Over the past several years, a community of researchers has been using and rening a
particular framework for research and curriculum development in undergraduate mathematics
education. The purpose of this paper is to share the results of this work with the mathematics
education community at large by describing the current version of the framework and giving
some examples of its application.
Our framework utilizes qualitative methods for research and is based on a very specic theoretical
perspective that is being developed through attempts to understand the ideas of Piaget
concerning re
ective abstraction and reconstruct them in the context of college level mathematics.
Our approach has three components. It begins with an initial theoretical analysis of
what it means to understand a concept and how that understanding can be constructed by
the learner. This leads to the design of an instructional treatment that focuses directly on
trying to get students to make the constructions called for by the analysis. Implementation
of instruction leads to the gathering of data, which is then analyzed in the context of the
theoretical perspective. The researchers cycle through the three components and rene both
the theory and the instructional treatments as needed.
In this report the authors present detailed descriptions of each of these components. In
This article provides an exploratory case study that examines what one teacher indicated as unexpected as she worked to become more purposeful about her classroom discourse practices. We found that she highlighted three areas as being unexpected: (1) aspects of lesson enactment; (2) characteristics of student learning and (3) her own intentionality or purposefulness. We interpret these instances through the lens of the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) appraisal framework in order to understand how she evaluates the instances she highlights and connect these instances to the literature on values in the teaching and learning of mathematics.