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Abstract
The meeting of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics held at the University of Southampton on 21st June 2008 was dedicated to the memory of Brian Griffiths, who had died earlier that month. At the meeting it was suggested that I write a paper tracing the development of research in mathematics education in the UK up to the writing of Mathematics: Society and Curricula, a book that Brian and I co-authored, published in 1974. This paper is dedicated to Brian's memory: I hope that it will be considered a fitting tribute to a great friend and colleague, and to an outstanding mathematician and mathematics educator.
Notes
1. Full publication details of this, and other books mentioned in the text can be found on www.copac.ac.uk
2. Much of the material in this section is drawn from J.L. Griffiths (Citation2003), which in turn was influenced by A. Yates (Citation1971).
3. Ballard, in particular did, and wrote, much of relevance to mathematics education. A fuller indication of this can be found in Howson (Citation1982).
4. Walter Ledermann, who, in the late 1930s, acted as Thomson's ‘tame mathematician’, tells me that his appointment, as a refugee German Jew, was only possible because his salary was being paid from US donated money.
5. See, e.g. Howson (Citation1984).
6. Thus the results of repeated SATs testing were readily predicted by those aware of Matthew Arnold's comments on the “payments by results” scheme that “it gives a mechanical turn to the school teaching … and must be trying to the intellectual life of the school”. Moreover, in “the game of mechanical contrivances the teacher will in the end beat us … by [getting] children through the … examination … without their really knowing [anything] of these matters” (quoted in Howson Citation1982 , 121). “History of education” should not be merely an academic pursuit, but on occasion an aid to innovation and a warning of possible undesirable outcomes or even of outright failure.
7. Clarke, who was knighted in 1943, had been appointed professor of education at Southampton (then a university college) in 1906 at the age of 25.
8. I do not know what was intended by the term ‘curriculum’, but I suspect it was more in the spirit of the short-lived 1904 Regulations which laid down rules concerning the subjects to be taught and the hours to be devoted to them in the new secondary schools, rather than the extremely prescriptive demands that followed the 1988 Education Reform Act.
9. By 1947 over 400,000 record cards had been sold to 34 LEAs. These, however, had their critics: teachers complained they took many hours to complete and the County Education Officer for Kent thought ‘the card was of doubtful value as an instrument of educational guidance but extremely serviceable if one's purpose was to stuff a mattress’ (Yates, Citation1971, p. 6).
10. Elizabeth Williams, quoted in Howson Citation1982, 195.
11. The data concerning those who took ordinary degrees in mathematics – which were still popular in those days - have not, to my knowledge, been documented. My memories of Manchester in the early 1950s are that there were about 55 honours and 25 ordinary graduates each year.
12. One exception was Dover Wilson at King's College, London who, when Elizabeth Williams joined the department in the 1930s, stressed that it was the duty of staff to pursue and foster research (Howson, Citation1982, 188–189).
13. This is based on Frobisher and Joy (Citation1978). As the authors suppose in their introduction, it is not 100% accurate but it nevertheless clearly demonstrates the growth of interest in, and training for, mathematics education research. It should be noted that included amongst these statistics are students from Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.
14. It is not clear what Taylor meant by ‘hard’ – did he mean within that subject, for several education staff retained strong links with mathematics and published not so much in mathematics research journals but in publications such as the Mathematical Gazette, or did he mean researchers in mathematics education who published in educational research journals?
15. He progressed from teaching in first primary and then secondary schools to a lectureship at Oxford; after that he became a professor at Bristol, the Director of the London Institute, Principal of London University and Chairman of NFER.
16. For ten years the Schools Council mounted various projects within the field of mathematics education, before becoming the victim of financial stringency and the object of criticism. In 1981 it was replaced by an Examinations Council and a School Curriculum Development Council in which teachers exercised far less power. These bodies disappeared in the aftermath of the 1988 Education Act, by which time the government had taken complete control of the curriculum and examinations.
17. Unfortunately, Skemp (then in Manchester's Psychology Department) could not match his psychological knowledge with a flair for textbook writing. Years later he remarked to me that it was a pity that he could not have been in the SMP team and added his research knowledge to the classroom experience and writing skills that the SMP teachers possessed: an interesting missed opportunity.
18. The results were hardly conclusive: universities were split on the desirability of having double subject A-level mathematics, and on the syllabus as a whole (see Thwaites, Citation1972, 56–60). One professor wanted more manipulation on the grounds that ‘it is perhaps good that students should become proficient with manipulative tricks at school and leave the serious study of mathematics to the university’! Clearly it was impossible to please all the professors all the time.
19. The first SMP series of texts to make serious use of research findings was SMP 11–16, which began work in 1977. Ling (Citation1987, 40) tells how the project drew in particular on the work of the Concepts in Secondary Mathematics and Science Project (CSMS) based at Chelsea College.
20. JRME followed in 1970.
21. Sadly, Brian was prevented from attending the congress by the death of his younger son, Joe.
22. By 1977 the number of US centres and laboratories had decreased to 17, IOWO ceased to exist (but was later replaced by the Freudenthal Institute at Utrecht) and IDM has now all but withered away.
23. Until 1964, when he became the Director of the Nuffield Primary Project, Matthews had been a schoolteacher (and had led the St Dunstan's project). The Nuffield Project had mixed success: the somewhat-elderly staff he recruited had taken very different views of what primary schools needed, and Matthews had resisted calls to produce textbooks. Schools were presented with a vast range of guides, each covering several years of teaching, some appealing and immediately usable and others posing great mathematical problems. On the plus side, however, was the establishment of local centres to help teachers, and these soon spread nation-wide both for secondary as well as primary education.
24. It was only after Exeter that ‘mathematical education’ was replaced by ‘mathematics education’. I can recall Brian Griffiths arguing for this change on the basis that the education was not ‘mathematical’ but was in mathematics.
25. The secretary for this group was Alan Bishop, just one of the up-and-coming researchers and teachers chosen for such posts – others included Margaret Brown and Celia Hoyles. The précis of the group's work, based on Alan Bishop's summary, is still worth reading – everything remains relevant.
26. In fact Eccles was one of the better Ministers of Education. Later he was to increase financial support for research activities; he it was who attempted to establish the Curriculum Study Group within the Ministry and who then responded to the criticisms of teachers and unions.
27. Vaizey should not be dismissed as an educational Philistine. In the late 1960s he and I met when both of us were working on educational development projects.
28. Currently the NCETM offers small grants to encourage “classroom-based teacher research” by teachers from different schools, usually with an HEI partner. It also supports the groups to disseminate the outcomes by display on the NCETM portal or at special events. The NCETM also funds a major collaborative project seeking to investigate and evaluate in terms of impact on teaching, a range of different models for continuing professional development of teachers of mathematics.