Existing research on limits documents many difficulties students encounter when learning about the concept. There is also some research on teaching of limits but it is not yet as extensive as the research on student learning about limits. This study explores the discourse on limits in a beginning-level undergraduate calculus classroom by focusing…

This article presents several of the challenges facing postsecondary mathematics education and describes how the undergraduate Learning Assistant (LA) program has been used as a catalyst to engage faculty and students in redesigning opportunities to learn mathematics. Characteristics of the LA program that have been used to transform introductory…

This commentary articulates the need to investigate problems of mathematics instruction at community colleges. The authors briefly describe some features of this often-ignored institution and the current status of research. They also make an argument for how investigations of instruction in this setting can both advance understanding of this…

In recent years, changes in the Brazilian economic and social scenario have generated a growing demand for higher education in the country. In response to this new context, the federal government launched in 2007 a programme aiming at expansion of the enrolment to public higher education. In such environment of changes, several proposals have…

CATO is a new user interface, developed by the author as a response to the significant difficulties faced by scientists, engineers, and students in their usage of computer algebra (CA) systems. Their tendency to use CA systems only occasionally means that they are unfamiliar with requisite grammar and syntax these systems require. The author…

In this paper we outline the main tenets of the commognitive approach and we exemplify its application in studies that investigate the learning and teaching of mathematics at university level. Following an overview of such applications, we focus on three studies that explore fundamental discursive shifts often occurring in the early stages of…

Students benefit from learning multiple procedures for solving the same or related problems. However, past research on comparison instruction has focused on comparing multiple formal procedures. This study investigated whether the benefits of comparing procedures extend to comparisons that involve informal and formal procedures. We also examined…

This study aims to investigate the nature of different mathematics teaching modes (prescriptions) that guide prospective teachers during their instruction. The participants were 24 junior prospective middle school mathematics teachers (19 females and 5 males) who were attending a mathematics methods course at a private university in central…

This study investigates factors contributing to student engagement in an educational Facebook group. The study is based on survey results of 138 undergraduate mathematics students at a highly diverse urban public university. Survey measures included engagement in the Facebook group, access to Facebook, comfort using technology, and interest in the…

Background: New emerging online technologies have made dynamic changes in the structure of the online environment possible to address varying needs of diverse learners. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the changes that occurred in online instructional design and strategies in mathematics education courses taught over a course of…

The research relates to undergraduate students' understanding of mathematical concepts that relate to the conceptualisation of the continuous such as the notion of limit. The cognitive difficulties that accompany the learning of these concepts at the different stages of the mathematics education are well reported in the literature. I analyse the…

The Math Exam/Education Resources (MER) is an open online learning resource hosted at The University of British Columbia (UBC), aimed at providing mathematics education resources for students and instructors at UBC. In this paper, there will be a discussion of the motivation for creating this resource on the MediaWiki platform, key features of the…

Instructors in higher education are very familiar with the Likert scale Students' Evaluation of Teaching (SET) used to evaluate teaching. Researchers have raised concerns about biases affecting the results of SET surveys, as well as their validity and reliability and use in high-stakes decision making. Here, we demonstrate that Q methodology,…

The research literature has made calls for greater coherence and consistency with regard to the meaning and use of the term advanced mathematical thinking (AMT) in mathematics education (Artigue, Batanero, & Kent, 2007; Selden & Selden, 2005). Educators and researchers agree that students should be engaged in AMT but it is unclear…

Deborah Nolan is Professor of Statistics and holds the Zaffaroni Family Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California-Berkeley, where she has also served as Associate Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. This interview…