Annual Report 2015, Budapest
Last edition of ECER (2015), NW24 had a total of 14 sessions, including 3 joint sessions with NW 14, 20 and 30, and 4 symposiums as well.
The main topics discussed during the conference include the following topics:
(a) Problem Solving,
(b) Rational Numbers,
(c) Teacher's Persepctive,
(d) Students' Perspective,
(e) Teacher training,
(f) Students attitudes.
The symposiums brought to the audience the opportunity to talk about "mathematics tasks" either from the learner perspective or from the teacher perspective. There was also a singificant amount of work presented regarding "successful educational actions" in Mathematics.
The total amount of presentations scheduled and discussed during the conference were 51 papers (+ 6 which were rejected during the review process). NW24 accepted 77.78% of the papers submitted, and rejected 11.11%. NW24 redirected 11.11% of the papers received as well. Thus, the overall acceptance were 86.36%, whereas the overall rejection were 13.64%.
In terms of "quality of the paper", the first 25% reached 7,9 or more points (Q1) after the review process. The second quartil grouped papers up to 6,7 points (Q2). The overall evaluation of the presentations was very positive.
Audience engaged in significant discussion, specially during the three symposiums, which were very appreciated specially because the coherence in terms of the papers presented. Powerful ideas regarding methodological issues about using video as a research tool (to collect and analyze data) emerged during the discussions. Management of large data sets appears to be a topic of interest for the future, specially all related to ethical issues, data storage, etc., and the impact of this over the research design, implementation and results. Great possibilities to increase our scientific knowledge regarding mathematics learning arose from the discussions.
This year (2015) NW 24 hosted three joint sessions with NW 14, 20 and 30. The first one was conducted on Thursday Sept. 10th titled "ESE for Teacher Education" (NW30 and 24). The main topic in this session was new insights regarding teacher education connected to education for sustainable development (EDS). Three papers were presented in this JS. The second JS was carried out on Friday Sept 11th (NW 14 and 24). Presenters introduced examples of using successful educational actions based on dialogic strategies to teach mathematics. The last JS was conducted almost at the end of the conference (Friday Sept. 11th) organized by NW 20 and 24. All three presentations focused on the use of technologies to teach mathematics. During this session the Hungarian TV came to record one of the presentations (by a local team). All JS were highly appreciated by the audience, specially in terms of coherence and quality of the papers. The avarege attendance were around 20-30 attendees by session.
NW 24 also hosted a poster session. However, this year (2015) posters were not popular within the NW24 community. We had only 1 poster coming out from our network. We do not have additional information about number of attendees to the poster session. Posters remains a challenge for next ECER editions in the future.
Plans for the future include organising an special call (only NW24) or jointly with another network. Possibilities will be explored in the coming LC meetings.
Finally, NW24 (with NW14) have a proposal to a joint activity in the form of a season school for next summer / fall. We are still working on the proposal, which will be submitted before Chistmas 2015 to EERA, for funding.