I am thrilled to see that the post I made yesterday about Sarah Clark’s article in The Spectrum, and Deb Peterson’s comments in her blog at About.com, actually resulted in Deb finding out about my work. She has followed this up with another nice post about the issue. Be sure to check out the last part of the title of her post 🙂

I am not sure that I would totally agree that I have actually proven Sarah right, though. My study was a qualitative study of a small sample of teachers, and I don’t think it can be generalized like that. What I do think is interesting with the results of my work is that even these skilled teachers, who were actually chosen in order to provide good examples on how teachers connect mathematics with everyday life, did not do this so much!

There was another teacher in my study, called Harry, who also made a lot of connections with everyday life in his teaching, though. I wrote an article with some examples from his teaching for the Norma 05 conference (Mosvold, 2007). You can find a pre-print of this article here. (See full reference below!)

References:
Mosvold, R. (2007). Teaching “Mathematics in everyday life”. In C. Bergsten et al. (Eds.): Relating Practice and Research in Mathematics Education. Proceedings of Norma 05, Fourth Nordic Conference on Mathematics Education, 389-399, Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press.