Abstract
Before the pandemic (2019), we asked: On what themes should research in mathematics education focus in the coming decade? The 229 responses from 44 countries led to eight themes plus considerations about mathematics education research itself. The themes can be summarized as teaching approaches, goals, relations to practices outside mathematics education, teacher professional development, technology, affect, equity, and assessment. During the pandemic (November 2020), we asked respondents: Has the pandemic changed your view on the themes of mathematics education research for the coming decade? If so, how? Many of the 108 respondents saw the importance of their original themes reinforced (45), specified their initial responses (43), and/or added themes (35) (these categories were not mutually exclusive). Overall, they seemed to agree that the pandemic functions as a magnifying glass on issues that were already known, and several respondents pointed to the need to think ahead on how to organize education when it does not need to be online anymore. We end with a list of research challenges that are informed by the themes and respondents’ reflections on mathematics education research.
Highlights
Before the pandemic (2019), we asked: On what themes should research in mathematics education focus in the coming decade? The 229 responses from 44 countries led to eight themes plus considerations about mathematics education research itself
Bakker and Jinfa Cai saw a need to raise the following future-oriented question for the field of mathematics education research: Q2019: On what themes should research in mathematics education focus in the coming decade?
When we were almost ready with the analysis, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and we were not able to present the results at the conferences we had planned to attend (NCTM and ICME in 2020)
Summary
Around the time when Educational Studies in Mathematics (ESM) and the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (JRME) were celebrating their 50th anniversaries, Arthur. On November 26, 2020, we asked a follow-up question to those respondents who in 2019 had given us permission to approach them for elaboration by email: Q2020: Has the pandemic changed your view on the themes of mathematics education research for the coming decade? Our overview of themes drawn from the survey responses is intended to summarize what is valued in our global community at the time of the surveys. Reasoning from these themes, we end with a list of research challenges that we see worth addressing in the future (cf Stephan et al, 2015)
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