While measures of research quality are widely accepted in the education research community, there may be less agreement on what constitutes evidence of impact and on where to look for it. The aims of this symposium are to consider some key issues in undertaking the Australian government's national assessment of research engagement and impact, and…

Calls for high levels of participation and success in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) by all Australians exacerbates the need for research into improving participation in mathematics by students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Rogoff's three planes of analysis is used to foreground the institutional plane in a low…

In Australia, all teachers are expected to explicitly attend to numeracy in the subjects they teach. Pre-service teachers, therefore, need to begin to develop effective numeracy teaching strategies but there is a limited research base to inform the design of courses that address this need. This paper reports on findings from a study investigating…

Prospective secondary mathematics teachers in Australia are typically taught by mathematics educators and mathematicians who work in different faculties and seldom collaborate--a situation that can lead to conflicting views about how to teach mathematics. This paper reports on findings from semi-structured interviews with three mathematics teacher…

Numeracy is the responsibility of all teachers in Australia. Graduates from Initial Teacher Education programs must demonstrate knowledge and understanding of numeracy teaching strategies. Currently, there is a limited research base to inform curriculum design of courses that develop strategies for embedding numeracy across the curriculum. This…

Students' post-school options are limited if they have not completed mathematics subjects involving the study of calculus. This paper employs a sociocultural approach to identify institutional practices that might promote sustained engagement with these subjects among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Drawing on interviews with mathematics…

Research interest in numeracy is growing as a result of increased understanding of the impact of low levels of numeracy. However, there has been little research on factors that influence how teachers implement learning from professional development interventions to support teachers to promote numeracy learning. This paper reports on how a…

Collaboration between mathematicians and mathematics educators may provide a means of improving the quality of pre-service teacher education for prospective teachers of mathematics. Some preliminary findings of a project that investigates this type of interdisciplinary collaboration, both within and across institutions, are reported on in this…

The context in which mathematics is used is an important aspect of numeracy. Therefore, students' numeracy capabilities need to be developed in subjects across the curriculum. The case study of a secondary school history teacher is presented to demonstrate how a framework for identity as an embedder-of-numeracy can be used to identify ways that…

If teachers are to adequately support development of their students' numeracy capabilities then they need to have an identity as a teacher of numeracy. A preliminary evaluation of a conceptual framework (Bennison & Goos, 2013) developed for use in a two-year study that seeks to understand this construct is presented. Initial findings about an…

Numeracy is a fundamental component of the Australian National Curriculum as a General Capability identified in each F-10 subject. In this paper, we consider the principles of design necessary for the development of numeracy tasks specific to subjects other than mathematics--in this case, the subject of English. We explore the nature of potential…

This paper reviews recent literature on teacher identity in order to propose an operational framework that can be used to investigate the formation and development of numeracy teacher identities. The proposed framework is based on Van Zoest and Bohl's (2005) framework for mathematics teacher identity with a focus on those characteristics thought…

Numeracy is a fundamental component of the Australian National Curriculum as a General Capability identified in each F-10 subject. In this paper we report on an aspect of a larger project aimed at investigating how effective cross-curricular numeracy practice can be implemented within the context of the Australian National Curriculum.…