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Reflections on Policy What Should We Do, and Who Decides? Nitsa Movshovitz-Hadar

Abstract Although mathematics is essential to mathematics-education, and mathematics-education is essential to mathematics, these claims do NOT imply that mathematics and mathematics-education are the same. Actually, they are gradually growing apart. This chapter summarizes the views of its authors on the relationship between the mathematics and mathematics-education communities with respect to policy issues believed to be important to both communities. One argues that the professional object for mathematics teachers should be viewed as the teaching and learning of mathematics rather than mathematics in itself. Knowledge and experiences from mathematics as a discipline is necessary but not sufficient to form sustainable policy. Hence policy should benefit from being informed by mathematics-education research to a larger extend that currently. Another view states that instructional policy is only as good as its translation to classroom practice. Without appropriate support for teachers to make the significant changes in classroom instruction being asked of them, curricular initiatives are bound to fail. Mathematicians and mathematics educators can and should collaborate to provide support to teachers in implementation of good mathematics teaching. Yet another claim is that unlike mathematics, mathematics-education is an applied social science, and therefore research in it should be judged to a large extent, by the successful implementation of its outcome. Last but not least is a view of mathematics and mathematics-education as two quite different areas of study, attributing many of the disputes that have arisen between mathematicians and mathematics educators with regard to what school mathematics should be, to these differences. In conclusion, it seems necessary for the mathematics-education community and the mathematic community at large, to join forces and formulate a core of common

With contributions by Jonas Emanuelsson, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden Davida Fischman, California State University, San Bernardino, USA Azriel Levy, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel Zalman Usiskin, Emeritus, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA N. Movshovitz-Hadar (B) Dep. of Education in Science and Technology, Technion IIT, Haifa 32000, Israel e-mail: [email protected] M.N. Fried, T. Dreyfus (eds.), Mathematics & Mathematics Education: Searching for Common Ground, Advances in Mathematics Education, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7473-5_16, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

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agreements, upon which decision makers can be held accountable. Indeed, a difficult task, however without it there seem to be no hope for progress in the desired commonly agreed goal to improve the outcome of mathematics-education. Keywords Accountability · Classroom instruction · Curriculum · Curriculum change · Experimental school teaching · Mathematics-education · Mathematics-education research · Mathematics-ed