Mathematics and Task Design

Christine Mae, Janette Bobis, & Jennifer Way

Teacher knowledge is a significant issue for mathematics education (Sullivan, 2008a). Educational research has increasingly tried to identify characteristics of teacher knowledge for effective mathematics teaching and their influence on student learning outcomes (Bobis, Higgins, Cavanagh and Roche, 2012). With teacher performance standards now well iterated, the questions of “what [teacher] knowledge matters more, and why” (Bobis et al, 2012, p.1), remain central to improving mathematics education in Australia. This round table will outline the rationale and theoretical underpinnings of a study into the relationship between primary teachers’ subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge domains (Ball, Thames and Phelps, 2008). The Mathematics and Task Design Project is a research study involving 65 primary teachers within a system of schools. The study explores: (i) teachers’ understandings of area and volume when solving problems; the level of the tasks teachers design for their students; and, (iii) the nature of the feedback that teachers provide when analysing student work samples, and (iv) the relationships between each of these critical aspects of teacher knowledge. Data from the Task Design aspect of the study will be used to provide the stimulus for a discussion of the challenge of identifying and designing frameworks that can be applied to consistently analyse and describe the levels of opportunity and challenge within mathematical tasks.

Reviewing of research papers

Research papers will be blind reviewed by a panel of peers approved by the conference committee. The main purpose of the refereeing process is to contribute to the growth and development of quality practice in mathematics education research. Thus reviewers are asked to assist authors by providing helpful feedback and to comment on the suitability of papers for presentation at the conference. Accordingly, it will not be assumed that published papers presented at the conference will be as polished as articles in scholarly journals. Referees will be asked to assess papers being reviewed against the accepted norms for scholarly works presented at MERGA conferences, as set out above.

Each conference proceedings’ Editorial Team will exercise discretion over the reviewing process.

Reviewers’ comments will be returned to the authors. Authors whose papers are not accepted for publication may be invited by the editorial panel to present their paper at the conference, with an abstract (only) being published in the proceedings. Papers may be rejected outright, with no opportunity for presentation at the conference in an alternative form.

The MERGA website has detailed advice about criteria for reviewing of MERGA papers, review forms, and examples of strong and poor reviews of different types.

Mathematics and Task Design

Mathematics and Task Design

Short Communications

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Research Papers

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