Impacting positively on problems of student learning with classroom interventions of short duration

Presented by Dr Gabriel J Stylianides, Associate Professor of Mathematics Education, University of Oxford

Although there are notable examples of classroom-based intervention studies in mathematics education research, their number is small and acutely disproportionate to the number of studies that documented problems of student learning for which solutions are sorely needed. Also, most of the available interventions have long duration, which makes it hard to use these interventions in different contexts: their possible adoption would require teachers to do substantial reorganisation of their schemes of work in order to accommodate the time and other demands of the interventions. In this seminar I will:

• discuss the importance of classroom-based interventions of short duration that can help alleviate significant problems of students’ mathematical learning
• suggest and illustrate the possibility of designing such interventions by drawing on findings from a 4-year, university-based design experiment.