Erik De Corte

• KU Leuven

This article illustrates that due to the complexity of educational practices and of the educational system, their scientific study constitutes a crossroads for dialogue and possible conflicts among a variety of disciplines. The article focuses on school education. A first illustration shows how analyzing and improving classroom practices requires c...

This article first describes the nature of mathematics as an intellectual domain and how several general theoretical perspectives in educational psychology as well as mathematics-specific theories have influenced and still influence research on mathematics education. Subsequently, we review the current research-based views on (1) mathematical compe...

Resumen. Actualmente, en una sociedad de aprendizaje, la educación debe centrarse en fomentar la Competencia Adaptativa (AC por sus siglas en inglés: Adaptative Competence) que se define como la habilidad de aplicar de manera flexible conocimientos y destrezas en diferentes contextos. En este artículo se discuten tres preguntas: ¿Qué deben aprender...

Over the past decades numerous scholars have become aware of many compelling observations of students in mathematics classes abandoning their sense-making capabilities when doing word problems, and, in particular, carrying out arithmetic calculations that do not make sense in relation to the situations described. This led us, together with several...

The emergence of national evaluation schemes in higher education in Western Europe occurred in the mid-1980s, and originated in The Netherlands, Flanders, France and the United Kingdom. In the years thereafter many other Western European countries established similar evaluation systems. Over the past thirty years these systems have undergone import...

La transferencia entre el dominio de la investigación básica y el de la practica educativa no siempre se da, y cuando eso ocurre, hay cierto riesgo de que la transferencia viaje en una sola dirección. En este artículo se analiza el estado de la cuestión respecto a las enormes posibilidades que para el mundo educativo abre la investigación en psicol...

Born in June 1941, just about one year after the outbreak of World War II in Belgium, I grew up as an only child in a lower middle-class family. My parents, who were both born in the very early years of the 20th century, received little schooling. Compulsory education until the age of 14 years was introduced in Belgium only in 1914, just before the...

This article argues that research and educational practices relating to gifted students can highly benefit by linking up more closely with the mainstream of research on learning and instruction. The CLIA-model for the design of powerful learning environments that consists of four interconnected components (Competence, Learning, Intervention, and As...

The view of mathematics as an active and constructive process implies that learners assume control and agency over their own learning and problem-solving activities, so that self-regulation constitutes a feature of effective learning and problem solving. In the authors' view, self regulation, in addition to metacognitive process, also encompasses m...

The article deals with the way in which authority was established and interpreted by teachers and students in two Flemish sixth-grade mathematics classrooms. Problem-solving lessons during a seven-month observation period were analysed regarding three aspects of teacher–student interactions that explicitly or implicitly reflect who bears mathematic...

In today's learning society, education must focus on fostering adaptive competence (AC) defined as the ability to apply knowledge and skills flexibly in different contexts. In this article, four major types of learning are discussed—constructive, self-regulated, situated, and collaborative—in relation to what students must learn in order to acquire...

Over the past decade, the concept of self-regulated learning has broadened to include motivational, volitional, and emotional components next to (meta-)cognitive ones. In this article, we present a meta-emotion perspective as an essential component of a conceptual framework on self-regulation that fully acknowledges the role of emotions. Against th...

Mathematics education has been an issue of sometimes hot debates over the past decade, even so heated that they became characterized as the “math wars” (Kelly, 2008). The disputes related to the objectives as well as to the approach to teaching and learning mathematics. Somewhat simplified the discussion about objectives can be summarized as aiming...

This article presents a review of important recent themes and developments in research on the learning and teaching of mathematical knowledge and thinking. As a framework, we use a model for designing a powerful environment for learning and teaching mathematics; this model is structured according to four interrelated components, namely competence,...

Higher education is facing world-wide a number of problems such as: adjusting to larger and more homogeneous student populations, increasing the number of graduating students, and preparing them for lifelong learning. Enhancing students" learning proficiency can make a substantial contribution to solving each of these major concerns. Taking the gro...

The literature shows convincingly that metacognitive knowledge and a large variety of cognitive as well as affective and motivational self-regulation skills have a substantial effect on students' learning processes and outcomes (Masui 2002), and, thus, constitute important components of competence in a content domain. Taking this into account we de...

Erik de Corte describes a progression in which earlier behaviourism gave way increasingly to cognitive psychology with learning understood as information processing rather than as responding to stimuli. More active concepts of learning took hold ("constructivism"), and with "social constructivism" the terrain is not restricted to what takes place w...

There is now robust empirical evidence that shows that learning and teaching in schools make a substantial difference in students' cognitive growth. Taking this as a starting point and focusing on mathematics as a subject-matter domain, this article addresses the crucial issue of elaborating a coherent framework for the design of learning environme...

This contribution reports about a seven-month long video-based study in two regular Flemish sixth-grade mathematics classrooms. The focus is on teachers' approaches towards problem solving. In our analysis we distinguished between a paradigmatic-oriented (focus on the mathematical structure) and a narrative-oriented (focus on the contextual aspects...

Introduction Since the publication in 1983 of Schoenfeld's seminal article “Beyond the purely cognitive: Belief systems, social cognition, and metacognitions as driving forces in intellectual performance,” a substantial amount of research has been carried out aiming at a better understanding of the nature and the structure of students’ mathematics-...

Recent research has shown that many upper elementary school children do not master the skill of solving mathematical application problems. In this design experiment, a learning environment for teaching and learning how to model and solve mathematical application problems was developed and tested in 4 classes of 5th graders. Pupils were taught a ser...

We conducted a 7-month video-based study in two sixth-grade classrooms focusing on teachers’ metacognitive and heuristic approaches to problem solving. All problem-solving lessons were analysed regarding the extent to which teachers implemented a metacognitive model and addressed a set of eight heuristics. We observed clear differences between both...

Utilisant le champ des mathématiques et la programmation LOGO comme exemples, cet article alimente le dossier des récentes études sur l'apprentissage et sur l'enseignement qui ont démarréà la recherche d'une base de savoir raisonnablement susceptible de développer des situations d'apprentissage très performant dans le domaine des acquisitions d'apt...

Over the past 2 decades the study of students’ (and teachers’) mathematics-related beliefs has gradually received more and more attention from researchers in the field of educational psychology as well as from scholars in the area of mathematics education. In this article positive beliefs about mathematics and mathematics learning are considered as...

Changing perspectives on mathematics teaching and learning resulted in a new generation of mathematics textbooks, stressing among others the importance of mathematical reasoning and problem-solving skills and their application to real-life situations. The article reports a study that investigates to what extent the reform-based ideas underlying the...

Originally, self-regulation was almost exclusively perceived as the regulation of cognitive processes resulting in an emphasis on higher order information processing and metacognition. Motivational and affective factors were considered minor components in explaining students' learning behavior and results. Although the conception of (self-regulated...

In this study we report on orienting and self-judging as study and problem-solving activities or learning tools. We examine their trainability and their effect on academic performance. These questions are pare of a research project aimed at improving metacognitive knowledge as well as affective, conative and regulation skills. A design experiment w...

A major challenge for education and educational research is to build on our present understanding of learning for designing environments for education that are conducive to fostering in students self-regulatory and cooperative learning skills, transferable knowledge, and a disposition toward competent thinking and problem solving. Taking into accou...

This chapter presents a selective review of the recent research on the development, learning, and teaching of mathematical knowledge and thinking. While school mathematics involves not only arithmetic but also algebra, measurement and geometry, and data handling and probability, the present chapter focuses on arithmetic only, a focus that reflects...

Starting from a brief analysis of adaptive competence in mathematics, this article describes a series of research-based characteristics of the kind of learning processes that should be elicited in students to facilitate and support in them the progressive acquisition of such competence. Four major characteristics are discussed in some detail: learn...