Five Decades of Mathematics Education Research

Abstract

Mathematics educators have been publishing their work in international research journals for nearly 5 decades. How has the field developed over this period? We analyzed the full text of all articles published in Educational Studies in Mathematics and the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education since their foundation. Using Lakatos's (1978) notion of a research programme, we focus on the field's changing theoretical orientations and pay particular attention to the relative prominence of the experimental psychology, constructivist, and sociocultural programmes. We quantitatively assess the extent of the “social turn,” observe that the field is currently experiencing a period of theoretical diversity, and identify and discuss the “experimental cliff,” a period during which experimental investigations migrated away from mathematics education journals.

Paradigm Wars Revisited: A Cartography of Graduate Research in the Field of Education (1980–2010)

“…groups of experts” (Lee & Martin, 2015, p. 21). The specific text analysis tool we will use is called topic modeling, a tool that Inglis and Foster’s (2018) map of math education rightly described as analogous to a quantitative version of grounded theory.…”

“…The analogy between topics and grounded theory is particularly insightful when we recognize that in topic models, “there are no preconceived ideas about the topics that will emerge” (Inglis & Foster, 2018, p. 470). Topics are the result of iterative learning steps: Our model learns the mixture of topics that make up each document and the words that belong to each topic via successive updates to two sets of prior multinomial distributions, one of documents over topics and one of topics over words.…”

“…There has been no empirical study of the education field as a whole. Nor has there been an effort to discern the field’s contours from the written products of the researchers themselves—with the notable exception of Inglis and Foster (2018), whose work is limited to math education. Therefore, as a field, we remain unsure as to which account best captures the field’s intellectual stances and changes.…”

Mathematics Teacher Professional Journals: What Topics Appear and How Has This Changed over Time?

“…Topic modelling has been used to analyse newspaper coverage of nuclear technology (Jacobi et al, 2016) and messages from social networks, such as Facebook (Hong & Davison, 2010). It has also been applied to journal articles in research fields (Paul & Girju, 2009); in mathematics education, we have used topic modelling to analyse the content of leading international research journals (Inglis & Foster, 2018).…”

A Mathematics Education Research Agenda in Latin America Motivated by Coronavirus Pandemic

“…Mathematics Education has oriented its efforts, mainly, to the study of factors affecting mathematics teaching and learning processes, attending to the plurality of contexts, demands, and social needs, as well as scientific progress. Thus, both the problems and research agendas (Behr et al, 1984;Howson, 1988;Long, Meltzer, & Hilton, 1970;Skovsmose, 2012;Wheeler et al, 1984;Wilson, 2020) that have been identified and addressed in the research in Mathematical Education have evolved depending on the educational reforms and changes in educational paradigms generated by such needs (Artigue, 1998;Inglis & Foster, 2018;NCTM Research Committee, 2015). Inglish and Foster (2018) identified 'turns of interest' in the recent history of Mathematics Education, in topics such as geometry, calculators, programming, computers, and others.…”