Jinfa Cai, Anne Morris, Charles Hohensee, Stephen Hwang, Victoria Robison, and James Hiebert
This editorial discusses how data on students’ thinking and classroom experiences could be leveraged within a system to improve instructional practice, exploring how the knowledge base could serve as a tool to (a) gather, process, and analyze data from individual students; (b) increase understanding of the effects of students’ mathematical learning experiences; and (c) help teacher–researcher partnerships understand and improve students’ learning.
NCTM Research Committee
The Research Committee focuses on several systemic barriers that have impeded the equitable development of students’ mathematics knowledge, including school and school-system structures that foster the social reproduction of inequity. To develop an equitable context for all students to learn mathematics, the Research Committee posits that we need to change beliefs about students, about particular groups of students, about how students learn, and about grouping students.
Anna F. DeJarnette
In support of efforts to foreground functions as central objects of study in algebra, this study provides evidence of how secondary students use trigonometric functions in contextual tasks. The author examined secondary students’ work on a problem involving modeling the periodic motion of a Ferris wheel through the use of a visual programming environment. This study illustrates the range of prior knowledge and resources that students may draw on in their use of trigonometric functions as well as how the goals of students’ work inform their reasoning about trigonometric functions.
Arnulfo Pérez
This theoretical article describes a framework to conceptualize computational thinking (CT) dispositions—tolerance for ambiguity, persistence, and collaboration—and facilitate integration of CT in mathematics learning. Discussion of the CT framework highlights the complementary relationship between CT and mathematical thinking, the relevance of mathematics to 21st-century professions, and the merit of CT to support learners in experiencing these connections.
Matthew Inglis and Colin Foster
Mathematics educators have been publishing their work in international research journals for nearly 5 decades. How has the field developed over this period? The authors analyzed the full text of all articles published in Educational Studies in Mathematics and the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education since their foundation. They 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.
Jeremy Kilpatrick
A book review of Compendium for Research in Mathematics Education, edited by Jinfa Cai.