roschelle, Corinne Singleton, Nora Sabelli, Roy Pea, and John D. Bransford: Mathematics Worth Knowing, Resources Worth Growing, Research Worth Noting: A Response to the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Report 
  
• James G. Greeno and Allan Collins: Commentary on the Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel 
  
• Finbarr C. Sloane: Randomized Trials in Mathematics Education: Recalibrating the Proposed High Watermark 
  
• Jere Confrey, Alan P. Maloney, and Kenny H. Nguyen: Breaching the Conditions for Success for a National Advisory Panel 
  
• James P. Spillane: Policy, Politics, and the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Report: Topology, Functions, and Limits 
  
• Camilla Persson Benbow and Larry R. Faulkner: Rejoinder to the Critiques of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Final Report 
  

TIMSS 2007

The results from TIMSS 2007 were released today, and the media appears to be full of reports about how the students in each of our countries are doing. Overall, countries from Asia are on top as usual. If you want to learn more, there is a webcast to watch (.rm and .mov formats), international reports to read as well as a Technical Report and a very interesting set of Encyclopedias, which offer a nice overview of the mathematics (and science) teaching in each of the participating countries. That means: lots of interesting reading to do!

Conference calendar updated

I have now updated the conference calendar to include relevant conferences in 2009. If there are any conferences that I have missed, please let me know by sending me an e-mail or writing in the comment field below this message! 

You can always find a quick link to the conference calendar in the column to the right.

Terence Tao in Norway

Terence Tao is by many said to be the best mathematician in the world today, and for two days this week (today and tomorrow) he is visiting Trondheim, Norway. Unfortunately, I don't have the opportunity to travel to Trondheim and listen to him, but it sure would have been interesting.

Tao - born in 1975 (like myself) - is professor of mathematics at UCLA, winner of the Fields medal and lots of other prizes. He is working within many different fields of mathematics, and he frequently reports his work on his web page and his blog. Below is a small video presenting Tao:

Science & Education, January 2009

Science & Education is a journal that is devoted to publishing articles related to improving the teaching and learning of science and mathematics. The January issue of 2009 has recently been published. None of the articles in this issue are directly related to mathematics education, but if you are interested in science education in general, you might want to have a closer look at the issue anyway!

Building intellectual infrastructure

James Kaput wrote an article that was published online in Educational Studies in Mathematics on Friday. The article is entitled: Building intellectual infrastructure to expose and understand ever-increasing complexity. Here is the abstract of the article:

This paper comments on the expanded repertoire of techniques, conceptual frameworks, and perspectives developed to study the phenomena of gesture, bodily action and other modalities as related to thinking, learning, acting, and speaking. Certain broad issues are considered, including (1) the distinction between “contextual” generalization of instances across context (of virtually any kind—numeric, situational, etc.) and the generalization of structured actions on symbols, (2) fundamental distinctions between the use of semiotic means to describe specific situations versus semiosis serving the process of generalization, and (3) the challenges of building generalizable research findings at such an early stage in infrastructure building.

IEJME, October issue revisited

I have written about the October issue of International Electronic Journal of Mathematics Education in an earlier post. For some reason, the full-text version of the articles in this journal don't appear as a new issue of the journal appears - at least for me they don't! The articles are available now however, and you can freely download them in PDF format. This provides a nice occasion of referring to the articles again, and writing more about one of them:

• Do You Want Me to Do
  It with Probability or with My Normal Thinking? Horizontal and Vertical
  Views on the Formation of Stochastic Conceptions, by Susanne Prediger, Germany
• Teachers’ Perceptions of Mathematics Content Knowledge Assessments in Professional Development Courses, by Michelle T. Chamberlin, Robert A. Powers and Jodie D. Novak, USA 
• Mathematics Anxiety Among 4th And 5th Grade Turkish Elementary School Students, by Fulya Yüksel-Şahin, Türkiye 
• A Comparison of Placement in First-Year University Mathematics Courses Using Paper and Online Administration of a Placement Test, by Phyllis A. Schumacher and Richard M. Smith, USA 
• Senior Student Teachers’ Understanding of Relations Between Function, Equation, and Polynomial Concepts as Conceptual Knowledge, Danyal Soybas, Yılmaz Aksoy and Hayri Akay, Türkiye

In this collection, I found the article by Chamberlin, Powers and Novak particularly interesting, so I will provide you with some more details about it. The study reported in this article is related to the No Child Left Behind initiative in the U.S. In relation to this initiative, several professional development courses in the U.S. are required to assess the teachers' content knowledge. This article reports on the evaluation of the impact of these assessments. Although the article does not provide a very thorough theoretical background, it gives a good overview of the survey that were made to investigate the teachers' perceptions about these assessments.

One of the results of this survey was that the teachers appeared to learn more because of the assessments. They explain it like this:

We surmise that these positive effects may be due to an important aspect of theassessment process in these PD courses – the assessment and learning of mathematical topics and material was on-going and demonstrating mastery of those ideas was expected.

Many teachers appear to be reluctant to be tested, and this study apparently describes a study which had positive experiences with assessing the teachers after a course, and this might be interesting for other teacher educators or providers of in-service courses to take a closer look at.

Where am I, and where do I want to go?

I have started the countdown to Christmas, and 2008 is approaching the end. Since the major journals in mathematics education are having a few slow days at the moment, I found it useful to start reflecting about the year that is soon behind us, and the one which lies ahead.

I started this blog in February this year, and in the welcome post on February 5, I wrote:

There are so many journals, so many conferences, so many web-sites that cover research in mathematics education. This blog will be my humble attempt to cover the most important ones. In the sidebar, you can find feeds from the most important scientific journals in mathematics education research. In this blog, I will comment on new and interesting (to me at least) articles in these and other journals. I will also try to follow some of the most important conferences in mathematics education, as well as sharing interesting bookmarks regarding mathematics education.

Now, ten months later, I think it's appropriate to look back and see where I have come. The blog started out as a personal wish to get to know my own field of research better, and I personally feel that I have been extremely successful in this realm! I never advertised much for this blog, but when I started tracking the statistics with Google Analytics in late June, I realized that lots of people from all over the world actually read the blog!

Between July 1 and December 1, the blog had 5423 unique visitors, from 114 countries. I know this doesn't sound like a lot, but for a niche blog like this, I think it is actually quite good. For me, it is also interesting to note that my own country - Norway - is only in the third spot when it comes to number of visitors.

Most of my time has been spent on covering articles from peer-reviewed journals in mathematics education, and I have also covered some conferences. This is something I intend to continue doing, but I have been thinking about different possible ways of doing this. First, I have thought about the possibility of writing more about some main articles in a way that people who are not researchers can relate to. I think it is important for researchers to communicate their results not only to fellow researchers. Unfortunately, but understandably, most teachers do not read our research journals! So, I have started thinking about writing some abstracts or impressions of research articles that teachers, parents and others who are interested but not researchers might relate to. I have also started thinking about making a stronger effort into providing an even better overview of the field (indexing journal articles, updating the conference calendar more, etc.). These are some of my own thoughts. But I am also interested in learning about your ideas! So, if you read this blog frequently, or if this is the first time you drop by ... What do you think? What would be more useful to you? Please write comments to this post, or send me an e-mail to let me know!

I already know what an incredible learning experience this blog has been for me, but now I want to know how I can make it a better experience for you - the readers - as well!