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Olle Hellblom, Dag Wedelin, Tom Adawi
Chalmers University of Technolog, Sweden
Mathematics is one of three core subjects in Swedish schools and we put a lot of time and effort in teaching all children mathematics. However, many pupils and adults do not understand the purpose of this education and why we all need it. Issues regarding mathematics education are debated on all levels of society, in national politics as well as in local newspapers, and most people seem to have an opinion about what the problem is or what we should do about it. With this background we have researched the question “How do we want to organize mathematics education?” with focus on Swedish upper secondary education. However, we believe that the results are relevant also at the university level.
This paper argues that the debate consists of several different questions that are discussed simultaneously. To better understand what the issues are we have categorized the critique of mathematics education into three main questions: “Why should we study mathematics?”, “What should students learn?” and “How should we teach mathematics?” The study is based on interviews and a review of the mathematics education research literature. The interviews present four different professional perspectives on mathematics, problem-solving and creativity, and the review serves as a base for the categorization of both critique of the current state of mathematics education as well as proposals of what should be done to fix the problems.
The paper presents three common propositions of how to change mathematics education to increase pupils’ motivation and knowledge: a problem-solving approach, a modelling approach and a redefinition of school mathematics, and describes how these answer the questions of why, what and how we should teach and learn. A conceptual framework was developed to compare the three different propositions to each other and to the traditional way of teaching, to show the similarities and differences between the different approaches.
The paper concludes that there is no total consensus regarding how we should fix the problems with mathematics education. However, there is also significant agreement on some points, in particular that mathematics education should be an investigative and creative subject where students get to explore, rather than just read and practice what mathematicians have discovered before them.