Research project Mapping the opportunity gap in mathematics education
The project want to generate a nuanced understanding of how inequity in socio-material conditions can affect students' opportunities to learn mathematics.
The persistent, significant differential achievement in mathematics among groups of students is a global phenomenon raising concerns about equity in education. By understanding and mapping the opportunity gap in mathematics education as a spatially distributed network of multiple socio-material conditions that matter for mathematics achievement, the project wants to broadening concepts and measurements in existing research. The aim is to generating a nuanced and contextualized understanding of how inequity in socio-material conditions relates to the hidden/invisible segregation operating in mathematics education.
Project description
Internationally, students' achievements in mathematics can be linked to differences in students' ability to learn mathematics. This is a consequence of a wide range of social conditions that directly affect students' opportunities to learn mathematics in the classroom. Data from international large-scale measurements (ILSA) provide a basis that can help to understand how social conditions affect students' levels of achievement. However, the data is limited and insufficient when trying to describe and develop a nuanced understanding of differences in students' opportunities to learn mathematics. Investigating this requires new theoretical and methodological approaches that will allow researchers to uncover hidden segregation in mathematics education.
This project brings together a group of international researchers to study the opportunity gap in mathematics education in Sweden. Through the group's opportunity to include newly developed questions and collect geographical data in the Swedish part of an ILSA and combine these with existing data, the project intends to, in a partly new way, investigate inequalities in the Swedish school system. This is planned to be carried out in three interconnected studies that will use structural equation modeling, geographical information systems and social network analysis. The project intends to provide the field with novel theoretical and methodological approaches to large-scale studies of educational inequality.
Project members
Project managers
Hendrik Van Steenbrugge
Senior lecturer
Members
Erika Bullock
Assistant Professor
Marina Toger
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor
Paola Ximena Valero Duenas
Professor
Samuel Sollerman
Director PRIM, Senior lecturer
