WGA 8: Research, Practice and Theory of Mathematics Education

Abstract

This working group focused on connection between and among mathematics education research and mathematics, the foundation disciplines, and practice, The practice. The premise was that insularity from any or all of these critical domains is a threat to the quality and progress of the field. We organized our work to examine how productive fostered, we explored actual and possible connections between mathematics education and other disciplines. We investigated how mathematics education research interacts with mathematics as a disciplines, as well as with theory and practice of scholarship in other fields, with an eye on practice, we also explored new approaches to research that seek to bridge traditional divides among theory, basic research, and problems of teaching and learning. We set out to learn about productive interactions among disciplinary communities in the context of research in mathematics education. We asked: What are some of the barriers to such interactions? What special roles do mathematics and mathematicians and mathematics as a discipline have? and what roles might they have? in mathematics education research? We asked similar questions about the roles of other disciplines. We examined what is entailed in deriving questions about the roles of other disciplines. We examined what is entailed in deriving questions directly from issues of practice and in working closely with practitioners. We considered what is afforded and what pitfalls exist in designing theoretically-focused experiments in practice.