Historical Review of the Theses Approved in the Venezuelan Master’s Degree Programmes in Mathematics Education (1974-2016)

Abstract

Background: 1974 is the landmark of the launching of postgraduate studies in Venezuela and other Latin American countries. Objective: Answer the following question: (a) How can we detail the foundation of the PVMEMs and how have they evolved until now? Design: We carried out a multiple case study of a particular nature, developing it into three phases: (a) Pre-Active, considering previous studies related to the subject; (b) Interactive, corresponding to the fieldwork: identification of two active PVMEMs and semi-structured interviews with the people linked to the programmes above, who can provide information of interest to the study; this phase was closed with the organisation of the textual and oral corpora, fundamental for the study; and (c) Post-Active, when we proceed to: analyse and interpret the collected, reduced and organised information; organise the results obtained and provide the answers to the guiding questions of the research. Data collection and analysis: We saw that seven universities in Venezuela hold master's degree programmes in mathematics education. During the study period, 1,012 theses were approved, of which 973 (96.15%) were accepted; each thesis was coded to help locate it and, according to the interests of the study, the following aspects were considered: Author; Advisor; Qualification; Field, subjects, and objects; Paradigm/Methodical; Theories and Concepts. The oral corpus was submitted to narrative analysis, while a bibliometric analysis was conducted in the textual corpus. Results: (a) Regarding the details of the creation of postgraduate studies in mathematics education in Venezuela, we verified that on May 17, 1974, the PVMEM was created at the Caracas Pedagogical Institute, being also the first of the kind in Latin America; (b) Regarding the evolution of the Venezuelan master's degree programmes in mathematics education in Venezuela, we verified that 20 years passed between the