Changing classroom culture, curricula, and instruction for proof and proving: how amenable to scaling up, practicable for curricular integration, and capable of producing long-lasting effects are current interventions?

This paper is a commentary on the classroom interventions on the teaching and learning of proof reported in the seven empirical papers in this special issue. The seven papers show potential to enhance student learning in an area of mathematics that is not only notoriously difficult for students to learn and for teachers to teach, but also critically important to knowing and doing mathematics. Although the seven papers, and the intervention studies they report, vary in many ways—student population, content domain, goals and duration of the intervention, and theoretical perspectives, to name a few—they all provide valuable insight into ways in which classroom experiences might be designed to positively influence students’ learning to prove. In our commentary, we highlight the contributions and promise of the interventions in terms of whether and how they present capacity to change the classroom culture, the curriculum, or instruction. In doing so, we distinguish between works that aim to enhance students’ preparedness for, and competence in, proof and proving and works that explicitly foster appreciation for the need and importance of proof and proving. Finally, we also discuss briefly the interventions along three dimensions: how amenable to scaling up, how practicable for curricular integration, and how capable of producing long-lasting effects these interventions are

Research on Teaching and Learning Mathematics at the Tertiary Level:State-of-the-art and Looking Ahead

This topical survey focuses on research in tertiary mathematics education, a field that has experienced considerable growth over the last 10 years. Drawing on the most recent journal publication as well as the latest advances from recent high quality conference proceedings, our review culls out the following five emergent areas of interest: mathematics teaching at the tertiary level; the role of mathematics in other disciplines; textbooks, assessment and students’ studying practices; transition to the tertiary level; and theoretical-methodological advances. We conclude the survey with a discussion of some potential ways forward for future research in this new and rapidly developing domain of inquiry

Special issue on summative assessment

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research in Mathematics Education on 01 Aug 2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14794802.2017.133457

Abstract Algebra Teaching and Learning

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