Projects

It is well known that Education is one of the key elements of every society. A worldwide scale look at of the economic, social and financial health of the different countries clearly shows an intimate link between the expansion of the latter and the degree of expertise of its protagonists, which directly depends on the quality of the given training. Therefore, in a society more and more competitive, education plays a crucial role and looking for its improvement cannot be done without seeking the improvement of the quality of the educators. Researchers in Mathematics Education, with the aim of improving the teaching of this discipline, which still poses many problems, are interested in analysing the malfunctioning of the learning of Mathematics, by the means of designing and analysing tasks proposed to students on different school levels. More particularly in our project we are interested in investigating how students perceive one mathematical concept that underpins all mathematical domains: algebra and its symbols. In fact, the relation one has to symbolism not only plays a crucial role in learning process, but mastering symbolism is also unquestionably a sign of some mastery of mathematics. Studying the relations students have to symbolism is therefore of major importance in educational research. We chose the University of Melbourne and the Universite Paris 7, two internationally renowned institutions in the field of mathematics education to carry out the present project. Throughout this project, we intend to develop algebraic tasks for students in Australian elementary schools (including tasks designed in a computer environnement specially conceived for this purpose) and compare them to the French researches developed so far.

Sources: European Commission