We estimate the influence of classmates' ability characteristics on student achievement in exogenously formed university student groups. The study uses administrative data on undergraduate students at a large selective university in Russia. The presence of high-ability classmates has a significant positive effect on individual grades in key…

The article deals with the way in which authority was established and interpreted by teachers and students in two Flemish sixth-grade mathematics classrooms. Problem-solving lessons during a seven-month observation period were analysed regarding three aspects of teacher-student interactions that explicitly or implicitly reflect who bears…

We explored teachers' views and students' experiences of going beyond the syllabus in Advanced (A) level Mathematics. Questionnaires were sent to teachers and students in a sample of 200 schools and colleges. Teachers were asked about the necessity, importance and benefits of additional teaching. Students were asked about the extra activities they…

Making inferences about population differences based on samples of data, that is, performing intuitive analysis of variance (IANOVA), is common in everyday life. However, the intuitive reasoning of individuals when making such inferences (even following statistics instruction), often differs from the normative logic of formal statistics. The…

There is ample evidence that reasoning about stochastic phenomena is often subject to systematic bias even after instruction. Few studies have examined the detailed learning processes involved in learning probability. This paper examines a case study drawn from a large corpus of data collected as part of a research project that dealt with the…

Semiotic representations have been an important topic of study in mathematics education. Previous research implicitly placed more importance on the development of institutional representations of mathematical concepts in students rather than other types of representations. In the context of an extensive research project, in progress since 2005,…

We introduce "virtual duoethnography" as a novel research approach in mathematics education, in which researchers produce a text of a dialogic format in the voices of fictional characters, who present and contrast different perspectives on the nature of a particular mathematical phenomenon. We use fiction as a form of research linked to…

A challenge in mathematics education research is to coordinate different analyses to develop a more comprehensive account of teaching and learning. We contribute to these efforts by expanding the constructs in Cobb and Yackel's (Educational Psychologist 31:175-190, 1996) interpretive framework that allow for coordinating social and individual…

This article describes a model for incorporating lesson study into the student teaching placement and reports on the success of the implementation of such a model with student teachers and their cooperating teachers (CTs). Student teachers had the opportunity to discuss many important ideas with each other and their CTs, including "big ideas" of…

The practices of mathematics education can be investigated at a wide variety of levels: from the actions of individual students or teachers through classroom interactions, school structures, curriculum specifications and materials, teacher development programmes and local, national or international systems of instruction and assessment. These…

Within mathematics education research, the responses to the Programme for International Student Assessment's (PISA's) international testing regime tend to accept its framework and results as necessary points of reference, even when offering a critical reinterpretation or challenging national policy discourses based on PISA. In this…

What is the place of social theory in mathematics education research, and what is it for? This special issue of "Educational Studies in Mathematics" offers insights on what could be the role of some sociological theories in a field that has historically privileged learning theories coming from psychology and mathematics as the main…

Changes in school mathematics curricula, pedagogy and assessment, and as a consequence the pressure for changes in initial teacher preparation, are consequences both of government policy initiatives and pressure from unofficial agents such as the research community, teachers and others, though with great variation across the world. In the case of…

In this paper, we explore a sociological approach to mathematics education and offer a theoretical lens through which we can come to understand mathematics education as part of a wider set of social practices. Many studies of children's experiences in school show that a child's academic success is a product of many factors, some of which…

Mathematics continues to be an enabling discipline for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-based university studies and related careers. Explanatory models for females' underrepresentation in higher level mathematics and STEM-based courses comprise learner-related and environmental variables--including societal beliefs.…