The transition from school to university in mathematics education research: new trends and ideas from a systematic literature review

Abstract

Investigating the transition between educational levels is one of the main themes for the future of mathematics education. In particular, the transition from secondary school to STEM degrees is problematic for the widespread students’ difficulties and significant for the implications that it has on students’ futures. Knowing and understanding the past is key to imagine the future of a research field. For this reason, this paper reports a systematic review of the literature on the secondary-tertiary transition in Mathematics Education from 2008 to 2021. We constructed two corpuses: one from the proceedings of three international conferences in mathematics education (PME, ICME, and INDRUM) and the other from peer reviewed research papers and book chapters returned by the databases ERIC and Google Scholar. A clear evolution in perspectives since 2008 emerges from the analysis of the two corpuses: the research focus changed from a purely cognitive to a more holistic one, including socio-cultural and — to a lesser extent — affective issues. To this end, a variety of research methods were used, and specific theoretical models were developed in the considered papers. The analysis also highlights a worrisome trend of underrepresentation: very little research comes from large geographical areas such as South America or Africa. We argue that this gap in representation is problematic as research on secondary tertiary transition concerns also consideration of socio-cultural and contextual factors.

Transition from school into university mathematics: experiences across educational contexts

“…to the cumulative nature of mathematics education (Schoenfeld, 2000), the first step for the development of this Special Issue was to carry out a systematic review of the literature (Di Martino et al, 2022a). From this work, two further motivations came to our consideration.…”

“…The Special Issue opens with a systematic review of the literature (Di Martino et al, 2022a) covering the years 2008 (the year of the foundational review of the literature by Gueudet, published in Educational Studies in Mathematics) to 2021. The first outcome of this review is an issue of underrepresentation: we know little about research coming from certain geographical areas such as Africa, South America or Asia.…”

“…From the systematic review of the literature (Di Martino et al, 2022a), it appears that there is the need for more research from educational contexts such as East-Asia, and this Special Issue contains two papers that address this gap. The first, by Liang et al (2022), adopts the construct of figured worlds (Holland et al, 1998) to investigate the effects of the double discontinuity (Klein, 1939) that pre-service mathematics teachers experience during their training in Hong Kong.…”