HAL Id: hal-01349219
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01349219
Submitted on 27 Jul 2016
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.
L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Geometry in the secondary school curriculum and in
progression to university
Evelyne Barbin, Leo Rogers
To cite this version:
Evelyne Barbin, Leo Rogers. Geometry in the secondary school curriculum and in progression to university. History and Pedagogy of Mathematics, Jul 2016, Montpellier, France. �hal-01349219�
GEOMETRY IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL
CURRICULUM AND IN PROGRESSION TO UNIVERSITY
Discussion Group 1
Évelyne BARBIN, Leo ROGERS
IREM & Laboratory LMJL, University of Nantes, France evelyne.barbin@wanadoo.fr
University of Oxford, United Kingdom leorogers@appleinter.net
ABSTRACT
There has been considerable debate in recent years showing concerns about the place of geometry in the general school curriculum. The impression that the place of geometry in the curriculum, in programmes of study for school students, and in the courses for training teachers has significantly diminished in status. Furthermore, the impression the lack of a coherent geometrical education in school is a factor that is deleterious to many students’ progress in their university education. One key factor in this context is the great concern over students’ ability to understand the purpose and nature of ‘proof’ in mathematics.
In order to begin to understand whether, and to what extent, many of these concerns may be shared among colleagues, we devised and circulated a Questionnaire that was sent out to colleagues between August 2015 and March 2016. Until now, we have received 24 answers from 23 countries all other the world. The Questionnaire has two main areas of investigation where colleagues have been asked to comment upon the following themes.
1 Geometry teaching in school from 1970 to 2015
There have been considerable changes in most countries’ school curriculum since 1970, and this has caused (or been caused by) political or institutional changes affecting school systems.
These changes have had an effect on the presentation of geometry in school text-books and also on the training of teachers.
2 Geometry in your country now
What kind of geometry is taught at different stages (or pupils’ ages) in the school curriculum: for example, deductive geometry, transformation geometry, analytical geometry, vector-based geometry.
What software systems are used in the teaching and learning of geometry: for example, Cabri, Geometers Sketchpad, Geogebra.
Colleagues were also asked whether they felt that currently, students having little experience of geometry when they enter university, that this lack of geometrical experience is detrimental to their progress at university.
We thank all our colleagues who have already contributed to this enquiry; detailed analysis of the data will become available later.
If you are interested in participating in this debate, please write to Évelyne Barbin and Leo Rogers.
