Malta Review of Educational Research : volume 12 : issue 1

Abstract

Broadly speaking, mathematics education aims “to study the factors affecting the teaching and learning of mathematics and to develop programmes to improve the teaching of mathematics” (Godino, Batanero, & Font, 2007, p. 127). As a relatively recent scientific discipline, mathematics education lacks a consolidated and dominant research paradigm. As a result, as Sriraman and English (2010) note, there have been frequent shifts in the dominant paradigm. They point out the progressive shifts from behaviourism, through to stage and level theories, to various forms of constructivism, to situated and distributed cognitions, and more recently, to complexity theories and neuroscience. Sriraman and English explain that for the first couple of decades of its life, mathematics education as a discipline drew heavily on theories and methodologies from psychology. However, by the end of the 1980s, as researchers began to focus on the social dimension of learning, theories that view mathematics as a social product began to be used, and thus, socio-cultural theories became more dominant. Sriraman and English argue that one plausible explanation for these shifts is the diverging epistemological perspectives about what constitutes mathematical knowledge; another possible explanation proposed by Sriraman and English is that mathematics education is heavily influenced by unpredictable cultural and political forces.