{"title":"History of mathematics education for girls in the Netherlands","authors":"Jenneke H.J. Krüger","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2025.101238","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2025.101238","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In 1863 the Dutch government introduced subsidized secondary schools, meant for boys, with an emphasis on sciences and mathematics. The question of the need and suitability of mathematics for girls was much debated. Co-education was seen as undesirable, nevertheless, a minority of girls received permission to enroll at the boys' schools. Secondary schools for girls became popular, mostly with a curriculum that emphasized languages and no national examinations. Some girls' schools offered the same curriculum as those of the boys, with the same diploma. After standardization of co-education in 1968, girls came to be perceived as a problem, for not choosing mathematics and sciences. Female mathematics teachers pointed out that probably, the girls were not the problem, but the mathematics curriculum and the way it was taught. This point of view was one of many factors increasing the participation of girls in mathematics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101238"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A comparative study of the Brearley School and Wadleigh High School in early 20th century New York City","authors":"Yana Shvartsberg","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2025.101237","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2025.101237","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper offers comparative analysis of mathematics education for girls in two New York City schools during the time from 1890 to 1920, known as the Progressive Era in the United States. During this time, secondary education transitioned from being mostly accessible through private and religious institutions to becoming widely available through public high schools. This expansion led to an unprecedented increase in enrollment and brought several challenges, including the need to adapt curricula to meet the diverse needs of students. Concurrently, changes in labor market demands, particularly in urban areas, underscored the varying educational objectives for girls and boys, driven by the belief that they would have distinct career paths upon graduation. As a result, many educators and policymakers viewed curriculum differentiation as a necessary tool to accommodate students from varied backgrounds. Curriculum differentiation enabled students to choose classes they considered essential, a trend particularly prominent in public schools. In contrast, private schools continued to enroll students who planned to pursue further education after graduation, and therefore, these schools had to maintain their curricular rigor. Wadleigh Public School and Brearley Private School, both girls-only institutions, provide a snapshot of this complexity by highlighting how distinct goals in mathematics education coexisted within the same city at the same time. This paper explores the strengths and challenges faced by both schools, focusing on the purpose of mathematics education, curricular differentiation, and demographic factors affecting girls' enrollment in mathematics classes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101237"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Development and change in mathematics education for undergraduate women: An examination of the early years of Barnard College","authors":"Joanna Debney Mobley","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101236","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101236","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article explores how the mathematics education and educators at the New York, USA women’s college, Barnard College, during its early years approached the issue of equal study on separate campuses as well as how some of the female students of Barnard with a mathematics focus in their studies utilized their knowledge of this male-dominated field to pursue careers following their graduation. Women in the 19th century struggled to earn a degree of equal value to what was available to men, especially when they were excluded from sharing a campus and classes with their male counterparts. When Barnard was founded, higher education for women was a highly controversial issue, especially for institutions with rigorous academic demands. This paper uses archival material from both Barnard and Columbia to explore the mathematics curriculum required of Barnard’s students, why that particular curriculum was selected, and selected faculty and alumnae active in the department during its first 25 years.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101236"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Amy B. Ellis , Dru Horne , Anna Bloodworth , Robert Ely
{"title":"From mathematical play to playful math","authors":"Amy B. Ellis , Dru Horne , Anna Bloodworth , Robert Ely","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101235","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101235","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Mathematical play can support student agency and engagement, offer learning benefits, and foster productive mathematical dispositions. However, the bulk of research on mathematical play investigates the mathematics that emerges in young children’s natural play or in students’ play in informal spaces such as video games. We introduce the term “playful math” to describe the activities and features of an instructional environment that can facilitate mathematical play, and we investigate the efficacy of incorporating playful task design elements into algebra activities. Drawing on two small-group teaching experiments with middle-school students, the first with two participants and the second with three participants, we identified 13 phenomena characterizing students’ mathematical play activity: Competitive Fun, Feeling Proud, Enjoyment, Wonderment, Taking on Authority, Perturbation, Investment, Immersion, Agency, Perseverance, Creative/Unusual, Harder Math, and Laughter. We found that all phenomena except Wonderment and Perturbation occurred more during playful math tasks. We describe two vignettes exemplifying the mathematical play phenomena and discuss implications for task design and instruction.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101235"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shared drawings in a mathematical modelling activity: An exploratory study","authors":"Caterina Bassi, Domenico Brunetto","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101234","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101234","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recently, scholars highlighted the crucial role played by drawings in students’ modelling performance. Nevertheless, the correlation between the use of drawings and modelling performance cannot be extended when complex modelling activities are considered. In this work, we focus on the students’ drawing activities when dealing with a complex geometry problem. In particular, the paper reports an exploratory case from 11-grade students exposed to a realistic scenario from the sport context, on which they have worked for 4 hours. The analysed data, which focus on one of the class discussions, show that an important aspect for drawings to help students in the mathematical modelling process is that drawings must be shared among students. In this way, students can put into play different strategies for connecting both solution-relevant and non solution-relevant drawing elements, such as understanding, coordinating, contrasting and integrating, that help them in proceeding throughout the mathematical modelling process.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101234"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mathematics Education for Young Women and Girls from the Birth of the Kingdom of Italy (1861) to Fascism","authors":"Fulvia Furinghetti","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101210","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101210","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In 1861, when the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, the school system of the new state was organized in a highly centralized manner based on an 1859 law inherited from the Kingdom of Sardinia. This law, which with some changes regulated education in Italy until 1923, included the principle that the first two years of primary school should be compulsory for both boys and girls. A later law in 1877 reinforced this principle and led to more regular school attendance by girls, although, as the documents cited in this article show, the prejudice that literacy was unnecessary or even dangerous for women remained for many years. In elementary school curricula there were differences between math content aimed at females and that aimed at males. In secondary schools, math programs were not differentiated by gender, but for a long time access to these schools was difficult for girls. After elementary school, however, there was the teacher-training school called <em>scuola normale</em> (normal school), where girls could enroll. The math syllabuses were the same for boys and girls. In this article I focus on this type of school with the aim of understanding what math the girls encountered and how they reacted to it. As sources for my study I use answers to questions published in Italian mathematics journals addressed to students.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101210"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding mathematical conditionals: An educational perspective informed by philosophy, linguistics and psychology","authors":"Lara Alcock","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101233","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101233","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Conditionals – sentences of the form ‘if A then B’ – are ubiquitous in mathematics, where they are treated as true unless A is true and B is false. Conditionals are ubiquitous in everyday life, too, but there interpretations vary. This creates a challenge for students, who must learn an interpretation that might feel unnatural. How can we help them toward mathematically valid reasoning? In this theoretical paper, I argue that a sensible answer should build on work in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. I apply work from these fields to mathematical learning, especially at the transition to proof. I argue that day-to-day use of mathematical conditionals reflects the common inferential reading of everyday conditionals, so that an effective explanation of mathematical conditionals might: discuss the peculiarities of the material conditional, with reference to truth-functionality; observe that universal mathematical conditionals are sensibly subject to an inferential reading; and entrench habitual counterexample search.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101233"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Examples from English female mathematics exercise books of the 19th century","authors":"Peter Howard Ransom","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101231","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101231","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study compares the mathematical examples tackled by females and males in 19th century UK schools. It is based on a private collection of 101 mathematical manuscripts and compared with a collection of 231 similar exercise books at the University of Leicester. A summary of female mathematical education in England at the time will provide a background for the research. Illustrations will be given covering some of the associated textbooks on which these manuscript books are based. A comparison will be made between the problems given to each gender and some mathematical textbooks written specifically for females will be examined to identify any specific differences between them and the more widely used textbooks of the time. The purpose of such manuscript books will be considered. Based on the evidence examined, the ratio of such books in existence is 1:4, females to males.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101231"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143133107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“They do not have the same needs”: Mathematics education for girls and young women in France (19th-early 20th century)","authors":"Renaud d’Enfert","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101232","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101232","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the main places and characteristics of mathematics education for girls and young women in primary and secondary schools during the 19th and early 20th century. It looks at, in particular, the mathematical content that pupils learned in these schools and the aims of the teaching they received. It shows how female mathematics teaching differed from its male counterpart by responding to various gender stereotypes referring to the ‘nature’ and social role of women. The article also presents to what extent the girls’ mathematics programs were progressively aligned with those of boys, until they became almost identical from the 1920s onwards.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101232"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143133106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"It’s just a state of mind: The effect of deliberate and implemental mindset states on word-problem solving","authors":"Benjamin Rott , Timo Leuders","doi":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101230","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101230","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we draw on the distinction of states and traits to investigate the influence of humor and awareness prompts on solving word problems with a reflective component. Two studies with n = 144 and n = 401 mathematics pre-service teachers were conducted, using the three-item Cognitive Reflection test and a ten-item test on mathematical critical thinking, respectively. In both studies, students seeing jokes or awareness prompts showed significantly better results than students solving routine tasks before working on the test items. Drawing on the mindset theory by Gollwitzer, we explain these results with deliberate and implemental mindsets being induced by humoristic and awareness prompts prompts or routine tasks, respectively.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47481,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Mathematical Behavior","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101230"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143132655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}