UMERC is an interdisciplinary network of researchers, research students and teachers from school and university, who are engaged in research and research education in connection to the UMERC research themes.
2013-05-04
I shall demonstrate my conduct of action research at Grades four and eight in Sweden. By drawing on cultural-historical and/or Vygotskian perspectives, I shall explore the nuances of its theory/practice approach with three examples from ongoing classroom practices. In the first I shall draw on the theory of explicit mediation1 to rectify the faulty use of the = sign by students and share my collaboration with a teacher at Grade four. In the second, I shall draw upon exploratory talk and report my work with the same teacher in relation to the topic of measurement, within a project on communi...
2013-01-28
Proceedings from the 13th ProMath conference, September 2 – 4, 2011, in Umeå, Sweden.
2012-12-18
The education systems in Sweden and Finland have different formal and informal testing traditions. A recognised possible adverse effect of testing is test anxiety among pupils and students which may have a negative impact on examination performance. Research into which factors of testing practice affect the levels of test anxiety in younger pupils in real classroom settings is a neglected area internationally yet holds great importance for school practitioners. A cross-national study was conducted to determine whether there are any differences in test anxiety between groups of young pupils ...
2012-11-15
This paper reports on a research project relating to the newly implemented mandatory Swedish national mathematics tests for third-grade students (aged nine and ten). The project’s main research concerns the students’ ideas about and reactions towards these tests and how the specific test situation affects their perception of their own mathematical proficiency. Drawing on theories which suggest that identities are more fluid than static, we want to understand how students with special needs are ‘created’. The specific aim of this paper is to discuss how our research methods have been refined...
2012-10-11
In this study podcasts, i.e. short video clips, were analysed to ascertain how mathematical competencies were addressed. We analysed how the mathematical content was presented in the podcasts, and then how these characterizations related to eight students’ interest to learn mathematics. The mathematical presentations was analysed using the Mathematical Competencies Research Framework (Lithner et al., 2010). The results indicate that podcasts that address several mathematical competencies receive overall higher grades by the students in the study.
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