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Digital textbooks are rapidly becoming a common feature in mathematics and science teaching. At the same time, there is limited research on teachers’ use of digital textbooks for teaching. Our study takes a comparative approach, contributing to the field’s understanding of the implementation of digital textbooks in mathematics and science education. Four lower secondary teachers’ use of digital textbooks was deductively analysed concerning various features in the textbooks, using data from classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. Results revealed similarities between teachers regardless of subject, such as using functions to guide students in the digital textbook and recognising the advantages of using videos or animations. One conclusion is that these similarities could be regarded as generic for the use of digital textbooks and important regardless of the subject. A prominent difference concerned the use of digital textbooks as a means of content processing through writing. In the mathematics classrooms, paper and pencil were used, mostly due to the limited possibility of writing mathematics in digital textbooks. In the science classrooms paper and pencil were not used, as this subject is different and to a lesser extent based on being able to represent subject content through calculations, symbols, and figures. Another difference concerns teachers’ approach to planning and tracking students’ progress, where the science teachers focus on the group and the mathematics teachers on individuals. This implies the importance of including a focus on subject-specific aspects when designing and integrating digital resources in teaching.

In this paper we present findings from an initial phase of a more extensive study focussed on ways in which prospective mathematics teachers negotiate meaning from mathematics teacher education situations. The focus of this paper is on the language of one mathematics teacher educator and specifically the interpersonal aspects from one mathematics teacher education lecture in Sweden for prospective upper-primary school teachers. We draw on the enactivist view of cognition as a theoretical basis for a methodology we develop that utilises Systemic Functional Linguistics as an analytical tool for studying language-in-use. We exemplify our interpretations through a series of extracts from the mathematics education lecture. This initial phase of our study has exposed several important questions about how participating in an initial teacher education situation may contribute to the development of teacher identities, questions we raise throughout our analyses to provoke further investigation as part of our future research.

This paper presents a modified approach to subject-matter didactics, in which the focus is not on the content itself, but on the students' view of the content. The introduction deals with an overview of subject-matter didactics and the notion of beliefs used in this paper. The main portion of the paper deals with presenting the concepts of a book and a seminar based on the student-centered subject-matter didactics approach. For the first qualitative evaluation, selected reflections of students are analyzed. Finally, initial findings are summarized and an outlook is provided.

Computational thinking has become part of the mathematics curriculum in several countries. This has led recently available teaching resources to explicitly integrate computational thinking (CT). In this paper, we investigate and compare how curriculum resources developed in Denmark — digital teaching modules — and Sweden — printed mathematics textbooks — have incorporated CT in mathematics for grades 1–6 (age 7–12). Specifically, we identify and compare the CT and mathematical concepts, actions, and combinations in tasks within these resources. Our analysis reveals that Danish tasks are oriented toward CT concepts related to data, actions related to programming, and mathematical concepts within statistics. This is different from Swedish tasks, which are oriented toward CT concepts related to instructions and commands, actions related to following stepwise procedures, and mathematical concepts related to patterns. Moreover, what is most dominant in one country is almost or completely absent in the other. We conclude the paper by contrasting these two approaches with existing knowledge on computational thinking in school mathematics.

This paper presents results of a systematic review of papers published at the LUMAT journal on the current issues positively and negatively affecting teaching and learning in mathematics, in concurrence with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The analysis also offers insight into the most studied topics in mathematics education research, including key demographic and methodological characteristics such as year of publication, participants, education level, research methodologies, and research focus. Data was gathered from the studies published in the LUMAT: International Journal on Math, Science and Technology Education, starting from its first volume in 2013. So far, 225 articles were published in this journal, with 133 studies written in English and 51 studies related to mathematics. Although earlier studies support the notion that mathematics education is mostly traditional, this review suggests current research has thorough and positive outcomes, such that mathematics educators are likely to implement non-traditional approaches, encouraging student engagement, peer collaboration, and mathematical discourse. Certainly, in such learning environments, students tend to feel more motivated and less anxious about learning mathematics. They may also be more active and responsible in their learning, collaborate with peers, and get into mathematical discussions. Yet, there are also a number of difficulties and obstacles highlighted both in teaching and learning of mathematics. The findings might inspire several instructional implications for mathematics educators, curriculum developers, and researchers. Recommendations are given to add into what the existing literature claims and offer greater empirical evidence to support the verdicts.

This structured review explores the interaction of digital education and students with disabilities through an extensive search of Scopus and WoS databases, generating 23 related papers. The following three central ideas are the focus of the synthesis: (i) Digital Literacy and Skills Development, elucidating the strategies and tools employed to enhance digital competency among students with disabilities; (ii) Challenges and Barriers in Digital Education, delineating the multifaceted obstacles encountered in the digital learning environment, spanning technological, pedagogical, and socio-cultural dimensions; and (iii) Inclusive Education and Digital Transformation, exploring the transformative potential of digital technologies in fostering inclusive educational practices. This review highlights the potential and challenges inherent in digital education programs within this environment. It does so by conducting careful analysis, highlighting the need to address digital inclusivity to develop fair educational opportunities for students with disabilities.

A subject of physics includes various complex and sophisticated concepts that pose a challenge for both instructors to teach and students to grasp the clarity in the subject. Many researchers have discussed this challenge toward adopting an appropriate approach to teach physics in the institution. Therefore, the study reviews the research articles towards multimedia in improving the knowledge delivery system of physics published in various standard databases/indexes. The study conducts a literature review based on five-stage methodology comprising of: (1) research article collection from the databases, (2) research article inclusion/exclusion norms, (3) reviewing the processed research articles, (4) analyzing the research articles to extract the information, and (5) inferring the extracted information to derive at the future research direction. The paper contributes to reviewing thirty-three research articles specific to the usage of multimedia towards improving the methodologies involved in teaching and learning physics. The core idea of this study is to extract the research gaps on the usage of multimedia in the current knowledge delivery system of the physics domain to provide future research directions. Further, a bibliometric analysis comprises co-occurrence of keywords, citation, and co-citation using VOSviewer software. It is followed by content analysis to analyze the research method and multimedia tool used. The study outcome shows that most of the existing work found is Quasi-experimental design-based or qualitative design-based. The study outcome also highlights various themes of accepted papers and research gaps on the usage of multimedia in the knowledge delivery system of the physics domain.

Classroom climate is a rich and an important research concept due to the early discovery of a relationship between positive classroom climate and academic performance and motivation, engagement, participation, and attitude towards school and teaching. In this paper, I focus on the elements of the psychological dimension of emotional classroom climate and the kind of emotional classroom climate in Grade 3 (N = 25) and Grade 6 (N = 28) school mathematics in the context of geometry lessons by using participant-produced drawings. The students illustrated different elements of the psychological dimension of the emotional classroom climate through physical facial and body features as well as thoughts. Furthermore, the results showed that the emotional classroom climate in both grades was mainly positive, with a negative tendency in Grade 6. The results are discussed not only regarding the research goals, but also regarding their theoretical, practical, and methodological implications.

When we started to prepare this first LUMAT special issue on technology education in early 2023 we were a bit concerned whether our rather broad framing of the topic – contemporary issues – would attract too much attention. Due to the relatively short international history of technology education, we anticipated that the term technology education would be interpreted various ways and hence decided to clarify in the call for papers that ”[a] common denominator for all technology education is/should be that it explicitly aims at learning about technology”.

This Special Issue in International Journal on Math, Science and Technology Education (LUMAT) has a unique history. It is a collection of selected papers from the 27th International Conference on Mathematical Views (MAVI27), which took place in Bremen, Germany, from 15 to 17 September 2021.

This paper’s purpose is to investigate the attitude of students in mathematical discovery processes in terms of the handling of counterexamples. By understanding this attitude as a kind of scientific attitude, it consists of different aspects that become visible in the behaviour during a mathematical discovery process. Since such a process is particularly complex, the author’s interest is to use the concept of attitude as an explanation for students’ behaviour that occurs when dealing with conflicts such as counterexamples. Semi-structured interviews with sixth graders of a German Gymnasium were conducted and analysed in a qualitative and interpretative way. As a result, the case study of Alex and Milo is presented. Based on the framework that observable behaviour is influenced by an underlying attitude, there are drawn conclusions about Alex’s and Milo’s attitudes adopted in the mathematical discovery process and their impact on the process is elaborated.

This paper addresses the desideratum identified by Törner (2018), that researchers' beliefs are rarely addressed in the research literature dealing with beliefs. For this purpose, firstly a suitable theoretical framework is outlined that links the concept of belief with the research perspectives of researchers. Secondly, examples are given of how beliefs were, can and should be addressed in corresponding research on beliefs. Finally, it is shown in which ways explicating beliefs of mathematics education researchers might made their research, as well as their teaching more effective.

It is important to get more knowledge about the impact of the use of technology on the learning of mathematics. Recent research shows that the use of digital equipment and software is related to better mathematical skills, but excessive use of digital resources may disturb concentration on learning. This special issue presents five papers on different areas of technology in mathematics education.

Computer-based assessments is becoming more and more common in mathematics education, and because the digital media entails other demands than paper-based tests, potential threats against validity must be considered. In this study we investigate how preparatory instructions and digital familiarity, may be of importance for test validity. 77 lower secondary students participated in the study and were divided into two groups that received different instructions about five different types of dynamic and/or interactive functions in digital mathematics items. One group received a verbal and visual instruction, whereas the other group also got the opportunity to try using the functions themselves. The students were monitored using eye-tracking equipment during their work with mathematics items with the five types of functions. The result revealed differences in how the students undertook the dynamic functions due to the students’ preparatory instructions. One conclusion is that students need to be very familiar with dynamic and interactive functions in tests, if validity is to be ensured. The validity also depends on the type of dynamic function used.

This study was aimed at assessing students’ engagement in an integrated indigenous knowledge-chemistry lesson (IIK-CL) designed using the processes involved in cassava dough production. The paper focuses on the behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement and their impact on students’ construction of knowledge of the factors affecting rate of chemical reactions. The study was conducted in Swedru senior high school in the Agona East municipality of the Central Region of Ghana. A purposively sampled intact class of 26 students aged between 14 and 18 years formed the study. The control group for this study encompassed also 26 students randomly sampled from the remaining chemistry classes in the same grade as the study group. The IIK-CL, which employed the use of field trip and other interactive learning activities, was used to engage students in the learning concept. A quantitative research approach was used. Data before and after students’ engagement in the IIK-CL were collected using questionnaires and an observational schedule. The IIK-CL recorded a significant level of behavioural, emotional and cognitive student engagement. This implies that students are most likely to be engaged in lessons that are relevant to their everyday lives thereby helping them in constructing understanding of scientific concept in their personal context.

A rigorous and axiomatic-deductive approach is emphasized in teaching mathematics at university-level. Therefore, the secondary-tertiary transition includes a major change in mathematical thinking. One viewpoint to examine such elements of mathematical thinking is David Tall’s framework of the three worlds of mathematics. Tall’s framework describes the aspects and the development of mathematical thinking from early childhood to university-level mathematics. In this theoretical article, we further elaborate Tall’s framework. First, we present a division between the subjective-social and objective sides of mathematics. Then, we combine Tall’s distinction to ours and present a framework of six dimensions of mathematics. We demonstrate this framework by discussion on the definition of continuity and by presenting a visual construction of a nowhere differentiable function and analyzing the way in which this construction is communicated visually. In this connection, we discuss the importance to distinguish the subjective-social from the objective side of mathematics. We argue that the framework presented in this paper can be useful in developing mathematics teaching at all levels and can be applied in educational research to analyze mathematical communication in authentic situations.

The ability to apply mathematical concepts and procedures in relevant contexts in engineering subjects sets the fundamental basis for the mathematics competencies in engineering education. Among the plethora of digital techniques and tools arises a question: Do the students gain a deep and conceptual enough understanding of mathematics that they are able to apply mathematical concepts in engineering studies? This paper introduces the use of languaging exercises in the engineering mathematics course ‘Differential Calculus’ during the spring semester 2020, at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, TAMK. In this study, the students’ conceptual understanding and learning of differential calculus is researched. In the learning process, the languaging method is used to deepen the conceptual understanding of the concepts of differential calculus. Pre-test/post-test setup was used to see the possible gain in conceptual understanding. During the course, students did online assignments, which included languaging exercises. Students described the concepts of differential calculus using natural language, pictures, or a combination of them. The students were also asked to fill in a self-evaluation form to collect their perception of their own knowledge of mathematical skills. Mid-term and final exams summarized the acquired knowledge. The study aimed to enhance the learning outcomes and to gain a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts by exploiting the languaging method.

This study focuses on the knowledge base that Swedish elementary student teachers demonstrate in their solutions for six routine fraction tasks. The paper investigates the student teachers’ common content knowledge of fractions and discusses the implications of the findings. Fraction knowledge that student teachers bring to teacher education has been rarely investigated in the Swedish context. Thus, this study broadens the international view in the field and gives an opportunity to see some worldwide similarities as well as national challenges in student teachers’ fraction knowledge. The findings in this study reveal uncertainty and wide differences between the student teachers when solving fraction tasks that they were already familiar with; two of the 59 participants solved correctly all tasks, whereas some of them gave only one or not any correct answer. Moreover, the data indicate general limitations in the participants’ basic knowledge in mathematics. For example, many of them make errors in using mathematical symbol writing and different representation forms, and they do not recognize unreasonable answers and incorrect statements. Some participants also seemed to guess at an algorithm to use when they did not remember or understand the correct solution method.

In this paper we direct attention to 5–6-year-olds’ learning of arithmetic skills through a thorough analysis of changes in the children’s ways of encountering and experiencing numbers. The foundation for our approach is phenomenographic, in that our object of analysis is differences in children’s ways of completing an arithmetic task, which are considered to be expressions of their ways of experiencing numbers and what is possible to do with numbers. A qualitative analysis of 103 children’s ways of encountering the task gives an outcome space of varying ways of experiencing numbers. This is further analyzed through the lens of variation theory of learning, explaining why differences occur and how observed changes over a prolonged period of time can shed light on how children learn the meaning of numbers, allowing them to solve arithmetic problems. The results show how observed changes are liberating new and powerful problem-solving strategies. Emanating from empirical research, the results of our study contribute to the theoretical understanding of young children’s learning of arithmetic skills, taking the starting point in the child’s lived experiences rather than cognitive processes. This approach to interpreting learning, we suggest, has pedagogical implications concerning what is fundamental to teach children for their further development in mathematics.

Students’ challenges in learning mechanics are well documented from test situations, and group discussions are considered a fruitful way to meet these challenges. In this paper, we present a study from an authentic teaching setting where upper secondary students in groups solve the task of calculating the acceleration of an elevator by means of a scale. The group work was audio recorded in three groups with different ability levels. Analysis was performed inductively using the analytical tool of semantic gravity and semantic waves. The results reveal multiple challenges solving the task, even among high-achieving secondary physics students. The study shows that for group discussions to be fruitful, students must be able to negotiate for meaning by alternating between different levels of semantic gravity. In this study, only the group consisting of relatively high-achieving students was able to do this. For the groups that did not succeed, this is found to be due to insufficient knowledge base, poor integration of the required concepts in their own language and inappropriate epistemological framing of the situation. It is concluded that more effort should be put into learning basic concepts than curricula and teaching traditions normally provide. This should include tasks carefully adapted to students’ ability, where students can practice alternation between levels of semantic gravity.