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Middle year students often do not see the mathematics in the real world whereas the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics" aims for students to be "confident and creative users and communicators of mathematics" (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA] 2012). Using authentic and real mathematics tasks can address this situation. This paper is an account of how, working within a Knowledge Producing Schools' framework, a group of middle year students addressed a real community issue, the problem of the lack of a teenage safe space using mathematics and technology. Data were collected for this case study via journal observations and reflections, semi-structured interviews, samples of the students' work and videos of students working. The data were analysed by identifying the mathematics the students used determining the function and location of the space and focused on problem negotiation, formulation and solving through the statistical investigation cycle. The paper will identify the mathematics and statistics these students used as they addressed a real problem in their local community.

School autonomy has been identified as having an impact on a school's performance, yet less has been reported about the effect this has on students' goal orientations and engagement with mathematics. In a national study conducted in schools across Australia, measures of school autonomy were collected from teachers and school leaders, along with students' perceptions of the mastery and performance goal orientations of their classrooms and personally using surveys. Schools were identified as having high or low levels of autonomy on the basis of school leaders' responses. For the study discussed in this paper, a subset of 14 schools for which matched student and teacher data were available provided students' responses to a variety of variables including goal orientations. The findings suggested students in high-autonomy schools were less likely to hold a personal performance approach and avoidance goals than their peers in low-autonomy schools. Fifty-five case studies conducted in 52 schools provided evidence of some of the practical aspects of these findings, which have implications for systems, schools and teachers.

There is not just one mathematics taught at university level, nor is there one group of students. Mathematics is taught differently depending on the discipline and the perceived background of the student. There is engineering mathematics for the students heading towards engineering degrees, life science mathematics for those heading towards biology degrees and so on. This paper considers the phases of transitions that students experience as they embark on a course of study and then go on to professional life. We make inferences about the ways the curriculum should be designed to alleviate the difficulties of these phases as well as to take account of the capabilities that graduates will require in the workplace. It is not only where students are coming from that affects their learning but where they are heading to, in combination with their perceptions of that destination. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Metacognition has been accorded a role in both mathematical problem solving and in the learning of mathematics. There has been consistent advocacy of the need for the promotion of metacognitive activity in both domains. Such advocacy can only be effective if the advocated process is well understood. In this paper we have four goals: to describe a "multi-method" technique developed to study student mathematical metacognition; to set out the structural elements and configuration of a coherent model of metacognition in the domain of mathematical problem solving; to report on the empirical utility (and validity) of this model; and, to report the insights into student mathematical metacognition arising from the research. Multi-Method Interview Tasks are appended. (Contains 4 figures.)

When questioned, secondary mathematics teachers in rural and regional schools in Australia refer to their limited opportunities to engage and share experiences with peers in other schools as an under-utilised and cost-effective mechanism to support their professional learning and enhance their students' learning. The paper reports on the creation and evaluation of a network of learning communities of rural secondary mathematics teachers around a common purpose--enhancement and increased engagement of student learning in mathematics. To achieve this goal, teams of teachers from six rural schools identified an issue hindering improved student learning of mathematics in their school. Working collaboratively with support from university personnel with expertise in curriculum, assessment and quality pedagogy, teachers developed and implemented strategies to address an identified issue in ways that were relevant to their teaching contexts. The research study identifies issues in mathematics of major concern to rural teachers of mathematics, the successes and challenges the teachers faced in working in learning communities on the issue they identified, and the efficacy of the professional learning model.

Mathematics education is seen as a right for all children, and important to ensure a prosperous future. However, in Australia and other nations, rural students and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds both perform less well in mathematics and are less likely to pursue advanced mathematics. This paper presents a case study of a low socioeconomic status, rural government school that has high engagement and achievement in senior mathematics, despite its setting. The study uses a conceptual framework informed by Appreciative Inquiry and the theory of Practice Architectures to explore the activities and facilitatory elements that have likely contributed to the school's mathematics success. Rather than being attributed to one or two key programmes, the school's mathematics success seemed associated with a collection of whole-school factors. Setting high expectations while providing proactive learning support, differentiating instruction, emphasising the value of mathematics, linking mathematics to careers, and building mathematics teacher capacity were all associated with the school's higher than expected mathematics performance. Rather than hindering the school's mathematics programme, its small size and rural context were used to enable practices that contributed to mathematics success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While mathematics education research has become increasingly concerned with issues of equity, including girls' participation in the subject, the field remains troubled with conceptualising and operationalising gender. To date, few studies of gender and school mathematics participation have moved beyond conflating gender with sex or categorising masculinities and femininities through the body. This failure to engage with gender conceptualisation has persisted despite the apparent intractability of girls' underrepresentation in senior secondary mathematics in many contexts, including Australia. In this article, I provide fresh insights into girls' mathematics participation by employing a conceptualisation of gender as heteroglossic to explore the post-compulsory mathematics participation choices of two school students, one girl and one boy. Using these theoretical tools to decentre the students' bodies, I demonstrate that the reasons why these students chose to participate in Mathematics Advanced do not distinguish them by their sex/gender, as would be expected in the monoglossic gender system. While femininity was performed, both students' subject choices were primarily characterised as masculine performances, including establishing themselves as having mathematics brains and seeking to use their mathematics participation to attain prestige. I argue that recognising and normalising girls' masculinity and boys' femininity, rather than simply categorising gender differences, will be essential to increasing girls' belonging and participation in mathematics. This will require greater attention to the differences within, and similarities between, the categories of boy and girl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]