Dept of Mathematics Education seminar: 09 April 2025

[14:00-15:00] (40 mins Presentation + 20 mins Q&A): Les Staves

[les.staves@ntlworld.com]

Mathematics for children with very special needs

Abstract

The presentation outlines the development of social attitudes and education provision for children with severe or profound learning difficulties in the 20th and on into the 21st century.  It makes suggestions and provokes thinking about the nature of appropriate curriculum development

[16:00-17:00]  (40 mins Presentation + 20 mins Q&A): Prof Matthew Inglis

Loughborough University

[M.J.Inglis@lboro.ac.uk]

Mathematics education research, the Research Excellence Framework, and epistemic ostentatiousness

Abstract

In a 2024 British Educational Research Journal article, my colleagues and I reported a full-text analysis of submissions to the education subpanel of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (Inglis et al., 2024). We demonstrated that making explicit claims about the originality and significance of research reported in academic journal articles was associated with higher unit-level scores in the Research Excellence Framework. In this talk I explore this result further, by reporting an analysis where I applied the REF2021 model to articles from leading mathematics education articles between 2000-2003 and 2020-2023. I demonstrate that the extent to which we make explicit claims about the originality and significance of our community's work has increased over the last twenty years, and that it has disproportionately increased in articles where at least one author is based in the UK. I suggest that it is plausible that this is the result of the REF’s explicit definition of research quality (“originality, significance and rigour”), which was introduced for the 2008 RAE. I will offer some reflections on whether or not this trend is helpful, and how to theorise it.