Continuing with practice of previous ICMEs, four Survey Teams (ST) have been set up. The organization of these teams is intended to strengthen the emphasis on new developments and progress in the area of each theme or issue since the last three or four ICMEs. Each Survey Team will work all the way till the opening of ICME-14 to survey the state-of-the-art with respect to a certain theme or issue, with particular concern in identifying and characterizing important new knowledge, recent developments, new perspectives, and emergent issues.
The survey teams will have 90 minutes to present their work at ICME-14 in a kind of sub-plenary format and will present their work in parallel.
ST 1. Research on university mathematics education
Chair: Chris RASMUSSEN (USA)
Team members: Marianna BOSCH (Spain), Reinhard HOCHMUTH (Germany),
Oh Nam KWON (Korea), Birgit LOCH (Australia),
Mike THOMAS (New Zealand), María TRIGUEROS (Mexico)
IPC Liaison: Frode Rønning(Norway)
Description: Research on tertiary mathematics education is a relatively young, and growing field. In the US Research on Undergraduate Mathematics Education is organized as a Special Interest Group within MAA, and in Europe the INDRUM network is actively working within this field. Its second conference will be held in Norway in 2018 at the University of Agder. There is a Springer journal entitled International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, where Chris Rasmussen is one of the editors. Examples of research areas are teaching and learning of specific topics of university mathematics, or to special groups of students, transition from school to university, novel approaches to teaching and assessment – including use of digital resources.
ST 2. Eearly childhood mathematics education (up to age 7)
Chair: Elia ILIADA (Cyprus)
Team members: Anna BACCAGLINI-FRANK (Italy),
Nosisi FEZA (South Africa), Esther LEVENSON (Israel),
Nanae MATSUO (Japan)
IPC Liaison: Anjum HALAI (Pakistan)
Description: Research in early childhood mathematics education has experienced an increasing growth over the last years. The interest in this topic is induced by the well documented, positive relation between children’s early mathematical knowledge and their later mathematics learning and the strong emphasis given on early childhood education in many countries. The aim of this survey is to establish an in-depth and comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art of the most important developments and contributions since 2012, and of current tendencies, new perspectives and emerging challenges in the field. The survey focuses on six major research threads that have been identified in recent literature on Early Childhood Mathematics Education. Three of these threads are content-oriented: Number sense and whole number development, geometry education and children’s competences in other content domains. A two-fold cognition-oriented thread focuses on cognitive skills and special education, respectively, in early childhood mathematics. The role of technologies in early mathematics teaching and learning is another important research thread that is systematically reviewed. Finally, a teacher-oriented thread presents a synthesis of results of recent studies on early childhood teachers’ knowledge, education and affective issues in mathematics.
ST 3. Teachers’ collective work as a regular school practice for teacher development
Chair: Birgit PEPIN (Netherlands)
Team members: Jehad ALSHWAIKH (Palestine), Hiroyuki NINOMIYA (Japan),
Gérard SENSEVY (France), Yudong YANG (China)
IPC Liaison: Jill ADLER (South Africa)
Description: Teachers’ collective work as a teacher regular school practice has a long history in several countries. Lesson Study in Japan and Teaching Research Groups in China are well known examples. However, varying forms of such practice exist in many countries and in varying educational contexts. These different realities share some key features:
• The collective work is organized with some regularity;
• It is supported (albeit to varying degrees) by the school or if not a single school, a clustering of schools in a supported project or school district;
• The collective work is aimed at improving the quality of teaching and teaching practices, and organized around developing lessons.
Over time, and particularly in more recent years, these practices have been shared and researched leading to the evolution of a wide, yet dispersed, knowledge base.
The main research question guiding the survey study is: What can be learnt from an examination of common features as well as from variations in practices and their rationales in different national contexts?
To answer this question the team investigates
(1) the nature of school-based mathematics teachers’ collective work as regular school practice, and how this relates to situation, culture and context;
(2) the roles of the participants (coming from different communities) who engage collaboratively in such school-based collective work, and how they relate to each other;
(3) the kinds of learning that can be observed (and evidenced) in school-based teacher collective work, and how the observed/evidenced learning relates to the collective aspect, context and goals of the work;
(4) the methodological and theoretical perspectives/lenses that are used to guide and inform school-based teacher collective work, and perceived teacher learning, in such teams?
Leaning on previous research and survey studies (e.g. Robutti et. al, 2016, ICME 13; Adler et al., 2005, ICME 4), selected journals (research and practitioner) and proceedings, published in English and in local languages, over the past 5 years are reviewed, in order to establish an overview and review of the state-of-the-art of the most important developments and contributions, and of current trends and tendencies.
ST 4. The teaching and learning of mathematical modelling and interdisciplinary mathematics educations
Chair: Gloria STILLMAN (Australia)
Team members: Jussara de Loiola ARAÚJO (Brazil), Angeles DOMINGUEZ (Mexico),
Toshikazu IKEDA (Japan), Stanislaw SCHUKAJLOW (Germany)
IPC Liaison: Gabriele KAISER (Germany)
Description: The importance of applications and modelling in mathematics education has been growing during the last decades. In particular, firstly at the ICMEs with their regular working or topic groups and lectures on applications and modelling, and secondly in the series of ICTMAs which have been held biennially since 1983. ICME Proceedings and Survey Lectures indicate the state-of-the-art at the relevant time and contain many examples, studies, conceptual contributions and resources addressing the relation between the real world and mathematics, as do the books in the ICTMA Series. Additionally, the ICMI study on this theme published in 2004 showed a variety of topics related to modelling bringing together authors from different countries around the world. This increasing interest is a consequence of an increasing number of (empirical) research projects which focus on special aspects of applications and modelling as well as the number of (inter)national comparative studies. The planned survey shall review the current state-of-the-art on the teaching and learning of mathematical modelling under specific consideration of interdisciplinary aspects. Especially the importance of a well understood relation between mathematics and the real world shall be in the focus of the survey. This is particularly relevant in the context of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), which has recently come to political prominence.