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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a Swedish nation-wide professional development on participating teachers’ teaching practice and their knowledge, where collegial work, as a central part of the professional development, is taken into account as a factor to influence the outcome. We conducted statistical analyses (linear mixed models) on observational and interview data from a random selection of 105 teachers (grades 1–10/primary and secondary school). The results show effects on several aspects of teacher knowledge and teacher practice. However, the results show no connections between how the teachers have worked collegially and the observed changes in the teacher's knowledge and practice.

A reader of mathematical text must often switch between reading mathematical symbols and reading words. In this study, five different categories of structural connections between symbols and language, which invite such switches, are presented in a framework. The framework was applied in a study of Swedish mathematics textbooks, where 180 randomly selected pages from different educational stages were analyzed. The results showed a significant change in communication patterns as students progress through school. From a predomination of connections based on proximity found in year two, there is a gradual change to a predomination of symbols interwoven in sentences in year eight. Furthermore, more qualitative investigations of the different connections complemented the quantification, both through further explanations of the quantitative results, and through more examples of differences in communication patterns. The implications for readers of mathematics texts are discussed.

This study is based on a framework of algorithmic and creative mathematical rea- soning and focuses on students’ strategy choices in both practice and test. Previous research indicates that students that practice mathematics with tasks with given solution methods are outperformed in later test by students that have to construct solution methods during practice. Video recordings, students’ written solutions, and student interviews from ten university students provides data on strategy choices. The analysis was carried out to capture students’ strategy choices and reasons for these choices. The results showed that there was no real difference in how the stu- dents solved the tasks in the test. Regardless of practice condition, more or less the same solution strategies were used in the test situation.

This evaluation report was first published in Swedish in 2016 and since then, the Boost for Mathematics has been a topic of interest in several international publications. Because of this interest we have decided to have the original comprehensive evaluation translated into English so that it is accessible to a wider audience.

In mathematical text and talk, natural language is a constant companion to mathematical symbols. The purpose of this study is to identify different types of relations between natural language and symbolic language in mathematics textbooks. Here we focus on the level of integration. We have identified examples of high integration (e.g., when symbols are part of a sentence), medium integration (e.g., when the shifts between natural and symbolic language occurs when switching to a new line), and low integration (e.g., when symbols and written words are connected by the layout).

In this study, we examine how the use of natural language varies, considering the symbolic language in procedural and conceptual aspects of mathematics.

Over the last decades, there has been an on-going international reform for school mathematics, which has, not surprisingly, been difficult to implement. This study focuses on teachers’ interpretation of formal written curriculum documents, especially whether their interpretations align with how a concept (the concept of problem) is conveyed in the documents (in Sweden). The results show that the formal written documents are vague, but that it to some extent conveys the concept of problem as “a task for which the solution method is not known in advance to the solver.” The interviews show that about 53 % of the teachers interpreted problem as “any task,” and that teachers’ interpretationstherefore are not aligned with how the concept is (albeit vaguely) conveyed in the documents.