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.

Konstantinos Tatsis, Sonia Kafoussi and Chrysanthi Skoumpourdi have written an article called Kindergarten Children Discussing the Fairness of Probabilistic Games: The Creation of a Primary Discursive Community. The article was recently published in Early Childhood Education Journal. Here is the abstract of the article:

In this paper we analyse the language used by kindergarten children and their teacher while they discuss the fairness of two games that involved the concept of chance. Their discussions show that the children are able to overcome their primary intuitions concerning the fairness of a game and to comprehend the important role of materials. The children mostly used counting strategies in order to justify their opinion; this reveals the establishment of a primary discursive community based on the premise that each opinion should be justified in order to be accepted by the other children and the teacher.

Pessia Tsamir and Dina Tirosh have written an article about Combining theories in research in mathematics teacher education. This article was published in ZDM two days ago. In this interesting article, they examine how the combination of the theories of Shulman and Fischbein “may contribute to the evaluation of mathematics teachers’ (prospective and inservice) knowledge”. Here is the article abstract:

In this paper, we describe how the combination of two theories, each embedded in a different realm, may contribute to evaluating teachers’ knowledge. One is Shulman’s theory, embedded in general, teacher education, and the other is Fischbein’s theory, addressing learners’ mathematical conceptions and misconceptions. We first briefly describe each of the two theories and our suggestions for combining them, formulating the Shulman–Fischbein framework. Then, we present two research segments that illustrate the potential of the implementation of the Shulman–Fischbein framework to the study of mathematics teachers’ ways of thinking. We conclude with general comments on possible contributions of combining theories that were developed in mathematics education and in other domains to mathematics teacher education.

Ngai-Ying Wong from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, has written an article with the interesting title: Confucian heritage culture learner’s phenomenon: from “exploring the middle zone” to “constructing a bridge”. The article was published online in ZDM on Tuesday. The article gives some interesting insight into aspects of the Chinese culture, and it did represent several new issues and aspects to me. Besides, it is the first scientific article that I have ever seen (within our field, at least) that includes martial-art pictures. In the article, Wong also draws upon variation theory (which derives from the work of Swedish scholar Ference Marton and colleagues). Here is the abstract of the article:

In the past decades, the CHC (Confucian heritage culture) learner’s phenomenon has spawned one of the most fruitful fields in educational research. Despite the impression that CHC learners are brought up in an environment not conducive to learning, their academic performances have been excelling their Western counterparts (Fan et al. in How Chinese learn mathematics: perspectives from insiders, 2004). Numerous explanations were offered to reveal the paradox (Morrison in Educ J, 2006), and there were challenges of whether there is “over-Confucianisation” in all these discussions (Chang in J Psychol Chin Soc, 2000; Wong and Wong in Asian Psychol, 2002). It has been suggested that the East and the West should come and discuss at the “middle zone” so that one can get the best from the two worlds. On the other hand, at the turn of the new millennium, discussions on mathematics curriculum reform proliferate in many places. One of the foci of the debate is the basic skills—higher-order thinking “dichotomy”. Viewing from the perspective of the process of mathematisation, teaching mathematics is more than striking a balance between the two, but to bridge basic skills to higher-order thinking competences. Such an attempt was explored in recent years and the ideas behind will be shared in this paper.

Daniel Chazan, Michael Yerushalmy and Roza Leikin have written an article that was published online in The Journal of Mathematical Behavior yesterday. The article is entitled An analytic conception of equation and teachers’ views of school algebra, and here is the abstract:

This interview study takes place in the context of a single small district in the United States. In the algebra curriculum of this district, there was a shift in the conception of equation, from a statement about unknown numbers to a question about the comparison of two functions over the domain of the real numbers. Using two of Shulman’s [Shulman, L. S. (1986). Paradigms and research programs in the study of teaching: A contemporary perspective. In Wittrock, M. C. (Ed.), Handbook of research in teaching (3rd ed., pp. 3–36). New York: Macmillan] categories of teachers’ knowledge – pedagogical content knowledge and curricular content knowledge – we explore whether in this context teachers’ content knowledge give signs of being reorganized. Our findings suggest that the teachers see this conception of equation as useful for equations in one variable. They struggle with its ramifications for equations in two variables. Nonetheless, this conception of equation leads them to reflect on the algebra curriculum in substantial ways; two of the three teachers explicitly spoke about their curricular ideas as being associated with this conception of an equation or with their earlier views. The third teacher seems so taken with these curricular ideas that he explored their ramifications throughout the interview. We argue that the consideration of this new conception of equation was an important resource that the teachers used to construct their understandings of alternative curricular approaches to school algebra. As they work with this new conception of an equation, we find an analogy to their situation in Kuhn’s description of the individual scientist in the process of adopting a new paradigm.