Author: Reidar Mosvold

ESM, January 2009

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Mathematics in everyday life – a PhD thesis lives on!

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Normally, a PhD thesis is seldom read by many people, and years of work often end up in a drawer. My own thesis was published in a very limited number, and most of these disappeared during the day of my defense. About a year ago, I decided to publish my PhD thesis on Scribd, because – well mainly because I wanted more people to read it, of course!

Since then, my thesis – a 300 page long thesis in mathematics education – has been viewed 2779 times (as of writing), downloaded 4 times, liked by 4 people and 18 people have added the thesis to their favorites. It has also been awarded to the hot-list on Scribd. Although these numbers are not fantastic, I think it is pretty good for such a thesis. If you are interested in taking a look for yourself, you can either click on the link above, or you can read the embedded document below. If you rather want to read in fullscreen, click here. If you want to download it, click here (pdf).

Mathematics in everyday life – A study of beliefs and actions

Holidays are approaching…

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The holidays are approaching, and the Christmas bells have almost started ringing in my house. In that connection, I am going to inform the readers of Mathematics Education Research Blog that the next two weeks are probably going to be a bit slower than usual here. Most of the main journals have also entered a slow period it seems, so this might work out fine.

I am planning to write something during Christmas break, but the pace will be slower. If you want to make sure that you don’t miss all the important new articles that appear in the next two weeks, you might want to take a look at this page! This is a shared page from my Google Reader account, which is automatically updated with news from most of the journals I follow (those that have an RSS feed). No matter how slow my own pace is, this page will always be updated.

If you still need something more to read during Christmas break, you might want to take a look at the 630+ references that I have stored in my CiteULike account, or the 275+ bookmarks related to mathematics in my Delicious account. You might also be interested in taking a look at the list of academic journals in mathematics education, that I created over at Wikipedia the other day (and possibly contributing to the expansion of the list)!

Merry Christmas to all!

Reading tips: Branford (1908)

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Many great books have been written, and an increasing number are becoming part of the public domain. One of them, which I would like to point your attention to, is a classical book written by Benchara Branford in 1908! The title of the book is: “A Study of Mathematical Education, including The Teaching of Arithmetic”. Besides being an important book in the history of mathematics education, it also provides a nice insight into the teaching of mathematics as it was 100 years ago!

Personally, I think his very direct connection between the historical development of mathematics and the child’s development of mathematical thinking (often referred to as “the genetic approach” in mathematics education) is interesting.

A Study of Mathematical Education

If you want to read the book in fullscreen format, click here. For download (pdf), click here.

ATM eNews

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ATM Conference 2009ATM eNews is available, and it was published yesterday. Those who subscribe to the newsletter have probably got an email about it already, and those who don’t can read the entire newsletter online. The eNews contains lots of useful information about new publications, conferences, etc. If you don’t know, ATM is the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (in UK), and it has about 4000 members. ATM has an annual conference, which might be worth paying attention to. Online registration is now open.

Working for learning

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Pat Drake has written an article that was recently published online in Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education. The article is entitled Working for learning: teaching assistants developing mathematics for teaching. Here is the abstract of the article:

This article derives from a case study of 10 secondary school teaching assistants (TAs) who did not have conventional pre-qualifications in mathematics but who undertook an honours degree in mathematics education studies at a Higher Education Institution in England whilst continuing to work as TAs in school. Work-based learning was thus undertaken in parallel with advancement through the hierarchical undergraduate mathematics curriculum. Lave and Wenger’s work on communities of practice is used as a framework to explore the TAs’ learning of mathematics alongside their professional work in schools. This case illustrates how and where institution-based undergraduate teaching relates to work in school, and where it does not, thus signalling the importance of the TAs’ informal learning strategies in bringing together these experiences.

ZDM, No 1-2, 2009

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A new issue of ZDM was published on Friday. It is a double issue, with the following theme: Interdisciplinarity in Mathematics Education: Psychology, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Modelling and Curriculum. Guest editor of this issue is Bharath Sriraman, the editor of The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast. The issue contains not less than 22 articles:

If you don’t have full access to Springer (so that you can read these articles), you might want to pay attention to the article by Doorman and Gravemeijer, which is an Open Access article (i.e. freely available for all to read). 

A brief history of mathematics (book)

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For those of you who haven’t already discover it, here is a tip for Christmas: Scribd! You can find lots of interesting books and papers here, and some are true gems. Here is one of them: A brief history of mathematics, by Karl Fink. This official translation was published in 1900, and therefore is in the public domain. You can read the book in its entirety here:

A brief history of mathematics

If you want to read the book in fullscreen, you can go here. To download the book as pdf, click on this link.