Histories of mathematical practice account for mathematical knowledge and action by interpreting presently-available evidence as traces of the events, contexts, and relations that make up the past. Interpretations depend on the assumptions one makes about how mathematical knowledge works, insofar as it is knowledge and insofar as it is…

In this article, I consider ways in which the concept of "proximity" can be put to work to understand how gendering occurs in the conduct of gender research--the theme of this special issue. If we accept that researchers are always already inside and implicated in the issues into which they inquire, and that they simultaneously establish…

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the…

This review takes a critical position with regards to Treagust and Duit's article, "Conceptual Change: A discussion of theoretical methodological and practical challenges for science education." It is proposed that conceptual change research in science education might benefit from borrowing concepts currently being developed in the sociology of…

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the…

This paper provides a critical commentary on a suite of eight papers, which focus on conceptual change research in science education. Responses by Mercer, Smardon and Wells to a paper by Treagust and Duit are observed to reflect the backgrounds of the three authors with Wells focusing on issues of ontology and the affective domain. Mercer and…

Various strands of research in educational, social and organizational psychology focus on structures of collectively created meaning that emerge in and coordinate activities of groups. Despite expanding, this field still lacks conceptual clarity, enhanced by the multitude of terms used, such as common ground, shared understanding, collective mind,…

The concept of habitus lies at the heart of Bourdieu's theoretical framework. It is a complex concept that takes many shapes and forms in Bourdieu's own writing, even more so in the wider sociological work of other academics. In the first part of this paper I develop an understanding of habitus, based on Bourdieu's many writings on the concept,…

This paper identifies the general shifts in curriculum research from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Information is drawn from periodic reviews or summaries of the research literature. A comparatively larger number and variety of individual studies have been reported, but places to publish state-of-the-art curriculum reviews have become more…

Recent years have seen a substantial growth in research that probes children's ideas about natural phenomena. This paper places that research in a context which enables comprehension of how it informs and influences the practice of science education. To this end, past, present, and future styles of research are considered to: (1) demonstrate links…

Social science theorists such as Lewin, Campbell, and Wimsatt have established the basis for scientific community psychology and in particular mathematical psychology. Their tools of triangulation and robustness analysis have furthered the methodology by defining the logical effects of mathematical concepts in a theoretical system. Mathematical…

To control for interactions in learning research due to subjects' prior knowledge of the instructional material presented, an imaginary curriculum was presented with a computer assisted technique based on Carl Berieter's imaginary science of Xenograde systems. The curriculum consisted of a classification system for ten conceptual classes of…

What makes a fraction meaningful and a definition of the quantitative notion of fractions are discussed. Then observations from teaching experiments are presented. (MNS)

The author starts from a historical viewpoint to suggest that, at primary level, we have tended to perpetuate a nineteenth-century notion of music education. This is evident in the selection and organisation of musical content in curriculum documents, the scope of the teacher-pupil transaction implicit in these and the assumptions about music…

The effects of two instructional strategies for sequencing examples and nonexamples of the concept "parallelogram" were compared for sixth graders. A rational sequence was favored over a random sequence at the formal level of concept attainment; no interaction effect was found between the strategy and students' mathematical ability. (MNS)