How can school mathematics prepare citizens for a democratic society? Answers to this question are not static; they change as society and its problems change. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic with its corresponding disease COVID-19 presents such a problem: what is needed to navigate this complex situation that involves, among other things, mathematics?…

In 2020, the emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic brought a drastic and sudden change in teaching practices, from the physical space of the classrooms to the virtual space of an e-environment. In this paper, through a qualitative analysis of 44 collected essays composed by Italian mathematics teachers from primary school to undergraduate level…

We will present cultural transposition as a particular perspective to frame the use of foreign mathematics education practices as an opportunity for questioning the didactic practices of one's own cultural context. This requires a process activated by researchers, who deconstruct the cultural layers underpinning the foreign education practice…

Educators and several national standards highlight the role that problem solving should play in students' mathematics education: problem solving is recognized as one of the most significant activities of doing mathematics. From the research point of view, nowadays, it is well established that cognitive and affective factors come into play in…

Pupils' mistakes, if suitably analysed, may give useful suggestions for improving the teaching/learning process of mathematics. We present here the main issues of an investigation on a population of 732 Italian pupils (9--12 years old), addressed to determine the typology of errors in performing written subtraction. We compared our results with…

Investigates teachers' roles and conceptions by analyzing choices taken by mathematics teachers when faced with curriculum reform induced by introducing informatics, educational technology, in secondary school courses. (Author/MKR)

To investigate the origins and nature of intuitive obstacles affecting the learning of elementary probability theory, 618 Italian elementary and middle school students were interviewed about their methods of solution for several problems dealing with probability. The discussion focuses on four varieties of obstacles to learning prevalent within…

Acknowledging the complex relationships which the field of didactics of mathematics has with other research fields (e.g. mathematics, educational sciences, epistemology, history, psychology, semiotics, sociology, cognitive science), the authors analyze in this paper some cases of fruitful and some of failed dialogue between experts of the…