Elementary school teachers’ growth in inquiry-based teaching of mathematics

This article reports on a self-directed, school-based, practice-based professional development (PD) experience aimed at helping elementary school teachers to develop knowledge and expertise in inquiry-based teaching of mathematics. It discusses the characteristics of the self-directed orientation of this PD that supported the teachers’ learning, the nature of the inquiry-based knowledge they constructed, and the impact on their teaching. It highlights the centrality of agency, practical knowledge, and situated learning in this PD approach. The findings suggest that this approach can help mathematics teachers who want to be the architect of their own learning to transform their classrooms in meaningful and desirable ways.     

Post-primary students’ images of mathematics: findings from a survey of Irish ordinary level mathematics students

A questionnaire survey was carried out as part of a PhD research study to investigate the image of mathematics held by post-primary students in Ireland. The study focused on students in fifth year of post-primary education studying ordinary level mathematics for the Irish Leaving Certificate examination – the final examination for students in second-level or post-primary education. At the time this study was conducted, ordinary level mathematics students constituted approximately 72% of Leaving Certificate students. Students were aged between 15 and 18 years. A definition for ‘image of mathematics’ was adapted from Lim and Wilson, with image of mathematics hypothesized as comprising attitudes, beliefs, self-concept, motivation, emotions and past experiences of mathematics. A questionnaire was composed incorporating 84 fixed-response items chosen from eight pre-established scales by Aiken, Fennema and Sherman, Gourgey and Schoenfeld. This paper focuses on the findings from the questionnaire survey. Students’ images of mathematics are compared with regard to gender, type of post-primary school attended and prior mathematical achievement.     

Characterizing exemplary mathematics instruction in Japanese classrooms from the learner’s perspective

This paper aims to examine key characteristics of exemplary mathematics instruction in Japanese classrooms. The selected findings of large-scale international studies of classroom practices in mathematics are reviewed for discussing the uniqueness of how Japanese teachers structure and deliver their lessons and what Japanese teachers value in their instruction from a teacher’s perspective. Then an analysis of post-lesson video-stimulated interviews with 60 students in three “well-taught” eighth-grade mathematics classrooms in Tokyo is reported to explore the learners’ views on what constitutes a “good” mathematics lesson. The co-constructed nature of quality mathematics instruction that focus on the role of students’ thinking in the classroom is discussed by recasting the characteristics of how lessons are structured and delivered and what experienced teachers tend to value in their instruction from the learner’s perspective. Valuing students’ thinking as necessary elements to be incorporated into the development of a lesson is the key to the approach taken by Japanese teachers to develop and maintain quality mathematics instruction.     

Borch’s Theorem from the perspective of comonotonicity

This short note revisits the classical Theorem of Borch on the characterization of Pareto optimal risk exchange treaties under the expected utility paradigm. Our objective is to approach the optimal risk exchange problem by a new method, which is based on a Breeden–Litzenberger type integral representation formula for increasing convex functions and the theory of comonotonicity. Our method allows us to derive Borch’s characterization without using Kuhn–Tucker theory, and also without the need of assuming that all utility functions are continuously differentiable everywhere. We demonstrate that our approach can be used effectively to solve the Pareto optimal risk-sharing problem with a positivity constraint being imposed on the admissible allocations when the aggregate risk is positive.     

Characteristics of good mathematics teaching in Singapore grade 8 classrooms: a juxtaposition of teachers’ practice and students’ perception

This paper examines the instructional approaches of three competent grade 8 mathematics teachers. It also examines their students’ perception of the lessons they taught as well as characteristics of good lessons. The findings of teachers’ practice and students’ perception are juxtaposed to elicit characteristics of good teaching in Singapore grade 8 classrooms. With limitation, the findings of the paper suggests that good mathematics teaching in Singapore schools centres around building understanding and is teacher-centred but student focused. Some characteristic features of good lessons are that their instructional cycles have specific instructional objectives such that subsequent cycles incrementally build on the knowledge. The examples used in such lessons are carefully selected and vary in complexity from low to high. Teachers actively monitor their student’s understanding during seatwork, by moving from desk to desk guiding those with difficulties and selecting appropriate student work for subsequent whole-class review and discussion. Finally, during such lessons teachers reinforce their students’ understanding of knowledge expounded during whole-class demonstration by detailed review of student work done in class or as homework.     

Student teachers’ types of probing questions in inquiry-based mathematics teaching with and without GeoGebra

Previous studies have produced several typologies of teacher questions in mathematics. Probing questions that ask students to explain are often included in the types of questions. However, only rare studies have created subtypes for probing questions or investigated how questioning differs depending on whether technology is used or not. The aims of this study are to elaborate on different ways of asking students to give explanations in inquiry-based mathematics teaching and to investigate whether questioning in GeoGebra lessons differs from questioning in other lessons. Data was collected by video recording 29 Finnish mathematics student teachers’ lessons in secondary and upper secondary schools. The lesson videos were coded for the student teachers’ probing questions. After this, categories for the types of probing questions were created, which is elaborated in this paper. It was found that the student teachers who used GeoGebra emphasized conceptual probing questions during the explore phase of a lesson slightly more than the other student teachers.     

A revised theorization of the relationship between teachers’ conceptions of mathematics and its teaching

We assembled the ideas about mathematics and about its teaching which were expressed by mathematicians and mathematics educators into two pairs of ‘official’ (collective) conceptions: mathematics is either static or dynamic, and mathematics teaching is either closed or open. These polar conceptions produce a 4-pair relationship between the conceptions of mathematics and its teaching. The adherence to official conceptions was tapped by a questionnaire encompassing 176 Israeli high school mathematics teachers, aimed at examining the relationship between their conceptions of mathematics and its teaching. The majority of these teachers either hold a single conception in one of the domains or do not adhere to any conception, and a quarter of them hold either the static-closed or dynamic-open pairs of conceptions that prevail among teachers in other countries. Consequently, we define a conception of an entity as a comprehensive and homogenous set of ideas about a particular characteristic or feature of that entity. Reality is that teachers practice their profession without adhering to any official conception, and perhaps are (/to be?/) praised for their reluctance to blindly adopt the clear-cut rigid official conceptions of mathematics and its teaching while maintaining their individual and independent blends of ideas.     

Parallel implementation of Newton’s method for solving large-scale linear programs

Parallel versions of a method based on reducing a linear program (LP) to an unconstrained maximization of a concave differentiable piecewise quadratic function are proposed. The maximization problem is solved using the generalized Newton method. The parallel method is implemented in C using the MPI library for interprocessor data exchange. Computations were performed on the parallel cluster MVC-6000IM. Large-scale LPs with several millions of variables and several hundreds of thousands of constraints were solved. Results of uniprocessor and multiprocessor computations are presented.     

Instructors’ use of technology in post-secondary undergraduate mathematics teaching: a local study

In this study, instructors of undergraduate mathematics from post-secondary institutions in Newfoundland were surveyed (N = 13) and interviewed (N = 8) about their use of, experiences with, and views on, technologically assisted teaching. It was found that the majority of them regularly use technologies for organizational and communication purposes. However, the use of math-specific technology such as computer algebra systems, or dynamic geometry software for instructional, exploratory, and creative activities with students takes place mostly on an individual basis, only occasionally, and is very much topic specific. This was even the case for those instructors who use technology proficiently in their research. The data also suggested that familiarity with and discussions of examples of technology implementation in teaching at regular and field-oriented professional development seminars within mathematics departments could potentially increase the use of math-specific technology by instructors.     

On a sheaf-theoretic version of the Witt’s decomposition theorem. A Lagrangian perspective

The approach to a counterpart, in Abstract Geometric Algebra, that is, Geometric Algebra via sheaves of modules, of the classical Witt’s decomposition theoremis based on the axiomatization of the classical context, which however leads to the formulation of a specific subcategory of the category of sheaves of modules: the full subcategory of convenient sheaves of modules. Convenient sheaves of modules turn out, by the very essence of the matter at hand, to be of further importance as far as the setting of results leading to the sheaf-theoretic aspect of several forms of the Witt’s theorem is concerned. Further versions of the Witt’s theorem are still to be treated elsewhere.      

Chinese elementary mathematics teachers’ knowledge in mathematics and pedagogy for teaching: the case of fraction division

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.     

A historical teaching module on ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’: Boolean algebra and Shannon circuits

This article describes the design and implementation of a historical teaching module, where Danish upper secondary students studied primary source material from the mathematicians R W Hamming, G Boole and C E Shannon. The module is an example of a so-called HAPh-module, which focuses on elements of the history, application and philosophy of mathematics. A previous version was presented at the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics (HPM) meeting in Deajeon, Korea in 2012.     

The functions of function discourse – university mathematics teaching from a commognitive standpoint

This paper addresses a topic within university mathematics education which has been somewhat underexplored: the teaching practices actually used by university mathematics teachers when giving lectures. The study investigates the teaching practices of seven Swedish university teachers on the topic of functions using a discursive approach, the commognitive framework of Sfard. In the paper a categorization of the construction and substantiation routines used by the teachers is presented, for instance various routines for constructing definitions and examples, and for verifying whether an example satisfies a given definition. The findings show that although the overall form of the lectures is similar, with teachers using ‘chalk talk’, and overt student participation limited to asking and answering questions, there are in fact significant differences in the way the teachers present and do mathematics in their lectures. These differences present themselves both on the level of discursive routines and on a more general level in how the process of doing mathematics is made visible in the teachers’ teaching practices. Moreover, I believe that many of the results of the study could be relevant for investigating the teaching of other mathematical topics.     

A matrix-free implementation of Riemannian Newton’s method on the Stiefel manifold

Newton’s method for unconstrained optimization problems on the Euclidean space can be generalized to that on Riemannian manifolds. The truncated singular value problem is one particular problem defined on the product of two Stiefel manifolds, and an algorithm of the Riemannian Newton’s method for this problem has been designed. However, this algorithm is not easy to implement in its original form because the Newton equation is expressed by a system of matrix equations which is difficult to solve directly. In the present paper, we propose an effective implementation of the Newton algorithm. A matrix-free Krylov subspace method is used to solve a symmetric linear system into which the Newton equation is rewritten. The presented approach can be used on other problems as well. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for the above optimization problem.     

Coping with the Renewable Portfolio Standards: A utility’s perspective

Renewable Portfolio Standards require utilities to supply a percentage of their energy from renewables. Utilities demonstrate their compliance by purchasing renewable energy or renewable energy certificates. Certificates can be traded in a secondary market. This flexibility is intended to foster an efficient environment. Utilities, however, have not been reacting strategically. We formulate the utility’s problem as a stochastic dynamic program and present optimal policies for the utility to trade in the REC market and to purchase from the energy market.     

A historical perspective of Tian’s evolution algebras

Even if it has been less than a decade and a half since Tian introduced his concept of evolution algebras to represent algebraically non-Mendelian rules in Genetics, their study is becoming increasingly widespread mainly due to their applications to many scientific disciplines. In order to facilitate further research on the topic, this paper deals with the past and present research on these kind of algebras, together with the most relevant topics regarding them.     

Values in preservice mathematics teachers’ discussions of the Body Mass Index - A critical perspective

This article explores the values that come to the fore when preservice mathematics teachers (PTs) ¹ engage in critical discussions about the role of mathematical models in society. The specific model that was discussed was the Body Mass Index (BMI) ². From the analysis of the PTs’ discussions of the BMI from a mathematical and societal point of view several mathematical and mathematics educational values were identified such as openness, rationalism, progress, reasoning, evaluating, and problematizing the instrumental understanding of mathematics. In addition, critical thinking about mathematics in society as emphasized in curricula in the three countries involved in the study, was identified with four categories of complementary pairs. Knowing the mathematical and mathematics educational values underpinning PTs’ discussions and their connection to critical thinking is important for successfully engaging with the role of mathematics in society.