Fulvia Furinghetti has written an article about The emergence of women on the international stage of mathematics education. This article was published online in ZDM last week. The article has a particular focus on women in the history of ICMI. Here is the article abstract:

In this article, I consider the history of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) from its inception until the International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME) held in 1969. In this period, mathematics education developed as a scientific discipline. My aim is to study the presence and the contribution of women (if any) in this development. ICMI was founded in 1908, but my history starts before then, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the process of internationalization of mathematics began, thanks to the first International Congress of Mathematicians. Already in those years, the need for internationalizing the debate on mathematics teaching was spreading throughout the mathematical community. I use as my main sources of information the didactics sections in the proceedings of the International Congresses of Mathematicians and the proceedings of the first ICME. The data collected are complemented with information from the editorial board of two journals that for different reasons are linked to ICMI: L’Enseignement Mathématique and Educational Studies in Mathematics. In particular, as a result of my analyses, I have identified four women who may be considered as pioneer women in mathematics education. Some biographical notes on their professional life are included in the paper.

The third issue of BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics has been published. It contains several interesting articles:

• Ancient accounting in the modern mathematics classroom, by Kathleen Clark and Eleanor Robson
• The influence of Amatino Manucci and Luca Pacioli, by Fenny Smith
• A teaching module on the history of public-key cryptography and RSA, by Uffe Thomas Jankvist
• The history of symmetry and the asymmetry of history, by Peter M. Neumann
• A mathematical walk in Surrey, by Simon R. Blackburn

I have written a lot about new articles that have been published in the major journals lately, but not so much about updates on new issues of these journals. Here is an overview of some of the latest news from the major journals:

Educational Studies in Mathematics has released the October issue of this year, with a special focus on “The role and use of examples in mathematics education”. The articles in the issue include:

• Intuitive nonexamples: the case of triangles, by Pessia Tsamir, Dina Tirosh and Esther Levenson
• Using learner generated examples to introduce new concepts, by Anne Watson and Steve Shipman
• Doctoral students’ use of examples in evaluating and proving conjectures, by Lara Alcock and Matthew Inglis
• Exemplifying definitions: a case of a square, by Rina Zazkis and Roza Leikin
• The purpose, design and use of examples in the teaching of elementary mathematics, by Tim Rowland
• Characteristics of teachers’ choice of examples in and for the mathematics classroom, by Iris Zodik and Orit Zaslavsky
• Shedding light on and with example spaces, by Paul Goldenberg and John Mason

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education has released the September issue with the following highlights:

• How can research be used to inform and improve mathematics teaching practice? by Anne D. Cockburn
• Promoting student collaboration in a detracked, heterogeneous secondary mathematics classroom, by Megan E. Staples
• Using a video-based curriculum to develop a reflective stance in prospective mathematics teachers, by Shari L. Stockero
• What makes a problem mathematically interesting? Inviting prospective teachers to pose better problems, by Sandra Crespo and Nathalie Sinclair
• Mathematical preparation of elementary teachers in China: changes and issues, by Yeping Li, Dongchen Zhao, Rongjin Huang and Yunpeng Ma

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education has released the September issue of this year with the following articles:

• Effects of advance organiser strategy during instruction on secondary school students’ mathematics achievement in Kenya’s Nakuru district, by Bernard N. Githua and Rachel Angela Nyabwa
• Examining Reflective Thinking: A Study of Changes in Methods Students’ Conceptions and Understandings of Inquiry Teaching, by Jing-Ru Wang and Sheau-Wen Lin
• Following Young Students’ Understanding of Three Phenomena in which Transformations of Matter Occur, by Lena Löfgren and Gustav Helldén
• Secondary School Students’ Construction and Use of Mathematical Models in Solving Word Problems, by Salvador Llinares and Ana Isabel Roig
• Cognitive Incoherence of Students Regarding the Establishment of Universality of Propositions through Experimentation/Measurement, by Mikio Miyazaki
• Differentials in Mathematics Achievement among Eighth-Grade Students in Malaysia, by Noor Azina Ismail and Halimah Awang
• THAI GRADE 10 AND 11 STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF STOICHIOMETRY AND RELATED CONCEPTS, by Chanyah Dahsah and Richard Kevin Coll
• The Inquiry Laboratory as a Source for Development of Metacognitive Skills, by Mira Kipnis and Avi Hofstein

Otherwise, For the learning of mathematics has released issue 2 of this year.

Ghislaine Gueudet and Luc Trouche have written an article about mathematics teachers’ documentation work. The article is called Towards new documentation systems for mathematics teachers? In my Master thesis, I wrote about genesis principles – in particular historical genesis (the use of history of mathematics in an indirect approach) – and Gueudet and Trouche introduce the concept of “documentational genesis” which I find interesting! The article was published online in Educational Studies in Mathematics a couple of days ago. Here is the abstract of their article:

We study in this article mathematics teachers’ documentation work: looking for resources, selecting/designing mathematical tasks, planning their succession, managing available artifacts, etc. We consider that this documentation work is at the core of teachers’ professional activity and professional development. We introduce a distinction between available resources and documents developed by teachers through a documentational genesis process, in a perspective inspired by the instrumental approach. Throughout their documentation work, teachers develop documentation systems, and the digitizing of resources entails evolutions of these systems. The approach we propose aims at seizing these evolutions, and more generally at studying teachers’ professional change.

Guershon Harel, Evan Fuller and Jeffrey M. Rabin have written an article that was published online in The Journal of Mathematical Behavior on Wednesday. The article is entitled Attention to meaning by algebra teachers. Here is the article abstract:

Non-attendance to meaning by students is a prevalent phenomenon in school mathematics. Our goal is to investigate features of instruction that might account for this phenomenon. Drawing on a case study of two high school algebra teachers, we cite episodes from the classroom to illustrate particular teaching actions that de-emphasize meaning. We categorize these actions as pertaining to (a) purpose of new concepts, (b) distinctions in mathematics, (c) mathematical terminology, and (d) mathematical symbols. The specificity of the actions that we identify allows us to suggest several conjectures as to the impact of the teaching practices observed on student learning: that students will develop the belief that mathematics involves executing standard procedures much more than meaning and reasoning, that students will come to see mathematical definitions and results as coincidental or arbitrary, and that students’ treatment of symbols will be largely non-referential.

Yeping Li and Rongjin Huang have written an article called Chinese elementary mathematics teachers’ knowledge in mathematics and pedagogy for teaching: the case of fraction division. The article was published online in ZDM on Wednesday. Here is the abstract of the article:

In this study, we investigated the extent of knowledge in mathematics and pedagogy that Chinese practicing elementary mathematics teachers have and what changes teaching experience may bring to their knowledge. With a sample of 18 mathematics teachers from two elementary schools, we focused on both practicing teachers’ beliefs and perceptions about their own knowledge in mathematics and pedagogy and the extent of their knowledge on the topic of fraction division. The results revealed a gap between these teachers’ limited knowledge about the curriculum they teach and their solid mathematics knowledge for teaching, as an example, fraction division. Moreover, senior teachers used more diverse strategies that are concrete in nature than junior teachers in providing procedural justifications. The results suggested that Chinese practicing teachers benefit from teaching and in-service professional development for the improvement of their mathematics knowledge for teaching but not their knowledge about mathematics
curriculum.

L.M. Doorman and K.P.E. Gravemeijer have written an article entitled Emergent modeling: discrete graphs to support the understanding of change and velocity. The article was recently published online in ZDM. This article was published as an Open Access article, so it should be freely available to all! Here is the article abstract:

In this paper we focus on an instructional sequence that aims at supporting students in their learning of the basic principles of rate of change and velocity. The conjectured process of teaching and learning is supposed to ensure that the mathematical and physical concepts will be rooted in students’ understanding of everyday-life situations. Students’ inventions are supported by carefully planned activities and tools that fit their reasoning. The central design heuristic of the instructional sequence is emergent modeling. We created an educational setting in three tenth grade classrooms to investigate students’ learning with this sequence. The design research is carried out in order to contribute to a local instruction theory on calculus. Classroom events and computer activities are video-taped, group work is audio-taped and student materials are collected. Qualitative analyses show that with the emergent modeling approach, the basic principles of calculus can be developed from students’ reasoning on motion, when they are supported by discrete graphs.

Norma Presmeg has written an article with the interesting perspective: Mathematics education research embracing arts and sciences. The article was published in ZDM on Wednesday.Here is the article abstract:

As a young field in its own right (unlike the ancient discipline of mathematics), mathematics education research has been eclectic in drawing upon the established knowledge bases and methodologies of other fields. Psychology served as an early model for a paradigm that valorized psychometric research, largely based in the theoretical frameworks of cognitive science. More recently, with the recognition of the need for sociocultural theories, because mathematics is generally learned in social groups, sociology and anthropology have contributed to methodologies that gradually moved away from psychometrics towards qualitative methods that sought a deeper understanding of issues involved. The emergent perspective struck a balance between research on individual learning (including learners’ beliefs and affect) and the dynamics of classroom mathematical practices. Now, as the field matures, the value of both quantitative
and qualitative methods is acknowledged, and these are frequently combined in research that uses mixed methods, sometimes taking the form of design experiments or multi-tiered teaching experiments. Creativity and rigor are required in all mathematics education research, thus it
is argued in this paper, using examples, that characteristics of both the arts and the sciences are implicated in this work.