Classroom-based interventions of short duration in mathematics education: can they help alleviate significant problems of student learning? Seminar

Although there are notable examples of classroom-based intervention studies in mathematics education research, their number is small and acutely disproportionate to the number of studies that documented problems of practice for which solutions are sorely needed. Also, most of the available interventions are of long duration, which makes it hard to use these interventions in different contexts: their possible adoption would require teachers to do substantial reorganisation of the curricula they follow or textbooks they use in order to accommodate the time and other demands of the interventions. In this talk (1) I will discuss the importance of classroom-based interventions of short duration that can help alleviate significant problems of students’ mathematical learning, and (2) I will suggest and illustrate the possibility of designing such interventions by drawing on findings from a 4-year, university-based design experiment.