Articles and Books on Mathematics Education

The winter 2009-2010 issue of "American Educator", has a number of interesting articles. Here are two of interest for people interested in mathematics education.

Daniel Willingham "Is It True That Some People Just Can't Do Math"

Patsy Wang-Iverson, Perla Myers, and Edmund Lim W.K. "Beyond Singapore's Mathematics Textbooks - Focused and Flexible Supports for Teaching and
Learning"

The first has a number of useful references as well as comments. Here is one. There have been many papers written in Madison on student's lack of understanding of the equal sign. I once asked Liping Ma if this was a problem in China. She said that as far as she knew it was not. There is confirmation of this in one of the references.

Four questions asked of sixth grade students in the U.S. and China.

The paper which includes this is "Sources of Differences in Children's Understanding of Mathematical Equality: Comparative Analysis of Teacher Guides and Student Texts in China and the United States", by Xiaobao Li, Meixia Ding, Mary Margaret Capraro, Robert M. Capraro. It appeared in Cognition and Instruction, vol. 26, no. 2, pages 195-217, in 2008.

The second article in American Educator has comments on curriculum, teacher induction and education and support while teaching. There is also a one page supplemental article on teacher professional development and evaluation by Susan Sclafani and Edmund Lim W.K.

In addition there have been two very interesting books on school mathematics education written by mathematicians. The first is "Arithmetic for Parents: A Book for Grownups about Children's Mathematics" by Ron Aharoni, Sumizdat, 2007. An article by Aharoni about his experience teaching mathematics in an elementary school in Israel can be read here. This is a good introduction to his book, and more useful details are in the
book.

The second is "And All the Children Are Above Average: A Review of The End of Ignorance: Multiplying Our Human Potential" by John Mighton, a Canadian mathematician and playwright. The paperback version of this book was published by Vintage Canada. You can read about Mighton here. and there is also information about his math program JUMP here. This program was developed after Mighton learned a number of things while tutoring students who had significant problems in learning elementary mathematics. A review of this book by David Kirshner appeared in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education in the January, 2010 issue.

Posted by Richard Askey at January 11, 2010 6:44 AM
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