The prestigious Study Conference took place from June 3rd to June 7th 2015 on the specialist topic of Primary Mathematics Study on Whole Number Arithmetic (WNA) at the University of Macau, Macau SAR, China. Two papers were invited from the Stockholm mathematics education research team:
- Foundational Number Sense: The base for whole number arithmetic competence (Judy Sayers & Paul Andrews; 2015)
- Discerning multiplicative and additive reasoning in co-variation problems (Kerstin Larsson & Kerstin Petterson, 2015).
This study is very highly respected, and only those invited are able to participate. A link to the invited papers can be found at: http://www.umac.mo/fed/ICMI23/proceedings.html.
ICMI study 23 accepted just 67 papers from the international field. These were divided into five themed groups. Every theme participants spent time in Macau discussing each other’s work alongside other published work in the field, and will be a chapter in the next volume published in 2017. From 1959 to 1998 he was Professor in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University, where he is now professor emeritus.
Panel discussions were on three topics: Tradition and Culture; Teacher Education and special educational linked to arithmetic learning in the early school years. The panel discussions were taken by, among others, Joanne Mulligan from Australia, Lieven Verschaffel from Belgium and MArja van den Heuvel Panhuizen, from the Netherlands.
The five themes are:
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The why and what of WNA
Kerstin Larsson Stockholm University, Hyman Bass Columbia University and Judy Sayers Stockholm University - Whole number thinking, earning, and development
- Aspects that affect whole number learning
- How to teach and assess WNA
- Whole numbers and connections with other parts of mathematics.
Judy Sayers was participant in theme 1: The why and what of WNA. She collaborated with Liping Ma, Xuhua Sun from China, Eva Thanheiser and Lyn McGarvey from the USA and Canada, Jean-Luc Dorier from the Piaget Institute, Geneva, Christine Chambris and Catherine Houdement from France and Narumon Changsri from Thailand.
In Kerstin’s group Hamsa Venkat from South Africa, Sybilla Beckman from the US and many others. Plenary speakers were Liping Ma, Brian Butterworth from Neuroscience psychology UCL, England, and Hyman Bass, an American mathematician, known for work in algebra and in mathematics education.
