European Research in Mathematics Education I - Fakultät für ...

European Research in Mathematics Education I: Keynote Address 2 60
informants, however, did not seem to agree on much beyond that, nor did they agree on
where research might be headed.
Silver and I were struck by the variety of perspectives researchers in mathematics
education have both within a country and across countries. That same diversity had
been noted in the discussion document prepared for the International Commission on
Mathematical Instruction’s study of research in our field (see Sierpinska & Kilpatrick,
1998, pp. 3-8). There does seem to be a difference, however, between within-country
and cross-country diversity. Problems that researchers may have some trouble
communicating about within a country become magnified when they are
communicating across national borders. Not only are there cross-country variations in
how education is organized and conducted, there are also variations in research
traditions and in how researchers are situated.
The late Efraim Fischbein (1990) noted some years ago that throughout much of the
twentieth century, the activity of the International Commission on Mathematical
Instruction consisted primarily of comparative surveys and international meetings on
curriculum issues. Issues concerning the mathematical content of the curriculum have
been easy to discuss because, as in TIMSS, the terms used to talk about curriculum
topics are more or less universal. Local, sociopolitical characteristics of a curriculum
are easily ignored. Similarly, researchers from quite different traditions can discuss the
learning of, say, rational numbers or the use of, say, problem-solving or estimation
processes and have little trouble understanding each other’s work. Another subject that
seems easy to discuss internationally is theory, especially epistemology. Most of the
chapters in the book summarizing the research reported at conferences of the
International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Nesher &
Kilpatrick, 1990) deal almost exclusively with the learning of content in a
subject-matter domain, with epistemological issues, or with a blend of the two.
One cannot deny the progress researchers have made internationally in exploring
theoretical issues and how children learn specific mathematical content and processes.
At the same time, however, one ought to recognize that many important research issues
may have been neglected at the international level “because they do not relate readily to
abstractions or universals, requiring instead attention to the nuances of local
educational settings” (Silver & Kilpatrick, 1994, p. 750). Researchers should consider
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