Remedial interventions in mathematics for high school students: navigating two theories optimize the design of the activities
Abstract:
The DynaMat project was funded from 2022 to 2025 by a grant of the Italian Ministry of the University and of Research, with the aim of studying how to identify students' mathematics learning profiles (and how these might change), from a discursive perspective, and to qualitatively describe in fine-grained detail how remedial learning of high school students (15-16 years old) with a history of low achievement in mathematics may be supported by a newly designed set of mathematics remediation activities involving digital artifacts. While the majority of remedial interventions in the literature are grounded in behaviorist and cognitivist theories, they are based on deficit models, and they deploy digital technology mainly to offer explicit instruction approaches, DynaMat takes a participationist approach that overcomes deficit discourse by focusing on what students actually say and do, and on enabling their participation.
In this talk I will highlight the significance of the DynaMat project, situating it within the Italian educational context, and within the national and international literature on mathematics learning difficulties and remedial interventions, and I will discuss my current thinking on some key aspects of the project's theoretical framework, building mainly on the Theory of Commognition (Sfard, 2008), but also leveraging the Theory of Semiotic Mediation (Bartolini Bussi & Mariotti, 2008).
Bio:
Anna Baccaglini-Frank is a full professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Pisa, Italy, where she teaches courses for graduate students pursuing a degree in mathematics and preservice primary and secondary school teachers. At the beginning of her research career she studied high school students' processes of conjecture generation in dynamic geometry environments. Then, since 2011 she has become more and more interested in mathematics learning difficulties at all school levels, focusing especially on how physical and digital artifacts can be used to design inclusive mathematics activities. A substantial outcome of her work in this area are student activities and teacher guides of the PerContare project (www.percontare.it), a design research project aimed at preventing primary school children's (grade 1-5) persistent learning difficulties in mathematics.
She is the PI of DynaMat, a project funded from 2022 to 2025 by a grant of the Italian Ministry of the University and of Research. This basic research aims to study how to identify students' mathematics learning profiles (and how these might change), from a discursive perspective, and to qualitatively describe in fine-grained detail how the learning high school students with a history of low achievement in mathematics may be supported by a newly designed set of mathematics remediation activities involving digital artifacts.
Anna is the recipient of the first edition (2022) of the “Giovanni Prodi” award for original research in Mathematics Education, and she is editor-in-chief of the journal Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education.
Anna serves on the editorial board of Educational Studies in Mathematics, as well as on the editorial committees of Italian journals, and has been leading or co-leading the Thematic Working Group 24 since CERME11.
She is also scientific director of the Center for Advanced Research on Mathematics Education (CARME, see www.carme.center), founded in 2021 in Pistoia (Italy) thanks to a grant by the CARIPT Italian bank foundation.
