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Susanne Prediger has written an article about How to develop mathematics-for-teaching and for understanding: the case of meanings of the equal sign . The article was published online in Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education on Thursday last week. Point of departure in her article is the very important question about what mathematical (content) knowledge prospective teachers need. A main claim which is raised already in the introduction is: "Listen to your students!" In the theoretical background, Prediger takes Shulman's classic conceptualization of three main categories of content knowledge in teaching as point of departure: Subject-matter knowledge Pedagogical-content knowledge Curricular knowledge She continues to build heavily on the work done by Hyman Bass and Deborah Ball (e.g. Ball & Bass, 2004), and she goes on to place her own study in relation to the work of Bass and Ball: Whereas Bass and Ball (2004) concentrate on the first part of their program, namel...

Tamsin Meaney, Tony Trinick and Uenuku Fairhall have written an article with an interesting focus on professional development and mathematics teacher conferences. The title of their article is ‘The conference was awesome’: social justice and a mathematics teacher conference . The article was recently published online in Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education . Here is the abstract of their article: Professional development comes in many forms, some of which are deemed more useful than others. However, when groups of teachers are excluded, or exclude themselves, from professional development opportunities, then there is an issue of social justice. This article examines the experiences of a group of teachers from a Māori-medium school who attended a mathematics teacher conference. By analysing the teachers’ sense of belonging through their ideas about engagement, alignment and imagination, we are able to describe how different kinds of relationships influence the inclusion/exclusion pr...

Dionne I. Cross has written an article called Alignment, cohesion, and change: Examining mathematics teachers’ belief structures and their influence on instructional practices . This article was recently published online in Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education . Here is the abstract of the article: This collective case study reports on an investigation into the relationship between mathematics teachers’ beliefs and their classroom practices, namely, how they organized their classroom activities, interacted with their students, and assessed their students’ learning. Additionally, the study examined the pervasiveness of their beliefs in the face of efforts to incorporate reform-oriented classroom materials and instructional strategies. The participants were five high school teachers of ninth-grade algebra at different stages in their teaching career. The qualitative analysis of the data revealed that in general beliefs were very influential on ...

Peter Ash has a nice blog about mathematics and education, and he has given a nice review of what appears to be an interesting book in a blog post about " Poincare's Prize ". Here is the intro of his post, to tickle your interest: I recently read Poincaré's Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math's Greatest Puzzles by George C. Szpiro. I recommend it highly. Some time back I recommended another book on the same topic, The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe by Donal O'Shea. If you can only read one book on the topic, I recommend the Szpiro book.

Ron J.C.M. Salden, Vincent Aleven, Rolf Schwonke and Alexander Renki have written an article entitled The expertise reversal effect and worked examples in tutored problem solving . The article was printed online in Instructional Science on Thursday. Here is the abstract of their article: Prior research has shown that tutored problem solving with intelligent software tutors is an effective instructional method, and that worked examples are an effective complement to this kind of tutored problem solving. The work on the expertise reversal effect suggests that it is desirable to tailor the fading of worked examples to individual students’ growing expertise levels. One lab and one classroom experiment were conducted to investigate whether adaptively fading worked examples in a tutored problem-solving environment can lead to higher learning gains. Both studies compared a standard Cognitive Tutor with two example-enhanced versions, in which the fading of worked examples occurred either in a...

Barbra Melendez, Silas Bowman, Keith Erickson and Edward Swim have written an article called An integrative learning experience within a mathematics curriculum . The article was recently published online in Teaching Mathematics and its Applications . Here is the abstract of their article: We developed four separate scenarios focusing on the connections between mathematics, biology, and social sciences. This structure facilitated the coordination of faculty from seven academic departments on campus. Each scenario had students from different majors build mathematical models, gather information from their respective disciplines, and develop a final presentation that included a committee consensus on how to approach the problem in a practical way. As a result, students learned how mathematics plays a role in other disciplines and how insight from different points of view affects the approach taken to a complex problem.

Valérie Munier and Helene Merle have written an article that was published in the September issue of International Journal of Science Education . The article is entitled Interdisciplinary Mathematics-Physics Approaches to Teaching the Concept of Angle in Elementary School . Unfortunately, I don't have access to this article, but I find the topic interesting! Here is a copy of the abstract of their article: The present study takes an interdisciplinary mathematics-physics approach to the acquisition of the concept of angle by children in Grades 3-5. This paper first presents the theoretical framework we developed, then we analyse the concept of angle and the difficulties pupils have with it. Finally, we report three experimental physics-based teaching sequences tested in three classrooms. We showed that at the end of each teaching sequence the pupils had a good grasp of the concept of angle, they had truly appropriated the physics knowledge at play, and many pupils are enable to suc...