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!

If you would like to learn more about teaching mathematics, a good idea might be to participate in an e-workshop! NCTM are going to organize several such workshops in 2009. If you want to learn more you might want to check out their website.

Terence Tao is by many said to be the best mathematician in the world today, and for two days this week (today and tomorrow) he is visiting Trondheim, Norway. Unfortunately, I don’t have the opportunity to travel to Trondheim and listen to him, but it sure would have been interesting.

Tao – born in 1975 (like myself) – is professor of mathematics at UCLA, winner of the Fields medal and lots of other prizes. He is working within many different fields of mathematics, and he frequently reports his work on his web page and his blog. Below is a small video presenting Tao:

I have started the countdown to Christmas, and 2008 is approaching the end. Since the major journals in mathematics education are having a few slow days at the moment, I found it useful to start reflecting about the year that is soon behind us, and the one which lies ahead.

I started this blog in February this year, and in the welcome post on February 5, I wrote:

There are so many journals, so many conferences, so many web-sites that cover research in mathematics education. This blog will be my humble attempt to cover the most important ones. In the sidebar, you can find feeds from the most important scientific journals in mathematics education research. In this blog, I will comment on new and interesting (to me at least) articles in these and other journals. I will also try to follow some of the most important conferences in mathematics education, as well as sharing interesting bookmarks regarding mathematics education.

Now, ten months later, I think it’s appropriate to look back and see where I have come. The blog started out as a personal wish to get to know my own field of research better, and I personally feel that I have been extremely successful in this realm! I never advertised much for this blog, but when I started tracking the statistics with Google Analytics in late June, I realized that lots of people from all over the world actually read the blog!

Between July 1 and December 1, the blog had 5423 unique visitors, from 114 countries. I know this doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a niche blog like this, I think it is actually quite good. For me, it is also interesting to note that my own country – Norway – is only in the third spot when it comes to number of visitors.

Most of my time has been spent on covering articles from peer-reviewed journals in mathematics education, and I have also covered some conferences. This is something I intend to continue doing, but I have been thinking about different possible ways of doing this. First, I have thought about the possibility of writing more about some main articles in a way that people who are not researchers can relate to. I think it is important for researchers to communicate their results not only to fellow researchers. Unfortunately, but understandably, most teachers do not read our research journals! So, I have started thinking about writing some abstracts or impressions of research articles that teachers, parents and others who are interested but not researchers might relate to. I have also started thinking about making a stronger effort into providing an even better overview of the field (indexing journal articles, updating the conference calendar more, etc.). These are some of my own thoughts. But I am also interested in learning about your ideas! So, if you read this blog frequently, or if this is the first time you drop by … What do you think? What would be more useful to you? Please write comments to this post, or send me an e-mail to let me know!

I already know what an incredible learning experience this blog has been for me, but now I want to know how I can make it a better experience for you – the readers – as well!

University of Agder, Norway, arguably has one of the strongest research groups in mathematics education. They have a strong Master programme, a PhD programme, and five international professors in mathematics education. Now, they have announced a free position/appointment as research fellow for a period of three years. So, if you want to become a PhD student in Norway, this might be your lucky day 🙂

Some of the research areas within the field of mathematics education in Agder include:

• Developmental research in the teaching and learning of mathematics (from day-care centres to the university level)
• Mathematics classroom research
• Pupils’ and students’ understanding, attitudes and motivation for mathematics
• Problem solving and modelling in mathematics
• History of mathematics
• Mathematics teacher education and professional development

If you are interested, you can read the entire announcement from the link above, or you can contact Professor Simon Goodchild (simon.goodchild@uia.no).

Thursday and Friday last week, we had an interesting seminar at University of Stavanger with Seán Delaney from Marino Institute of Education, Ireland. The seminar had four themes, all within the topic of mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT):

1. Overview of research on teacher knowledge, with reference to pupil attainment
2. Studying the mathematical work of teaching in order to evaluate construct equivalence of the teacher knowledge measures in new settings
3. Using the mathematical quality of instruction to validate the multiple-choice measures of teacher knowledge
4. Issues related to translation and cultural adaptation of measures

Seán Delaney has been part of the Learning Mathematics for Teaching (LMT) Project at University of Michigan, and he finished his PhD earlier this year. His thesis was entitled Adapting and using U.S. measures to study Irish teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching, and he had Deborah Ball as his main supervisor. In the June issue of Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, an article about the pilot phase of Delaney’s study was published:

Delaney, S., Ball, D., Hill, H., Schilling, S., and Zopf, D. (2008). “Mathematical knowledge for teaching”: adapting U.S. measures for use in Ireland. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 1(3):171-197.

In August, the 4th version of the YERME Summer School (YESS-4) was organized in Turkey. I wrote about this event in several blogposts. (Click on all the marked words for links to the various articles!)

Today, I discovered in Carlos Torres’ blog that the keynote presentations are actually available online, on Slideshare! (Take a look at Cartoni21’s slideshows!) These were the main presentations:

1. Barbara Jaworski’s opening talk:

2. Guershon Harel’s presentation

3. The presentation of Jean-Baptiste Lagrange

4. Laurinda Brown’s talk

5. Günther Törner’s presentation

There is a movement at work across America that smothers research knowledge, gives misleading data to parents, and substantially undermines our ability to improve American children’s mathematical understanding.

And she claims that this movement has had a strong impact – even into the White House…

The Math-Blog presents a nice overview of some of the greatest female mathematicians ever. No doubt, most of the mathematicians we ever hear of are men, but there still are several female mathematicians that have made significant contributions to the field. Here is part of the introduction to this list of mini-biographies:

These women were often groundbreakers, highly determined and very dedicated. They are shining examples of the fact that mathematics is not a “boys only” club, even if at many points in time it’s appeared that way on the surface. Today their work is recognized and appreciated, and they stand as fantastic sources of inspiration for a new generation of students and math enthusiasts – both female and male.