Mathematical Knowledge Its Growth Through Teaching

In the first BACOMET volume different perspectives on issues concerning teacher education in mathematics were presented (B. Christiansen, A. G. Howson and M. Otte, Perspectives on Mathematics Education, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986). Underlying all of them was the fundamental problem area of the relationships between mathematical knowledge and the teaching and learning processes. The subsequent project BACOMET 2, whose outcomes are presented in this book, continued this work, especially by focusing on the genesis of mathematical knowledge in the classroom. The book developed over the period 1985-9 through several meetings, much discussion and considerable writing and redrafting. Our major concern was to try to analyse what we considered to be the most significant aspects of the relationships in order to enable mathematics educators to be better able to handle the kinds of complex issues facing all mathematics educators as we approach the end of the twentieth century. With access to mathematics education widening all the time, with a multi tude of new materials and resources being available each year, with complex cultural and social interactions creating a fluctuating context of education, with all manner of technology becoming more and more significant, and with both informal education (through media of different kinds) and non formal education (courses of training etc. ) growing apace, the nature of formal mathematical education is increasingly needing analysis.

What mathematics is entailed in knowing to act in a moment? Is tacit, rhetorical knowledge significant in mathematics education? What is the role of intuitive models in understanding, learning and teaching mathematics? Are there differences between elementary and advanced mathematical thinking? Why can't students prove? What are the characteristics of teachers' ways of knowing? This book focuses on various types of knowledge that are significant for learning and teaching mathematics. The first part defines, discusses and contrasts psychological, philosophical and didactical issues related to various types of knowledge involved in the learning of mathematics. The second part describes ideas about forms of mathematical knowledge that are important for teachers to know and ways of implementing such ideas in preservice and in-service education. The chapters provide a wide overview of current thinking about mathematics learning and teaching which is of interest for researchers in mathematics education and mathematics educators. Topics covered include the role of intuition in mathematics learning and teaching, the growth from elementary to advanced mathematical thinking, the significance of genres and rhetoric for the learning of mathematics and the characterization of teachers' ways of knowing.

Mathematics is generally considered as the only science where knowledge is uni form, universal, and free from contradictions. „Mathematics is a social product - a 'net of norms', as Wittgenstein writes. In contrast to other institutions - traffic rules, legal systems or table manners -, which are often internally contradictory and are hardly ever unrestrictedly accepted, mathematics is distinguished by coherence and consensus. Although mathematics is presumably the discipline, which is the most differentiated internally, the corpus of mathematical knowledge constitutes a coher ent whole. The consistency of mathematics cannot be proved, yet, so far, no contra dictions were found that would question the uniformity of mathematics" (Heintz, 2000, p. 11). The coherence of mathematical knowledge is closely related to the kind of pro fessional communication that research mathematicians hold about mathematical knowledge. In an extensive study, Bettina Heintz (Heintz 2000) proposed that the historical development of formal mathematical proof was, in fact, a means of estab lishing a communicable „code of conduct" which helped mathematicians make themselves understood in relation to the truth of mathematical statements in a co ordinated and unequivocal way.

First published in 1994. This book and its companion volume, Mathematics, Education and Philosophy: An International Perspective are edited collections. Instead of the sharply focused concerns of the research monograph, the books offer a panorama of complementary and forward-looking perspectives. They illustrate the breadth of theoretical and philosophical perspectives that can fruitfully be brough to bear on the mathematics and education. The empathise of this book is on epistemological issues, encompassing multiple perspectives on the learning of mathematics, as well as broader philosophical reflections on the genesis of knowledge. It explores constructivist and social theories of learning and discusses the rile of the computer in light of these theories.

The idea of teachers Learning through Teaching (LTT) – when presented to a naïve bystander – appears as an oxymoron. Are we not supposed to learn before we teach? After all, under the usual circumstances, learning is the task for those who are being taught, not of those who teach. However, this book is about the learning of teachers, not the learning of students. It is an ancient wisdom that the best way to “truly learn” something is to teach it to others. Nevertheless, once a teacher has taught a particular topic or concept and, consequently, “truly learned” it, what is left for this teacher to learn? As evident in this book, the experience of teaching presents teachers with an exciting opp- tunity for learning throughout their entire career. This means acquiring a “better” understanding of what is being taught, and, moreover, learning a variety of new things. What these new things may be and how they are learned is addressed in the collection of chapters in this volume. LTT is acknowledged by multiple researchers and mathematics educators. In the rst chapter, Leikin and Zazkis review literature that recognizes this phenomenon and stress that only a small number of studies attend systematically to LTT p- cesses. The authors in this volume purposefully analyze the teaching of mathematics as a source for teachers’ own learning.

The Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education is a comprehensive reference text, covering every topic in the field with entries ranging from short descriptions to much longer pieces where the topic warrants more elaboration. The entries provide access to theories and to research in the area and refer to the leading publications for further reading. The Encyclopedia is aimed at graduate students, researchers, curriculum developers, policy makers, and others with interests in the field of mathematics education. It is planned to be 700 pages in length in its hard copy form but the text will subsequently be up-dated and developed on-line in a way that retains the integrity of the ideas, the responsibility for which will be in the hands of the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board. This second edition will include additional entries on: new ideas in the politics of mathematics education, working with minority students, mathematics and art, other cross-disciplinary studies, studies in emotions and mathematics, new frameworks for analysis of mathematics classrooms, and using simulations in mathematics teacher education. Existing entries will be revised and new entries written. Members of the international mathematics education research community will be invited to propose new entries. Editorial Board: Bharath Sriraman Melony Graven Yoshinori Shimizu Ruhama Even Michele Artigue Eva Jablonka Wish to Become an Author? Springer's Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education's first edition was published in 2014. The Encyclopedia is a "living" project and will continue to accept articles online as part of an eventual second edition. Articles will be peer-reviewed in a timely manner and, if found acceptable, will be immediately published online. Suggested articles are, of course, welcome. Feel encouraged to think about additional topics that we overlooked the first time around, and to suggest colleagues (including yourself!) who will want to write them. Interested new authors should contact the editor in chief, Stephen Lerman, at [email protected], for more specific instructions.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. The book presents the Proceedings of the 13th International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME-13) and is based on the presentations given at the 13th International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME-13). ICME-13 took place from 24th- 31st July 2016 at the University of Hamburg in Hamburg (Germany). The congress was hosted by the Society of Didactics of Mathematics (Gesellschaft für Didaktik der Mathematik - GDM) and took place under the auspices of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI). ICME-13 brought together about 3.500 mathematics educators from 105 countries, additionally 250 teachers from German speaking countries met for specific activities. Directly before the congress activities were offered for 450 Early Career Researchers. The proceedings give a comprehensive overview on the current state-of-the-art of the discussions on mathematics education and display the breadth and deepness of current research on mathematical teaching-and-learning processes. The book introduces the major activities of ICME-13, namely articles from the four plenary lecturers and two plenary panels, articles from the five ICMI awardees, reports from six national presentations, three reports from the thematic afternoon devoted to specific features of ICME-13. Furthermore, the proceedings contain descriptions of the 54 Topic Study Groups, which formed the heart of the congress and reports from 29 Discussion Groups and 31 Workshops. The additional important activities of ICME-13, namely papers from the invited lecturers, will be presented in the second volume of the proceedings.

The diversity of research domains and theories in the field of mathematics education has been a permanent subject of discussions from the origins of the discipline up to the present. On the one hand the diversity is regarded as a resource for rich scientific development on the other hand it gives rise to the often repeated criticism of the discipline’s lack of focus and identity. As one way of focusing on core issues of the discipline the book seeks to open up a discussion about fundamental ideas in the field of mathematics education that permeate different research domains and perspectives. The book addresses transformation as one fundamental idea in mathematics education and examines it from different perspectives. Transformations are related to knowledge, related to signs and representations of mathematics, related to concepts and ideas, and related to instruments for the learning of mathematics. The book seeks to answer the following questions: What do we know about transformations in the different domains? What kinds of transformations are crucial? How is transformation in each case conceptualized?

Mathematics holds an essential, ubiquitous presence in the education sector, as do ongoing explorations of its effective teaching and learning. Written by leading experts on mathematics and mathematics education, this book situates issues of student thinking and learning about mathematics within the broader context of educational psychology research and theory and brings them to a wider audience. With chapters on knowing and understanding mathematics, mathematical habits, early mathematical thinking, and learning mathematics, this concise volume is designed for any educational psychology, mathematics education, or general education course that includes student learning in the curriculum. It will be indispensable for student researchers and both pre- and in-service teachers alike.

Mathematics as the Science of Patterns: Making the Invisible Visible to Students through Teaching introduces the reader to a collection of thoughtful, research-based works by authors that represent current thinking about mathematics, mathematics education, and the preparation of mathematics teachers. Each chapter focuses on mathematics teaching and the preparation of teachers who will enter classrooms to instruct the next generation of students in mathematics. The value of patterns to the teaching and learning of mathematics is well understood, both in terms of research and application. When we involve or appeal to pattern in teaching mathematics, it is usually because we are trying to help students to extract greater meaning, or enjoyment, or both, from the experience of learning environments within which they are occupied, and perhaps also to facilitate remembering. As a general skill it is thought that the ability to discern a pattern is a precursor to the ability to generalize and abstract, a skill essential in the early years of learning and beyond. Research indicates that the larger problem in teaching mathematics does not lie primarily with students; rather it is with the teachers themselves. In order to make changes for students there first needs to be a process of change for teachers. Understanding the place of patterns in learning mathematics is a predicate to understanding how to teach mathematics and how to use pedagogical reasoning necessary in teaching mathematics. Importantly, the lack of distinction created by the pedagogical use of patterns is not immediately problematic to the student or the teacher. The deep-seated cognitive patterns that both teachers and students bring to the classroom require change. Chapter 1 opens the book with a focus on mathematics as the science of patterns and the importance of patterns in mathematical problem solving, providing the reader with an introduction. The authors of Chapter 2 revisit the work of Po lya and the development and implementation of problem solving in mathematics. In Chapter 3, the authors present an argument for core pedagogical content knowledge in mathematics teacher preparation. The authors of Chapter 4 focus on preservice teachers’ patterns of conception as related to understanding number and operation. In Chapter 5 the authors examine the role of visual representation in exploring proportional reasoning, denoting the importance of helping learners make their thinking visible. The authors of Chapter 6 examine patterns and relationships, and the importance of each in assisting students’ learning and development in mathematical understanding. The authors of Chapter 7 examine the use of worked examples as a scalable practice, with emphasis on the importance of worked examples in teaching fraction magnitude and computation is discussed. In Chapter 8, the authors expand on the zone of proximal development to investigate the potential of Zankov’s Lesson in terms of students analyzing numerical equalities. The authors of Chapter 9 focus on high leverage mathematical practices in elementary pre-service teacher preparation, drawing into specific relief the APEX cycle to develop deep thinking. In Chapter 10, the author focuses on number talks and the engagement of students in mathematical reasoning, which provides opportunities for students to be sensemakers of mathematics. Chapter 11 presents an epilogue, focusing on the importance of recognizing the special nature of mathematics knowledge for teaching.