Paola Iannone

University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Mathematics

Example-generation tasks have been suggested as an effective way to both promote students’ learning of mathematics and assess students’ understanding of concepts. E-assessment offers the potential to use example-generation tasks with large groups of students, but there has been little research on this approach so far. Across two studies, we investi...

Handwritten tasks are better suited than digital ones to assess higher-order mathematics skills, as students can express themselves more freely. However, maintaining reliability and providing feedback can be challenging when assessing high-stakes, handwritten mathematics exams involving multiple assessors. This paper discusses a new semi-automated...

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Kristýna Nižňanská, David Zenkl and Pavel Sovič for collecting the interview data and help with their analysis. We thank Adrian Simpson for his help with the statistical analysis. Finally, we would like to thank the students who took part in the study for giving up their time to engage with our project. Ethics...

In this paper, we report aspects of mathematics undergraduate students' activity when writing a mathematical proof in an interactive theorem prover. The participants, two first-year undergraduate mathematics students, were invited to a series of interviews and asked to engage with a learning resource, the Natural Number Game, designed to introduce...

Evaluation of small teaching interventions in university mathematics is an exciting area for collaboration between mathematicians and mathematics educators and one that is often overlooked in mathematics education. In this chapter, I will discuss how I became involved in such collaborations. I will do so by first introducing my background and my re...

Programming is becoming increasingly common in mathematics degrees as it is a desirable skill for new graduates. However, research shows that its use is mostly restricted to computational or modelling tasks. This paper reports a study on students' perceptions of and difficulties with Lean, an interactive theorem prover introduced as part of a trans...

Investigating the transition between educational levels is one of the main themes for the future of mathematics education. In particular, the transition from secondary school to STEM degrees is problematic for the widespread students’ difficulties and significant for the implications that it has on students’ futures. Knowing and understanding the p...

Understanding the secondary–tertiary transition is not only an educational matter, but also an inclusion and equality matter as mathematics qualifications lead to better employment and better earning for students. Research on what causes the crisis associated to this transi- tion has so far focused on the impact of cognitive and epistemological cha...

This paper describes the collaborative development of an agenda for research on e-assessment in undergraduate mathematics. We built on an established approach to develop the agenda from the contributions of 22 mathematics education researchers, university teachers and learning technologists interested in this topic. The resulting set of 55 research...

Understanding the secondary-tertiary transition is not only an educational matter, but also an inclusion and equality matter as mathematics qualifications lead to better employment and better earning for students. Research on what causes the crisis associated to this transition has so far focused on the impact of cognitive and epistemological chang...

This exploratory study reports on characteristics of proof production and proof writing observed in the work of first-year university students who took part in workshops on the theorem prover LEAN (https:// leanprover.github.io). These workshops were voluntary and offered alongside a transition to proof module in a UK university. Through qualitativ...

https://hal.science/hal-03925304v1

This paper describes the collaborative development of an agenda for research on e-assessment in university mathematics. We adapted an established approach to develop the agenda from the contributions of 22 mathematics education researchers, university teachers and learning technologists interested in this topic. The resulting set of 55 questions ar...

Scope and focus of the Working Group At CERME12 the work in TWG21 will build on the experience of the virtual pre-CERME12 meeting in 2021 and will focus on the development of four themes that were discussed in that forum. The impact of the recent pandemic on access, social justice and equity in assessment will also be a focus of the meeting, togeth...

Two previous studies mapping university mathematics students’ summative assessment diet in the UK revealed a clear picture. In general, there was a dominance of closed book examinations with a strong relationship to departmental league table position. The decade since then has seen many changes in higher education in the UK, particularly in the str...

The book presents developmental outcomes from an EU Erasmus+ project involving eight partner universities in seven countries in Europe. Its focus is the development of mathematics teaching and learning at university level to enhance the learning of mathematics by university students. Its theoretical focus is inquiry-based teaching and learning. It...

The book presents developmental outcomes from an EU Erasmus+ project involving eight partner universities in seven countries in Europe. Its focus is the development of mathematics teaching and learning at university level to enhance the learning of mathematics by university students. Its theoretical focus is inquiry-based teaching and learning. It...

The book presents developmental outcomes from an EU Erasmus+ project involving eight partner universities in seven countries in Europe. Its focus is the development of mathematics teaching and learning at university level to enhance the learning of mathematics by university students. Its theoretical focus is inquiry-based teaching and learning. It...

This article discusses how mathematics students are assessed and the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic had on assessment. It gives suggestions for questions suitable for open-book exams that also foster conceptual understanding and that could be included in mathematics assessment beyond the emergency of the pandemic.

One more presentation on our project with LEAN!

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 & Ramsden, 1983). We choose oral performance assessment as this mode of assessment differs substantially from written exams for its dialogic nature and because variation of ass...

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 & Ramsden, 1983). We choose oral performance assessment as this mode of assessment differs substantially from written exams for its dialogic nature and because variation of ass...

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 str...

This paper reports findings from a case study of the impact that using guided notes has on university mathematics students' note taking behaviour. Whereas previous research indicates that students do not appreciate the importance of lecturers' non-written comments and record in their notes only what is written on the board when taught with the trad...

Existing research posits a relationship between undergraduate mathematics students’ mathematics-related epistemological beliefs and their perceptions of summative assessment. This paper reports a study investigating whether there is indeed such a relationship. First and second year mathematics undergraduate students at two universities in the UK we...

Summary of the activities of the TWG21: Assessment in mathematics education

In this paper, we report findings from a pilot study investigating school students' epistemologies of mathematics by using novel mathematics definitions. Students aged 17 and 18-year-old in Italy and the UK were asked to complete a worksheet that used a numerical approach to determine the sizes of infinite sets and were, then, invited to attend foc...

this are the slides of my recent presentation at BSRLM

In recent years much research has focused on student engagement, both at school and at university level. This attention is motivated by the pivotal role that engagement plays in student learning and in the student experience and retention (at university level at least). Acknowledging that student engagement is a multifaceted construct we focus on t...

The call for papers for CERME10 (Dublin - February 2017) is now open - the deadline is the 15th September 2016. Join our new group on Assessment in Mathematics Education. The call with all the details and deadlines is attached here. We are looking forward to receive your papers!

We report on a mixed-method study that compared students’ perceptions of summative assessment across two distinct disciplines – education and mathematics, at two research-intensive institutions in the UK. The disciplines chosen represent opposing positions in Biglan’s classification of academic disciplines, as well as having very different assessme...

I am delighted to announce that Ian Jones (Loughborough University) and myself are editing a Special Issue of RME due to be published in 2017. Here is the call for papers with the relevant deadlines. High quality research papers are very welcome!! We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Existing research into students' preferences for assessment methods has been developed from a restricted sample: in particular, the voice of students in the ‘hard-pure sciences’ has rarely been heard. We conducted a mixed method study to explore mathematics students' preferences of assessment methods. In contrast to the message from the general ass...

This paper explores the views of a group of students who took an oral performance assessment in a first-year mathematics module. Such assessments are unusual for most subjects in the UK, but particularly within the generally homogenous assessment diet of undergraduate mathematics. The evidence presented here resonates with some, but not all, of the...

If assessment drives learning and the closed book examination dominates the pattern of assessment for undergraduate mathematics (as it does in the UK), lecturers need to ensure that examinations reflect the learning they value. This article uses a mixed method approach to explore lecturers’ views of the closed book examination in relation to other...

Recent UK policy has emphasised both the development of socially mixed communities and the creation of balanced school intakes. In this paper, we use a case study of an area of mixed tenure in eastern England to explore policy in practice and the extent to which mechanisms of segregation impact on both the creation of socially mixed neighbourhoods...

A consistent message emerges from research on undergraduate students' perceptions of assessment which describes traditional assessment as detrimental to learning. However this literature has not included students in the pure sciences. Mathematics education literature advocates the introduction of innovative assessment at university. In this literat...

In this article, we report the planning and implementation of an oral assessment component in a first-year pure mathematics module of a degree course in mathematics. Our aim was to examine potential barriers to using oral assessments, explore the advantages and disadvantages compared to existing common assessment methods and document the outcomes i...

Much research and many papers on mathematics pedagogy have discussed assessment and, in particular, the need to provide a varied diet of methods by which students are assessed for the award of their degree. In this article, we explore the mix of assessment methods provided across a range of UK university mathematics departments. We examine the rela...

Many mathematics education researchers have suggested that asking learners to generate examples of mathematical concepts is an effective way of learning about novel concepts. To date, however, this suggestion has limited empirical support. We asked undergraduate students to study a novel concept by either tackling example generation tasks or readin...

There is increasing recognition in the United States of the need for mathematics departments and mathematicians to become involved in training mathematics teachers for primary and secondary schools. Certainly, issues that are valued by both mathematicians and mathematics educators could promote collaboration. For example, the Mathematical Sciences...

In this paper we investigate how teachers can foster conceptual mathematical thinking in five- and six-year-old pupils in a classroom situation. In this context we define conceptual mathematical thinking as instances where pupils verbalise mathematical thinking linked to abstraction and generalisation. We focus on one case study to explore the impa...

In this paper we draw on a 16-month study funded by the Learning and Teaching Support Network in the UK and entitled Mathematicians as Educational Co-Researchers. The study's aims were two-fold. Primarily we intended to explore mathematicians’ reflections on issues identified in the literature as highly topical in the area of teaching and learning...

Responding to an increasingly urgent need for collaboration between mathematicians and mathematics educators, the study reported in this paper engages mathematicians as educational co-researchers in a series of themed Focus Group interviews where a pre-distributed sample of mathematical problems, typical written student responses, observation proto...

alongside modifications of the syllabus to adjust to the background of new intakes of students, reflection on university-level pedagogical practice, is urgently necessary. We conducted a series of themed Focus Group interviews with mathematicians from six UK universities. Pre-distributed samples of mathematical problems, typical written student res...

To cipher is to 'express, show forth, make manifest by any outward signs, portray, delineate', to 'express by characters of any kind', to engage with a 'secret or disguised manner of writing, whether by characters arbitrarily invented or by an arbitrary use of letters or characters in other than their ordinary sense, by making single words stand fo...