4TU.AMI: Mathematics Education for the 21st century

Day 2 (Wednesday 3 April) @ 11:15–12:45

Educating students in and for the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous society we live in, requires continuous consideration of university education. We need to consider what has to be kept while simultaneously thinking about what should and could be adapted. Firstly there are changes in the background, skills and attitudes of students. Secondly, developments in computational power change the way mathematics is being used. Quite recently, progress in AI is starting to have a large impact on the educational landscape. This session serves as a starting point for a (national) discussion on Mathematics Education for the 21st century in the Netherlands.

Samuel Bengmark (Chalmers University of Technology)

Study your own teaching practice!Pragmatic Research on Education Practice (PREP)

Many mathematicians are ambitious and strive to continuously improve their teaching by experimenting with different teaching approaches while trying to find out if it is effective or not. Unfortunately, many of us think we lack the time, knowledge, motivation, or data to turn these experiments into studies that can be published in (educational) journals. In rare cases they are shared in pedagogical conferences but most insight are at most told to the closest colleagues.

We therefore propose a collegial process that we call PREP, Pragmatic Research on Educational Practice, with the aim of getting us teachers to succeed in completing simpler educational studies and share the results with each other. At this presentation, I will tell you about this process, our experiences so far and what we hope for the future, with the goal to inspire you to study your own teaching practice. PREP is a collegial process aimed at engaging educators in studying, documenting, and sharing their initiatives to improve teaching practices. We will tell you about the experiences and results so far and invite you to take part.

Alessandro Di Bucchianico (Eindhoven University of Technology)

The 4TU.AMI SRI Research on Mathematics Education Project

4TU.AMI very recently approved a research project proposal from the four technical universities and Groningen University on Research on Mathematics Education. We will give an outline of the goals of the project, highlight how all university mathematics teaching will benefit from it and invite members of the audience to participate in the project. 

Annoesjka Cabo (TU Delft)

Mathematical competencies: What, why and how?

Societal challenges of both today and tomorrow require that we educate students with an adequate mathematical skills set. There is an increasing need for students who specialize in mathematics, as well as an increasing need for mathematical proficiency of students from other disciplines. Several developments urge us to go beyond traditional ways of teaching mathematics. The questions ‘ what’,  ‘ how’ and ‘ with what purpose’  mathematics is taught at university level deserve thorough investigation. Moreover, there is added value of the teaching being delivered by mathematicians and there is a need for scientific proof of this added value. Since the current state-of-the-art in research on mathematical education does not satisfactorily cover the needs in higher education, there is an urgency to perform targeted research on mathematical competencies. In this talk you will learn about the mathematical competencies framework, think along about which developments are to be dealt with and how the community of mathematicians can contribute to these topics.