Surveys teams are commissioned by the IPC to examine new developments and progress on specific themes and issues that have arisen in mathematics education during recent ICMEs.
Survey teams review identifying and characterising important new knowledge, recent developments, new perspectives, and emergent issues, and each team will report their findings and recommendations at the Congress.
ICME-15 Survey Report topics
The IPC has commissioned teams to survey developments and progress on the following five key themes:
Survey 1: Challenges and perspectives of mathematics assessment
Educational assessment is a broad and complex task that encompasses the global educational process from the formative and summative assessment of learning to the functioning of the system itself. This study will address the teaching-learning-assessment cycle that teachers handle in their practice of teaching mathematics.
One of the challenges teachers faced during the COVID-19 pandemic was precisely how to assess content learning and the achievement of mathematical skills and competencies in remote education. The situation experienced revealed critical knots in the assessing practice not only in the sense to ensure the validity and reliability of the results, but also in relation to the formative dimension of the evaluation, the relevance of matching the ways of teaching with those of assessing, and the evaluation of capacities that are put into play in complex mathematical tasks such as problem solving and modelling. Considering that remote and hybrid education are here to stay, this survey will address the challenges, perspectives, and the latest trends and developments in the field of assessment in mathematics in these modalities.
IPC Liaison: Olive Chapman
Leader: Prof. Kaye Stacey, University of Melbourne (Australia)
Member: Prof. Yuriko Yamamoto Baldin, Universidade Federal de São Carlos (Brazil)
Member: Prof. Kim Koh, University of Calgary (Canada)
Member: Prof. Ruhama Even, The Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel)
Member: Mr Ross Turner, The Australian Council for Educational Research (Australia)
Survey 2: Mathematics education and Indigenous perspectives
Indigenous people represent about 5% of the world population, living in more than 90 countries across the globe. In most countries they are minority ethnic groups that face threats to their native languages, culture and ways of knowing, economic livelihood, and preservation of their natural environment. Mathematics education, as a cultural and contextualised matter, should promote a close relationship between indigenous learners and their cultural heritage and worldview, which would promote a respectful, equitable, and valued integration into society whilst understanding Indigenous approaches to mathematics, and how that knowledge is used in daily lives and in decision making.
This survey will address issues related to emerging theoretical and methodological perspectives in mathematics education in Indigenous contexts, their challenges and opportunities, as well as the kind of understanding and learnings that are expected from the Indigenous worldviews of mathematising, and the challenges and opportunities that arise for mathematics teachers, educators, and education researchers when working in Indigenous contexts.
IPC Liaison: Chris Matthews
Leader: Prof. Florence Glanfield, University of Alberta (Canada)
Member: Dr. Maria del Carmen Bonilla, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Peru)
Member: Prorector Ylva Jannok Nutti, Sami University of Applied Sciences (Norway)
Member: Dr. Domingo Yojcom, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (Guatemala)
Daniel Orey, Federal University of Ouro Preto (Brazil)
Survey 3: Statistics and data science education as a vehicle for empowering citizens
Data are increasingly pervasive in our daily lives. School statistics has not kept up with the ways that citizens engage with data such as navigating Twitter feeds, using AI for identifying photos, and streaming GPS data to live feed into Google maps to estimate travel times. Data science has created breakthroughs to make more data more accessible, including data that doesn’t fit standard formats.
Data science education has enabled school students to draw from massive public depositories where data are repurposed and wrangled with other data and machine language algorithms in new, creative ways. Privacy, ethics, and awareness of the non-objective nature of data such as underlying gender/racial bias in how and whose data are used to train algorithms are at the forefront of data science education.
This survey will examine work underway to prepare and arm citizens with data-based evidence to influence and improve citizen power. The outcome can influence national curricula as countries become aware of how far the school curriculum must progress to keep up with data usage in the world.
IPC Liaison: Katie Makar
Leader: Prof. Rolf Biehler, Universitat Paderborn (Germany)
Member: Prof. Takashi Kawakami, Utsunomiya University (Japan)
Member: Dr. Erna Lampen, Stellenbosch University (South Africa)
Member: Dr. Lucia Zapata-Cardona, Universidad De Antioquia (Columbia)
Member: A/Prof Travis Weiland, University of Houston (United States)
Survey 4: Interdisciplinary exchange among Mathematics Education, Psychology, and Neuroscience
Research in Mathematics Education has increasingly incorporated perspectives from other disciplines, and entire research fields like Numerical Cognition, have emerged from the interaction between Mathematics Education, Psychology, and Neuroscience. Mathematics Education has borrowed concepts from these disciplines such as mindset, working memory, and cognitive inhibition, as well as research methods such as response time paradigms, eye tracking, and neuroimaging.
This Survey aims at mapping these interactions and looking at them from a critical perspective, asking how effective has this interdisciplinary exchange become, how has it supported the advance of Mathematics Education research and theories, what extent have the results of this research been integrated into Mathematics Education, what impact these interactions and findings have had on mathematics teaching and learning in the classroom, and what challenges need to be addressed by these fields in order to foster more effective work in the future.
IPC Liaison: David Gomez
Leader: Prof. Roza Leikin, University of Haifa (Israel)
Member: Prof. Daniel Ansari, Department of Psychology & Faculty of Education, Western University (Canada)
Member: Andreas Obersteiner, Technische Universität München (Germany)
Member: Dor Abrahamson, University of California (United States)
Member: Hui-Yu Hsu, National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan)
