A comparative synthesis of UK mathematics education research: what are we talking about and do we align with international discourse?

Abstract

A Comparative Synthesis of UK Mathematics Education Research: what are we talking about and do we align with international discourse?This paper makes an important and original contribution to the updating of methodological approaches to research syntheses. We analysed all 813 Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics from 2003 to 2018, first using a quantitative corpus-survey and qualitative thematic coding and, again, independently, using topic modelling. We found strong convergence between findings from the different methods. We compare our findings to those from an earlier Proceedings review (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002) and to a recent review of the corpus of publications in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education and Educational Studies in Mathematics, as well as to a review by the European Society for Research into Learning Mathematics and several other reviews. We found considerable similarity between the issues discussed, and similar trends over time. We conclude that the efficiency of topic modelling makes it a powerful option to include among a range of methodological approaches to research review.

The Promise of AI Object-Recognition in Learning Mathematics: An Explorative Study of 6-Year-Old Children’s Interactions with Cuisenaire Rods and the Blockplay.ai App

“…While Bruner was nuanced about how these three types of learning interacted, in English schools the practice is often to see them as sequential from Concrete to Abstract [21], in line with Piaget's stages of development. And the pedagogy of mastery approaches in England, for example the professional development materials for the White Rose mathematics resources used by almost 90% of English primaries [22,23] tends to support a gradual progression, from handling of physical concrete objects, to drawings of them, to drawings bounded by boxes, to empty boxes, to annotated rectangles as 'bar' models, i.e., lengths labeled with numbers-an incremental 'small steps' process that may take months or years to master [24,25].…”

Topics of interest to the MSOR community: evidence from the first 20 years of MSOR Connections

“…This means the 62 issues published prior to the current one span a 20 year period. Recently, we have been impressed by insights into mathematics education research papers using a method called topic modelling (Inglis and Foster, 2018;Marks et al, 2021), which attempts to determine key topics from a large corpus of documents. This 20th anniversary of MSOR Connections seems an ideal time to apply this method to the archive of articles published in this journal, in hopes of identifying for the benefit of the community the topics which are discussed in MSOR Connections and changes over time in their popularity.…”