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In this article, we conduct a qualitative systematic review of studies examining the use of digital games to promote students' mathematical reasoning in primary and lower secondary schools. Digital games now have a prominent role in students' leisure time, as has mathematical reasoning in curricula around the world. This study investigates how the affordances of digital game--based learning environments (DGBLEs) are used to support students' mathematical reasoning. Through a thematic analysis, we construct five distinct themes that describe how mathematical reasoning is afforded in the DGBLEs in the reviewed studies: developing (winner) strategies, exploring an immersive environment, experimenting, designing learning games and solving tasks. By analysing the themes in relation to the reasoning and proof cycle, we found that DGBLEs primarily supported exploration, conjecturing and, to a lesser extent, justification. We conclude that students' mathematical reasoning can be achieved through DGBLEs that specifically target exploration, conjecturing and justification, and by carefully structuring students' interactions with and dialogues about the games played.

The aim of mathematics education research is to develop comprehensive understandings of the problems of mathematics teaching and learning, and the ambition is, at least in the long run, to support the development of institutionalised teaching-learning practices. Looking back at the attempts to structure syllabi and other curricular materials and to study student learning in clinical settings in the past, it is disappointing to see the dismal results of the efforts. There is "a complexity" involved in mathematics education that goes beyond the subject itself and beyond individual students' cognition. The papers in the present issue of the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education (JMTE) in different ways and to different extents reflect this move beyond an interest in mathematics per se and in individual students' learning. It is increasingly acknowledged that the student population in many countries in the West is becoming increasingly diverse, and that mathematics plays a significant societal and political role in and beyond educational contexts. We sometimes tend to write about teachers' knowledge and beliefs, about noticing, and even about equity as if contextual issues do not matter much. But they do matter, also within the countries that dominate our international journals at present. The "full complexity" of mathematics teaching and learning is to a great extent contextual complexity.

The study reported in this paper concerns the tensions and conflicts that teachers experience while they enact a new set of reform-oriented curricular materials into their classrooms. Our focus is ?n the interactions developed in two groups of teachers in two schools for a period of a school year. We use Activity Theory to study emerging contradictions and we elaborate on the construct of dialectical opposition to understand the nature of these contradictions and their potential for teacher learning. We provide evidence that discussions about contradictions and their dialectical character in the two groups support teachers to engage differently in mathematics teaching and learning and carry potentials for shifts in the practices that evolve in their classrooms. Our study addresses empirically in the context of mathematics teaching the philosophical claim about the role of contradictions as a driving force for any dynamic system.

For more than 20 years, belief research has been based on the premise that teachers' beliefs may serve as an explanatory principle for classroom practice. This is a highly individual perspective on belief-practice relationships, one that does not seem to have been influenced by the increasingly social emphases in other parts of mathematics education research. In this article, I use the notions of context and practice to develop a locally social approach to understanding the belief-practice relationships. It is a corollary of the approach taken that the high hopes for belief research with regard to its potential impact on mathematics instruction need to be modified.

Current developments in mathematics education require teachers to play a different and more profound role than few years ago. The first half of this article discusses the theoretical background of these developments in terms of their epistemological and meta-mathematical orientations. Based on this theoretical analysis, the teacher's new role is summed up as one of "forced autonomy". Next, the article summarises two different responses on the part of the research community to the situation of forced autonomy. These are the ones of focussing primarily on teachers' meta-mathematical and mathematical qualifications. Subsequently, the results of an empirical study are outlined. These results are used both to develop an empirically grounded elaboration of the notion of forced autonomy and to challenge the above-mentioned responses on the part of the research community. The concluding section calls for the adoption of broad perspectives on teacher qualifications, integrating pedagogical, mathematical and meta-mathematical perspectives.

Contributes to a further understanding of the significance of one teacher's beliefs and images of school mathematics on his teaching practices. Describes a novice teacher whose images of school mathematics were strongly influenced by the current mathematics education reform. Focuses on how the teacher coped with the complexities. (Contains 19 references.) (Author/ASK)