This volume grew out of a symposium on discourse, tools, and instructional design at Vanderbilt University in 1995 that brought together a small international group to grapple with issues of communicating, symbolizing, modeling, and mathematizing, particularly as these issues relate to learning in the classroom. The participants invited to develop chapters for this book--all internationally recognized scholars in their respective fields--were selected to represent a wide range of theoretical perspectives including mathematics education, cognitive science, sociocultural theory, and discourse theory. The work is distinguished by the caliber of the contributors, the significance of the topics addressed in the current era of reform in mathematics education, and the diversity of perspectives taken to a common set of themes and issues. The book is intended for those who are seeking to expand their understanding of the complexity of learning in order to enhance the learning experiences students have in schools, primarily researchers, instructional designers, and graduate students in mathematics education, as well as those in other fields including science education, instructional design in general, discourse theory, and semiotics.

This volume grew out of a symposium on discourse, tools, and instructional design at Vanderbilt University in 1995 that brought together a small international group to grapple with issues of communicating, symbolizing, modeling, and mathematizing, particularly as these issues relate to learning in the classroom. The participants invited to develop chapters for this book--all internationally recognized scholars in their respective fields--were selected to represent a wide range of theoretical perspectives including mathematics education, cognitive science, sociocultural theory, and discourse theory. The work is distinguished by the caliber of the contributors, the significance of the topics addressed in the current era of reform in mathematics education, and the diversity of perspectives taken to a common set of themes and issues. The book is intended for those who are seeking to expand their understanding of the complexity of learning in order to enhance the learning experiences students have in schools, primarily researchers, instructional designers, and graduate students in mathematics education, as well as those in other fields including science education, instructional design in general, discourse theory, and semiotics.

This stimulating study focuses on mathematics as a language with its own rules and conventions and explores the implications of this for classroom practice.

This fourth volume in the series of yearbooks by the Association of Mathematics Educators in Singapore entitled Reasoning, Communication and Connections in Mathematics is unique in that it focuses on a single theme in mathematics education. The objective is to encourage teachers and researchers to advance reasoning, communication and connections in mathematics classrooms. Several renowned international researchers in the field have published their work in this volume. The fifteen chapters of the book illustrate evidence-based practices that school teachers and researchers can experiment with in their own classrooms to bring about meaningful learning outcomes. Three major themes: mathematical tasks, classroom discourse, and connectivity within and beyond mathematics, shape the ideas underpinning reasoning, communication and connections in these chapters. The book makes a significant contribution towards mathematical processes essential for learners of mathematics. It is a good resource for mathematics educators and research students.

The editors and contributors of these ten articles focus on the idea that communication includes both what is happening and being said among participants in a classroom and also the politics, values and ideologies that serve as the foundation of the practice. They describe how communication thereby involves register, representation and contexts through media-human interfaces in the classroom and in interpreting mathematics as a text, how communication in mathematics teaching becomes social interaction in cooperative settings and classroom activities, and how communication translates into practice, community, identity and policy.

Current interest in semiotics is undoubtedly related to our increasing awareness that our manners of thinking and acting in our world are deeply indebted to a variety of signs and sign systems (language included) that surround us.

Over the past years a substantial amount of research has been undertaken relating to the development of powerful learning environments for the acquisition in students of worthwhile educational objectives focussing on conceptual understanding, higher-order cognitive and metacognitive skills, and self-regulated learning. This research has been mainly undertaken from three distinct, but related perspectives in the study of learning and instruction, namely instructional psychology, instructional technology, and instructional design. Against this background a "research community" involving 14 European research teams has recently been initiated with the aim of interactively contributing to the advancement of theory and methodology relating to the design, implementation, and evaluation of powerful learning environments.This volume, based on the plenary lectures and working sessions during the community's third workshop, constitutes a collective output of this research community, focussing on the identification and analysis of major components and dimensions of powerful learning environments aimed at the promotion of deep conceptual and strategic learning in major domains of school curricula, like mathematics, physics, history, and social sciences.In Part I of the volume three chapters present general perspectives on the central theme of the third workshop. In Part II six studies are reported wherein novel learning environments for elementary and secondary mathematics education have been designed, implemented and evaluated. In Part III of the volume another set of five investigations is presented relating to the design, implementation and evaluation of powerful learning environments in other subject-matter domains (physics, history, social sciences) and in teacher training.