The authors of this volume claim that mathematics can be usefully re-conceptualized as a special form of communication. As a result, the familiar discussion of mental schemes, misconceptions, and cognitive conflict is transformed into a consideration of activity, patterns of interaction, and communication failure. By equating thinking with communicating, the discursive approach also deconstructs the problematic dichotomy between "individual" and "social" research perspectives. Although eac...

Research for Educational Change presents ways in which educational research can fulfil its commitments to educational practice. Focussing its discussion within the context of mathematics education, it argues that while research-generated insights can have beneficial effects on learning and teaching, the question of how these effects are to be generated and sustained is far from evident. The question of how to turn research into educational improvement is discussed here in the cont...

Our objective is to publish a book that lays out the theoretical constructs and research methodologies within mathematics education that have been developed by Paul Cobb and explains the process of their development. We propose to do so by including papers in which Cobb introduced new theoretical perspectives and methodologies into the literature, each preceded by a substantive accompanying introductory paper that explains the motivation/rationale for developing the new perspectives and/or...