From technological innovation in individual classrooms to large-scale transformation of teaching practices - Mind the gap!

The ICTMT conference proceedings chart the development of technology use in mathematics education from the 1990s to the current day. Throughout this period, the prevailing topics for plenaries, papers and workshops have been focused on the development of innovative classroom practices involving ‘new’ technologies. Alongside this, there has been a slow but emergent theme that has brought aspects of teachers’ professional development to the fore - as attempts to scale the widespread use of technology by students have proved both challenging and expensive. In this plenary, I will draw on some personal contributions to ICTMT conferences from the past in order to highlight how my own work now focuses on the design and evaluation of technology-focused professional development for teachers of mathematics. This work is set against the backdrop of the Cornerstone Maths project in England, which is aiming to scale student access to dynamic mathematical technology in lower secondary mathematics in hundreds of schools

Dynamic digital technologies for dynamic mathematics: Implications for teachers' knowledge and practice

This report summarises the outcomes of the Nuffi eld Foundation funded 2014–17 project ‘Developing teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching and classroom use of technology through engagement with key mathematical concepts using dynamic digital technology’. The Nuffi eld Foundation is an endowed charitable trust that aims to improve social well-being in the widest sense. It funds research and innovation in education and social policy and also works to build capacity in education, science and social science research

Connecting mathematics in a connected classroom: Teachers emergent practices within a collaborative learning environment

During 2008-9 seven secondary mathematics teachers from England, Scotland, Netherlands and Sweden began to use a wireless classroom network to link their students’ handheld ICT devices. This paper focuses on the teachers’ reported uses of the Screen Capture feature, which were coded to reveal patterns in the emerging classroom practices. Analysis of the data revealed: increased opportunities for purposeful classroom discourse; improved formative assessment practices; and highlighted the need for teachers to choose rich examples on which to build the mathematical tasks

Multi-mass solvers for lattice QCD on GPUs

Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are more and more frequently used for lattice QCD calculations. Lattice studies often require computing the quark propagators for several masses. These systems can be solved using multi-shift inverters but these algorithms are memory intensive which limits the size of the problem that can be solved using GPUs. In this paper, we show how to efficiently use a memory-lean single-mass inverter to solve multi-mass problems. We focus on the BiCGstab algorithm for Wilson fermions and show that the single-mass inverter not only requires less memory but also outperforms the multi-shift variant by a factor of two.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures, 3 Table

Bringing the outside world into the mathematics classroom - New approaches to the use of video in the classroom

Many countries are exploring different approaches to create a more relevant mathematics curriculum through the use of real world examples in the classroom. In this paper we will share some of the classroom video resources that have been developed since the last ICTMT: the series World of Maths (Teachers TV 2008) and i-Maths (British Broadcasting Corporation 2008). This also complements the UK’s “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) agenda (Her Majesty's Treasury 2004) which aims to promote STEM subjects to the populus and increase student uptake in STEM related careers and courses

Hiccups within technology mediated lessons: a catalyst for mathematics teachers’ epistemological development

© 2015 British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics. The notion of the lesson ‘hiccup’, defined as the perturbation experienced by a teacher during teaching that has been triggered by the use of mathematical technology, was first proposed in Clark-Wilson. Hiccups which are both unanticipated and unplanned, emerged from a study that sought to make sense of the process of secondary mathematics teachers’ situated learning as they began to use a particular new technological tool (TI-Nspire™ handheld devices and software) in their classrooms. The high frequency of the resulting hiccups enabled a categorisation of seven hiccup types that were shown to have influenced the development of teachers’ mathematical, pedagogic and technological knowledge. This article first reports and then extends this earlier work by articulating the design principles for a professional development approach within the Cornerstone Maths (CM) project that uses hiccups to try to address professional development ‘at scale’ concerning student use of dynamic digital technologies in mathematics classrooms

Linking routinely collected social work, education and health data to enable monitoring of the health and health care of school-aged children in state care (‘looked after children’) in Scotland: a national demonstration project

Background and objectives: Children in state care (‘looked after children’) have poorer health than children who are not looked after. Recent developments in Scotland and elsewhere have aimed to improve services and outcomes for looked after children. Routine monitoring of the health outcomes of looked after children compared to those of their non-looked after peers is currently lacking. Developing capacity for comparative monitoring of population based outcomes based on linkage of routinely collected administrative data has been identified as a priority. To our knowledge there are no existing population based data linkage studies providing data on the health of looked after and non-looked after children at national level. Smaller scale studies that are available generally provide very limited information on linkage methods and hence do not allow scrutiny of bias that may be introduced through the linkage process. Study design and methods: National demonstration project testing the feasibility of linking routinely collected looked after children, education, and health data. Participants: All children in publicly funded school in Scotland in 2011/12. Results: Linkage between looked after children data and the national pupil census classified 10,009 (1.5%) and 1,757 (0.3%) of 670,952 children as, respectively, currently and previously looked after. Recording of the unique pupil identifier (Scottish Candidate Number, SCN) on looked after children returns is incomplete, with 66% of looked after records for 2011/12 for children of possible school age containing a valid SCN. This will have resulted in some under-ascertainment of currently and, particularly, previously looked after children within the general pupil population. Further linkage of the pupil census to the NHS Scotland master patient index demonstrated that a safe link to the child’s unique health service (Community Health Index, CHI) number could be obtained for a very high proportion of children in each group (94%, 95%, and 95% of children classified as currently, previously, and non-looked after respectively). In general linkage rates were higher for older children and those living in more affluent areas. Within the looked after group, linkage rates were highest for children with the fewest placements and for those in permanent fostering. Conclusions: This novel data linkage demonstrates the feasibility of monitoring population based health outcomes of school aged looked after and non-looked after children using linked routine administrative data. Improved recording of the unique pupil identifier number on looked after data returns would be beneficial. Extending the range of personal identifiers on looked after children returns would enable linkage to health data for looked after children who are not in publicly funded schooling (i.e. those who are pre- or post-school, home schooled, or in independent schooling)