The 'personality' of educational objects

Presented by Dr Mathew Inglis, Mathematics Education Centre, University of Loughborough

Educators use a great many adjectives to describe educational objects. For example, mathematical tasks are routinely described using adjectives such as “rich”, “open”, “real-life”, “engaging” and so on. In this talk I will present a series of studies where colleagues and I have used methods developed by psychologists interested in understanding human personalities to investigate the ‘personalities’ of educational objects. I will pay particular attention to mathematical proofs (the primary route through which undergraduate mathematics is taught) and school-level classroom mathematics tasks.