Teachers' Practice And Students' Learning In The Mexican Programme For Teaching Mathematics With Technology

摘要

Since 1997, an ongoing national programme called Teaching Mathematics with Technology (EMAT) has been introduced in Mexican lower-secondary mathematics classrooms (children 12-15 year-old). The programme introduces a pedagogical model aimed to foster exploratory and collaborative learning through the use of computational tools. In this article, we present some results from an evaluation study that looked at teachers' practice with these tools, their assimilation of the pedagogical model and the impact of the use of the programme on students' learning. The results show that teacher-training remains insufficient and that teachers have great difficulties in changing their practice as conceived by the programme. The use of the technological tools in schools is also very inconsistent. For students, the benefit of the technology-based activities remains difficult to assess, and there is no visible impact on learning as measured by items used in national evaluations (although there seems to be a correlation between the tools used and the learning of different mathematical topics).