Sociomathematical worlds: investigating children's developing relationships with mathematics

This paper describes the methodology used for a three-year ethnographical study of children’s expanding awareness of mathematics and their growing mathematical identities during the middle primary years. It explains how the term ‘sociomathematical worlds’ was adopted to represent the network of social contexts within which children learn about mathematics, and how an understanding of these worlds was constructed by the researcher through a process of broad and detailed data-gathering, rich in triangulation

New Perspectives on Mathematics Pedagogy

“New Perspectives on Mathematics Pedagogy” represents a serious attempt to understand pedagogy within mathematics classrooms. To that end, this symposium will address the key questions and issues surrounding mathematics pedagogy presently confronting vast numbers of researchers, as well as educators, and policy makers. Organised around presentations, responses, discussion and debate, the symposium is intended not only to enhance understanding but also to stimulate fresh thinking and initiate ongoing critical dialogue about the practice of mathematics pedagogy within teaching and learning settings

AgBioData consortium recommendations for sustainable genomics and genetics databases for agriculture

The future of agricultural research depends on data. The sheer volume of agricultural biological data being produced today makes excellent data management essential. Governmental agencies, publishers and science funders require datamanagement plans for publicly funded research. Furthermore, the value of data increases exponentially when they are properly stored, described, integrated and shared, so that they can be easily utilized in future analyses. AgBioData (https://www.agbiodata.org) is a consortium of people working at agricultural biological databases, data archives and knowledgbases who strive to identify common issues in database development, curation and management, with the goal of creating database products that are more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. We strive to promote authentic, detailed, accurate and explicit communication between all parties involved in scientific data. As a step toward this goal, we present the current state of biocuration, ontologies, metadata and persistence, database platforms, programmatic (machine) access to data, communication and sustainability with regard to data curation. Each section describes challenges and opportunities for these topics, along with recommendations and best practices

Down in the dark zone: teacher identity and compulsory standardised mathematics assessment

In this paper, teachers of Year 5 and Year 7 students teachers at one state primary school in Queensland, Australia, share their thoughts and experiences of the mandatory standardised state Numeracy Tests, noting the tensions, dilemmas and challenges these tests pose for teachers involved in children’s mathematical learning. Using Foucault’s theories of discourse and Lacan’s theories of identity the paper contemplates the ways in which mathematics teachers are inscribed and constituted within the standardised test process

Mathematical Subjects: children talk about their mathematics lives

We know the process by which children become social, moral, and creative beings, but when—and how—do they become mathematical beings? This thought-provoking volume follows ten children (ages seven through eighteen) in schools in New Zealand, England, Australia, Sweden, and an international school in Switzerland as they come to recognize the mathematical as part of their lives, their academic identities, and their identities as human beings. Through these students’ experiences important themes emerge, including mathematics as work, a domain of learning, and an avenue for competition; mathematical ability as a key to how they are perceived by others; and the relationships between mathematics achievement and the larger social and academic picture. This comparative study of educational systems and academic development will inform readers in these and other salient areas:\ud \ud * Theoretical bases for understanding children as mathematical subjects.\ud \ud * Help in creating the mathematical self: tutoring and related programs.\ud \ud * The roles of compulsory study and standardized assessment.\ud \ud * Class and ethnic content in children’s math narratives.\ud \ud * The gendering of mathematical ability and activity.\ud \ud * What children’s math experience can teach us about teaching the subject.\ud \ud Children Talk about Their Mathematics Lives opens bold windows onto how young people learn and how disparities arise, making it a cutting-edge resource for researchers and libraries, graduates and teachers in mathematics education and early childhood education

Whose mathematics education? Mathematical discourses as cultural matricide?

“Mathematics education, for what and why,” begs an additional question: “Whose mathematics education?” Among the ideas for discussion in this group is the concern that “school mathematics has scant relevance to the personal and collective lives of the students or the adults they will become.” This paper takes a step beyond “reactions against Eurocentric narratives of the history of mathematics” to the question of the sexualization of mathematical discourses (Irigaray, 2002), including notions of mathematical literacy. Within such discourses, women appear only by virtue of their invisibility. \ud \ud A globally recognised phenomenon in mathematics education is the differing ways in which boys and girls participate and achieve in their learning of mathematics. According to the recently publicised research of Guiso, Monte, Sapienza and Zingales (2008) based on the PISA analysis, the “gender gap,” long perceived to exist between girls and boys in mathematics, disappears in societies that treat both sexes equally and men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities, suggesting that boys are not innately better at mathematics than girls, and any difference in test scores is due to nurture rather than nature. When girls have equal access to education and other opportunities they do just as well as boys in mathematics tests.\u

The 'mathematically able child' in primary mathematics education: a discursive approach

Grouping according to perceptions of ability is widely used in the teaching of mathematics in many countries. These practices may be viewed as operating within discursive complexes concerned with the mathematically able child. This paper uses Foucault’s theories of discourse to argue that such a child is discursively produced, and that the differentiating pedagogies that characterise mathematics teaching in many New Zealand primary schools are supported within such discourse. It investigates the disposition surrounding the ‘mathematically able child’, and considers implications of dominant discursive accounts of mathematical ability for young learners

Children talk about mathematics assessment

This paper reports on the second phase of a study in which Year 7 children speak about standardised compulsory state-wide Numeracy Tests. While accepting these tests as an unavoidable part of their schooling, the children developed strategies to cope with the multiple pressures the tests created. Their views reflect their understandings of the test as defining both mathematics, and mathematical competence. They speak of an assessment regime with the power to create anxiety, undermine their mathematical confidence and construct their mathematical identities, and contemplate changes to that might both improve the quality of information gathered, and enhance their wellbeing

Testing times: children's experiences of standardised assessment

This article describes a study in which Year 7 children were invited to reflect on their engagement in standardised compulsory numeracy testing in Queensland, Australia. Their accounts reveal the strategic orientations children adopt to\ud manage multiple pressures created by such tests. Although they regarded standardised tests as an unavoidable facet of schooling, the children told of how this pervasive social practice produced discomfort, eroded confidence and positioned children hierarchically as mathematical identities. As they contemplated changes that might both enhance the quality of information gathered by the test and improve their experience of 'being tested', the children\ud provided evidence of how the test defined for them both mathematics and mathematical competence

Mathematics, mind and occupational subjectivity

Occupational subjectivity is a term that is used to describe the way individuals orient themselves in the world both recreationally and vocationally, that is, how they behave as occupational beings, justify occupational choices and imagine occupational futures. This paper exposes the ways in which the study of mathematics at school is powerfully implicated in occupational subjectivity. A group of upper secondary school children reflect on making choices about whether to continue studying mathematics once it is no longer compulsory, what kinds of mathematics to study when faced with several options, and the place of mathematics in occupation beyond school. The children could he seen to select occupational subject positions in reference to discourses linking self, mind and mathematics