Adults Learning Mathematics in School and Everyday Life
- Social and affective conditions of their learning processes
Where, how and why do adult men and women learn mathematics – or not- and change – or not- their attitudes  and self-perceptions in relation to mathematics? The background to these questions is the changing demand for adults’ competences and qualifications in functional mathematical skills and understandings (numeracy) as a result of the transition from an industrial society into a knowledge (or information) society.
        The objective of the research project is to contribute to answering these questions through the establishment of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to describe, analyse and understand the conditions of adults’ learning processes – including social and affective aspects. This is to be done both within the frame of formalised mathematics education and as informal mathematics learning in the communities of everyday practice. In investigations and theoretical constructions, the main stress will be laid on those types of learning processes that are also intended to lead to a vocational qualification e.g. learning directed towards the labour market.
        Gender will be an explicit dimension throughout the whole project. The aim is to establish a theoretical framework for a mathematics-containing adult education building on objective societal relevance and subjective relevance to the participants. The normative point of departure will be the difficulties that mathematics has to fit with (the concerns and constraints of) adults -  rather than adults’ difficulties with mathematics.  The project will be carried out through an international research network (Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, United Kingdom) and in co-operation with workplaces, teachers in adult education and others. The theory construction and re-construction will iterate in continual interplay with qualitative studies (observations of in educational & workplace settings and life history interviews) and the collation of existing quantitative data concerning adults’ numeracy.
        The research project was supported financially by the Danish Research Council of Humanities  in 2003-2004 and it was part of the research initiated by the Centre for Research in Learning Mathematics, Roskilde University, Denmark, in 2003-2005.  At the 10th International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME10) in 2004, three members of the research network (Tine Wedege, Jeff Evans og Gail E. FitzSimons) were appointed for the organising team of Topic Study Group 6, Adult and lifelong mathematics Education. With support from Malmö University, the research is resumed in 2007.

Research network

Dr. Tine Wedege, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden
Until 2005: Centre for Research in Learning Mathematics, Roskilde University, Denmark (responsible to the research council)

Dr. Jeff Evans, Mathematics and Statistics Group, Middlesex University Business School, London, United Kingdom

Dr. Gail E. FitzSimons, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Victoria, Australia

Dr. Mieke van Groenestijn, Utrecht University of Professional Education, The Netherlands

Also co-operating in the collation of the quantitative data in the project:

Professor Inge Henningsen, Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark