My research interests span mainly over three areas: mathematical reasoning, affect, and gender. A common theme in my research is looking at factors for members' participation in mathematics. I'm at the editorial board in mathematics education for Educational Studies in Mathematics and the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Differences in grade 7 students’ understanding of the equal sign

  2022. Lovisa Sumpter, Anna Löwenhielm. Mathematical Thinking and Learning

  Article

  This paper studies grade 7 (age 13) students’ expressed understanding about the equal sign/notion of equivalence in order to investigate what aspects of the concept that could be seen as an established knowledge at lower secondary school/middle school. Using items from different instruments and combining these to a new one that covered a broad spectrum of procedural and conceptual knowledge, we collected data from 159 students. The different statistical tests showed that if focusing only on separate items, it could confirm that students could be seen either having operational or relational understanding of the equal sign. However, when taking all results into account using several analyses, students’ understanding appear to be much more complex. Instead of a dichotomized view, students’ expressed knowledge of mathematical equivalence should be seen as a continuum.

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• Changes in affect: patterns in Grade 4 and Grade 8 students’ expressed emotional directions

  2023. Lovisa Sumpter, Samuel Sollerman. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology

  Article

  This paper targets patterns of expressed emotional directions towards mathematics. By using TIMSS data and recoding two of the instruments, we compared responses from the same student cohort in Grade 4 (11 years old) and Grade 8 (15 years old) in Sweden. Two hypotheses were tested: negative emotions including negative motivations increase with age, and there will be gender differences. By using statistical analyses, including Cramer’s V, the two hypotheses were confirmed. The results also illuminated patterns within the responses, such that boys and girls in Grade 4 differ in expressed intrinsic motivation but not extrinsic motivation. There are also indications that girls might be more likely to form negative emotional directions between grades 4 and 8 than boys, and some implications of this is discussed. 

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• Algebraic and fractional thinking in collective mathematical reasoning

  2021. Helena Eriksson, Lovisa Sumpter. Educational Studies in Mathematics

  Article

  This study examines the collective mathematical reasoning when students and teachers in grade 3, 4, and 5 explore fractions derived from length comparisons, in a task inspired by the El´konin and Davydov curriculum. The analysis showed that the mathematical reasoning was  mainly anchored in mathematical properties related to fractional or algebraic thinking. Further analysis showed that these arguments were characterised by interplay between fractional and algebraic thinking except in the conclusion stage. In the conclusion and the evaluative arguments, these two types of thinking appeared to be intertwined. Another result is the discovery of a new type of argument, identifying arguments, which deals with  the first step in task solving. Here, the different types of arguments, including the identifying arguments, were not initiated only by the teachers but also by the students, this in a multilingual classroom with a large proportion of students newly arrived. Compared to earlier research, this study offer a more detailed analysis of of algebraic and fractional thinking including possible patterns within the collective mathematical reasoning. An implication of this is that algebraic and fractional thinking appear to be more intertwined than previous suggested.

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Show all publications by Lovisa Sumpter at Stockholm University