Programme

Chair: Benő Csapó, president of the PCPE

Welcome and Opening Remarks: Vanda Lamm, the Vice-President of the MTA

Terezinha Nunes (Professor Emeritus, Department of Education, University of Oxford): When what we know is not what we see: the place of quantitative reasoning in education

Discussants

Csaba Csíkos (University of Szeged)

Eszter Kónya (University of Debrecen)

Abstract

The first researchers in the new science of Psychology at the beginning of the 20^th century were interested in the crucial question of how can we know something that is different from what we see. This question motivated psychological research about the origins of children’s understanding of measurement and of number. After more than a century of research involving collaboration between psychologists, mathematicians, teachers and researchers in different domains of education, the concept of quantitative reasoning has been formulated to help us to understand how what we know can conflict with what we see. However, quantitative reasoning does not have yet a place in education. Eminent mathematicians have argued for schools to become places where students use sophisticated reasoning with elementary mathematics rather than places where students use elementary reasoning with sophisticated mathematics. In this talk, I endeavor to offer a framework for thinking about how education can promote the development of quantitative reasoning, drawing on the currently invisible knowledge about relations between quantities that young children bring to school.

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