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This paper presents findings from a case study on the impact of high stakes oral performance assessment on third year mathematics students' approaches to learning (Entwistle and Ramsden, Understanding student learning, 1983). We choose oral performance assessment as this mode of assessment differs substantially from written exams for its dialogic nature and because variation of assessment methods is seen to be very important in an otherwise very uniform assessment diet. We found that students perceived the assessment to require conceptual understanding over memory and were more likely to employ revision strategies conducive to deep learning (akin to conceptual understanding) when preparing for the oral performance assessment than when preparing for a written exam. Moreover, they reported to have engaged and interacted in lectures more than they would have otherwise, another characteristic conducive to deep learning approaches. We conclude by suggesting some implications for the summative assessment of mathematics at university level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of integrating history into mathematics education is widely recognised in the literature and advocated in curricula worldwide, including in China. However, under the influence of the long-standing centrally designed curricula, teachers in China are accustomed to content- and teacher-centred examination-driven teaching practices. Adopting a life story approach, this paper reports the case of a mathematics teacher who integrated history into her mathematics teaching during the initial two years of her teaching in a Shanghai high school. The agentic perspective adopted in the study allows us to focus on how the teacher's agency was enacted and achieved when engaging in teaching practices. Our findings reveal the roles played by personal qualities, prior experiences, and the structure and culture of schooling in the teacher's agency in integrating history into teaching under a dominant performance-driven context. Implications of the results for integrating history into teaching in restricted contexts are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This prospective study adopted Vygotsky's concept of perezhivanie to examine students' lived experiences in learning mathematics and how they were related to subject choice plans and actual decisions. Most research has considered students' mathematics subject choice as a decision predictable using important cognitive and social variables. Due attention has not been given to examining how students' lived experiences in learning mathematics relate and contribute to their subject choice plans and decisions over time. Perezhivanie is a psychological structure for understanding dynamic influences derived from personal and contextual sources. In this study, two case studies were crafted using multiple data sources including interviews, observations, surveys and fieldnotes collected over three years on two achieving students who had studied in the same class. Despite this shared context, their perezhivanija differed, revealing complex dynamic interplay between factors derived from personal and external realms. This study described the identified perezhivanija of these two students and explained how they were related to their subject choice plans and their eventual subject choice decisions. The findings revealed that perezhivanija, including both heightened experiences and meta-experiences, were vital personal sources informing subject choice plans and decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beliefs about mathematics education and their influences on teaching practices have been widely investigated in recent decades. There have been numerous empirical studies on the influences of religions on teachers' and students' beliefs about subjects such as sciences and language. However, the influences of worldviews in general and religions in particular, as one of the major sources of beliefs in relation to mathematics education, are under-researched. The current study is a first step to unpacking the relationship between teachers' religions and their beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning. By means of semi-structured interviews with mathematics teachers of different religious backgrounds, teachers' perceptions on the connection between their personal religious beliefs and their beliefs about teaching and learning are investigated. In-depth analyses of the perceptions of three mathematics teachers reveal the complex relationship between teachers' religious beliefs and their teaching beliefs. First, there are some common values shared by different religions, which influence the beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning as well as education in general. Second, religion is a rich belief system, and the teachers appear to apply only a portion of their religious beliefs to guide their teaching. It is also possible that a teacher is influenced by more than one religion or cultural tradition. Despite its subtleties, our study provides evidence to support the alignment between teachers' personal religious beliefs and their beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]