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research-article2016
RREXXX10.3102/0091732X16658650Review of Research in EducationReview of Research in EducationSchoenfeld: Research in Mathematics EducationMonth XXXX, Vol. XX, pp. x–xx

Chapter 14
Research in Mathematics Education

Alan H. Schoenfeld
University of California, Berkeley

As one of the three Rs, “’ rithmetic” has always been central to education and education
research. By virtue of that centrality, research in mathematics education has often reflected
and at times led trends in education research. This chapter provides some deep background
on epistemological and other issues that shape current research, with a primary focus on
empirical research, which sprouted and flowered over the past 100 years or so—roughly
coinciding with the existence of the American Educational Research Association as a
professional organization. The author begins by tracing the growth and change in research
in mathematics education and its interdependence with research in education in general
over much of the 20th century, with an emphasis on changes in research perspectives
and methods and the philosophical/empirical/disciplinary approaches that underpin them.
He then turns to an overview of currently flourishing research and some indications of
potentially productive arenas for future work.

D istilling a century of research in mathematics education into some 40 double-

spaced pages calls for difficult decisions. Focusing on history alone would allow
just four pages per decade, with no meaningful discussion of the field’s extraordinary
growth in recent decades. Even a focus on recent research would demand a bird’s-eye
view: Recent handbooks of research in mathematics education, such as English and
Kirshner (2015) or Lester (2007), average 1,000 journal pages in length. Then, there
is the issue of scope. What takes place in schools and classrooms is intimately con-
nected to what happens in society at large. Where do we draw the line—at student
thinking and learning, at the classroom door, at the school, at discussions of policy?
Do we include the interactions of society and schooling? Politics, policy, and the
social environment of education all shape what happens in mathematics classrooms.

Review of Research in Education

March 2016, Vol. 40, pp. 497­–528
DOI: 10.3102/0091732X16658650
© 2016 AERA. http://rre.aera.net

497
498  Review of Research in Education, 40

Some issues, such as equity—or perhaps better put, inequity—cut across all disci-
plines. Here, I focus primarily on research on mathematics education, almost exclu-
sively within the United States.
The first half of this review covers the grand sweep of research on mathematics
education conducted in the United States over much of the 20th century.1 The sec-
ond half discusses selected contemporary issues and trends.

Epistemological Underpinnings
The roots of mathematics education lie in ancient philosophy. Plato’s Meno
(380 B.C.E.), for example, introduced the Socratic dialogue. In conversation,
Socrates induces a slave to “recollect” a special case of the Pythagorean theorem.
Their dialogue illustrates the idea of anamnesis—that the soul is eternal and all
knowing, and that “recollecting” is all that is necessary for learning. The Platonic
view of mathematics in the Meno—that mathematical knowledge is “out there”
in an ideal form, perhaps to be revealed (“recollected” with guidance) but not
discovered—echoes to this day. The idea of individuals building their own
understandings, or of collectives constructing disciplinary practices, is not part
of this picture. This is consequential, in that what one takes to be the nature of
truth and what counts as evidence for it shape what one strives to describe and
measure.
The conception of education research as an empirical discipline is much more
modern. AERA’s (American Educational Research Association) formation in
1916 reflected the coming of age of the empirical approach, in which data matter
and are used to inform and shape policy. In the century since the founding of
AERA, the scope of inquiry into education has expanded. While still grounded
in epistemology (whether explicit or not) and shaped by social contexts, educa-
tion research expanded inwardly to include the study of thinking and learning,
and outwardly to include, for example, sociocultural characterizations of policies
and their impact.

History of Mathematical Education Research

The Early Years
Toward the turn of the 20th century, mass education was an elementary affair,
focused for the most part on the three Rs. In 1890, only 6.7% of the 14-year-olds in
the United States attended high school, and only 3.5% of the 17-year-olds graduated
(Stanic, 1987, p. 150). The vast majority of schoolchildren studied arithmetic with a
practical bent: The main focus of instruction was mastering arithmetic operations for
the commercial marketplace. In contrast, the small fraction of the population that
enrolled in high school (often en route to college) took courses in algebra, geometry,
and physics.
 Schoenfeld: Research in Mathematics Education    499

The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the beginnings of the profes-
sionalization of education, as witnessed by the emergence of a number of societies
devoted to the study of the field of education and to mathematics and mathematics
education in particular. Here is a brief chronology of the emergence of relevant soci-
eties. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) was founded in 1888, its focus
being primarily the advancement of university mathematics. The National Society
for the Study of Education (NSSE), founded by John Dewey, among others, in 1901,
was an organization of “scholars, professional educators, and policy makers dedicated
to the improvement of education research, policy, and practice” (NSSE, 2015). The
Mathematical Association of America was established in 1915, in large measure as
breakaway faction of the AMS, because the AMS had not proved hospitable to a
mathematical/pedagogical focus (Mathematical Association of America, 2015).
This is AERA’s centennial year. Founded in 1916, AERA is “concerned with improv-
ing the educational process by encouraging scholarly inquiry related to education and
evaluation and by promoting the dissemination and practical application of research
results” (AERA, 2016). The NCTM was founded in 1920. As described on its website,
the NCTM is “the public voice of mathematics education, supporting teachers to
ensure equitable mathematics learning of the highest quality for all students through
vision, leadership, professional development, and research” (NCTM, 2016).
The emergence of these societies represented, in large measure, a series of disci-
plinary attempts to gain an orderly perspective on what had, hitherto, been a some-
what unstructured educational context.2 Yearbooks, presidential papers, and other
documents provide a sense of the state of the art at the time. In mathematics and, as
far as one can tell, across all disciplines, the focus was on what should be taught and
how it should be taught—with little attention given to the learner. For example,
NCTM’s (1926/1995) first yearbook was published in 1926. David Eugene Smith
(1925/1995) describes the early chaos:

No secondary school could adjust its work and its program to the requirements of several colleges without
a sort of competence as a pedagogic acrobat that was rare to the point of non-existence. The situation
would have been comic were it not so preposterous. (p. 1)

The need for order gave rise to the existence of the College Entrance Examination
Board and, ultimately, to the growth of schools of education in the universities to
provide agreed-upon backgrounds to teachers. Curricular concerns percolated down-
ward, resulting in the rise of junior high schools and, ultimately, to the reshaping of
elementary mathematics education. By 1926, mathematics curricular foci had shifted
away from the abstract topics (e.g., methods of solving mixture problems, greatest
common divisor, and Gregorian and Julian calendars) to the concrete—the arithme-
tic of home and store, of maintaining a simple bank account, of balancing a check-
book, and other practically oriented applications. This “uniformizing” of curriculum
and assessments, with a focus on the practical, fed naturally into the measurement
regime that typified the first half of the century.
500  Review of Research in Education, 40

Arithmetic and algebra are easy to proceduralize and measure. One can construct
tests, define empirical standards, and see how students and teachers stack up; one can
test varied methods of instruction and see which is better. This was the agenda laid
out by Schorling (1926/1995), who documented the poor performance of students
on a range of mathematical tasks and proposed the following five-point program for
general improvement: (a) develop a consistent set of principles and methods for mak-
ing progress; (b) specify goals clearly; (c) be objective, using empirical studies as the
basis for specifying and refining curricula; (d) “employ certain well accepted princi-
ples from the psychology of drill”; and (e) “construct our teaching materials under
precisely controlled and tested conditions” (p. 72). Each of these agenda items met
with substantial elaboration.
Schorling (1926/1995) laid out 20 rules for drill in careful detail. Here are the first
four, as presented in subheadings in Schorling’s chapter: (a) Drill, to be effective,
must be individual; (b) In general, there should be much practice for a few skills
rather than a little practice for each of many; (c) A drill exercise must be specific; and
(d) A drill exercise must provide a scoring technique so that the pupil may watch his
or her daily growth.
Schorling’s (1926/1995) chapter exemplifies the perspectives underlying the year-
book volume in which it appeared, and much of the spirit of the times. First, math-
ematics itself was taken to be largely procedural. The content to be learned was
conceptualized as a set of operations that could be mastered and used reliably by
students. Second, learning (and the minds that did it) were grossly underconceptual-
ized, if they were conceptualized at all. The psychological underpinnings of learning
were grounded primarily in associationist or behaviorist psychology.3 These views
proved fertile ground for empirical study. Indeed, one of the most telling comments
in NCTM’s first yearbook (1926) is a comment inserted by the editors to frame the
chapter titled “Some Recent Investigations in Arithmetic”:

Detailed investigations and controlled experiments are distinctly the product of the last quarter of a
century. The yearbook would not be truly representative of the recent developments without a sampling of
the newer types of materials that are developing to guide our practice. (p. 166)

Here we see the emergence of scientism, in the name of science—a phenomenon

that would plague education research and practice through the entire 20th century
and beyond. The trappings of science—“objective” measurement and “rigorous”
methods—are easy to adopt, but they may miss the point entirely. The point here is
that empiricism, while essential, can be problematic if not carefully used. What you
choose to look at in the first place and how you think about, represent, and character-
ize what goes on in the minds of learners, are consequential.
We shall return to this issue in the discussion of more recent events, but it must be
noted that the perspective described above was anything but anomalous. In the intro-
duction to the 1930 yearbook of the NSSE, which was devoted to arithmetic, F. B.
Knight (1930a) wrote:
 Schoenfeld: Research in Mathematics Education    501

There has been a conscious attempt to avoid the urging of any point of view not supported by considerable
scientific fact. It has seemed preferable to proceed slowly and on sure ground, to be content with sane and
moderate progress, rather than to expound a theory of instruction which, though supported by fine hopes
and splendid aspirations, has as yet no basis in objective data. (p. 2)

Even so, comments by individual authors pointed to issues that would emerge
more than half a century later as being central to the field’s understandings of teach-
ing and learning. For example, Knight (1930b) himself observed that “a mathemati-
cal description of an arithmetic process does not yield the kind of information about
that process which is an essential basis for its instruction to children” (p. 162). This
could be taken as a precursor of the concept of pedagogical content knowledge
(Shulman, 1986), the idea that teachers’ knowledge includes a range of ways to con-
nect content to student understandings. Greene and Buswell (1930) characterize the
limits of objective testing by indicating that although such tests may indicate what
students failed to get correct, they do not indicate the cause of the errors. The authors
give the example of a fifth-grade student who produced the answer 14 when asked to
subtract 36 from 42:

Judging simply from his answer on a test paper, one would probably say that in addition to the error in the
first combination the student had forgotten to borrow and had for this reason subtracted 3 from 4, getting
1 in the ten’s place.4 What the pupil actually did was this: “Thirty-two to forty-two is ten and four more
(32 to 36) is fourteen.” In such an example as this, simply observing the answer on a test paper does not
help the teacher to understand the difficulty. Nothing short of a detailed individual diagnosis in which the
teacher observes the mental processes of the pupil as he works would throw light on the real difficulties
that are involved. (p. 275)

This last sentence is strikingly modern. It may not anticipate the systematicity of
student errors revealed by later research (e.g., Brown & Burton, 1978), but it cer-
tainly points to the fact that individual students’ thought patterns matter.
Similarly, objective measurement, properly employed, has always been a very use-
ful tool. An example comes from AERA’s first president, Frank Ballou, who was
director of the Massachusetts Department of Educational Investigation and
Measurement in Boston. In Improving Instruction Through Educational Measurement,
Ballou (1916) suggested that (a) the goals for instruction should be established by a
rational policy mechanism, (b) high-quality tests should be developed to capture
student performance, (c) median performance might be considered a goal for all to
achieve over time, and (d) schools whose performance was conspicuously low should
be given guidance and resources for improvement (see Schoenfeld, 2016, for more
details). But it should be noted that the understanding of what constituted school
mathematics and what should be done to measure mathematics performance were
considered unproblematic.
Part of what is interesting about education research in the early years is the ques-
tion of just what was considered mainstream research and what was not. In general,
classroom-based research was not (at least if it took place within a single classroom
502  Review of Research in Education, 40

and without a control group). For that reason, it is worth stopping to examine Harold
Fawcett’s (1938) masterpiece, The Nature of Proof, which appeared in NCTM’s year-
book series. The series editor, W. D. Reeve (1938), noted,

The present study is one in which interest has already been aroused all over the country through the desires
of teachers to find a way not only to teach the important facts of geometry but also to acquaint the pupil
with the kinds of thinking one needs in life situations which can best be learned by a study of geometry.
(p. v)

Fawcett’s (1938) book represents a striking exception to the epistemological zeit-

geist of the first half-century of education research, as well as to then-contemporary
pedagogy. In today’s language, Fawcett wanted students to experience geometry and
geometric thinking as sense-making activities. Geometry was not about Platonic
truths handed down from generation to generation to be memorized or mastered; it
was a rational human creation in which people made carefully considered definitions,
from which certain conclusions followed. Fawcett saw his task as being the initiation
of students into this culture of doing mathematics. To introduce students to the need
for precise definition, he opened the course with a wide-ranging discussion of the
proposition that “awards should be granted for outstanding achievement in the
school” (p. 30). The discussion quickly got muddled: Does performance on the foot-
ball team count as an achievement? What would be outstanding in that case? If the
award is given to a teacher, is the librarian eligible? It became clear to Fawcett’s class
over time that definitions needed to be made, but that the actual nature of the defini-
tion could be somewhat arbitrary (one might consider librarians to be teachers, or
not; one could consider a fly ball that hits the foul pole to be either fair or foul).
However, once the definition is made, that is it; consequences follow directly from
the way the definition is framed. Fawcett then turned to mathematics and had his
students grapple with the issue of what definitions are and how they come about. He
had his students define “adjacent angles”—a challenging task to accomplish precisely!
So the class began, and it continued, as a deep exploration into geometric thinking
and proving. The course description and its assessment (Fawcett employed multiple
measures) were strikingly modern, in both epistemological and pedagogical terms.

Midcentury, Painted With a Broad Brush

The middle of the 20th century saw significant demographic, political, and cur-
ricular changes—but, in large part, stasis with regard to the character of research in
mathematics education. Demographic trends documented by the U.S. Census Bureau
(2015) show significant increases in the number of 25-year-olds who graduated from
high school, from nearly 25% in 1940 to more than 60% in 1974 (and 88% in 2014),
with concomitant increases in college enrollment and graduation rates. What that
meant in midcentury was that high school mathematics, once reserved for the elite,
was now open to (some of ) the masses.5 That caused problems, requiring adjustments.
Also, more advanced mathematics was pushed lower into the curriculum as the
 Schoenfeld: Research in Mathematics Education    503

century passed. At midcentury, for example, calculus was often a course for college
juniors, with “college algebra” and advanced geometry part of the freshman and soph-
omore curricula; today, high school seniors pursuing STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) careers are expected to take calculus. The steady com-
pression of the curriculum consistently moved advanced topics into earlier grades.
And, of course, social context made a difference. Wars—whether hot, cold, or
economic—focus attention on the mathematical and scientific preparedness of
America’s citizenry. After World War II broke out, the U.S. Office of Education and
NCTM collaborated in an effort to characterize the level of mathematical compe-
tency that schools needed to provide, if students were to enter the military with
adequate mathematical preparation (NCTM, 1943). Soviet success in launching
Sputnik on October 4, 1957, marked the start of the space race and major efforts to
rejuvenate STEM education, with coalitions of mathematicians, scientists, and edu-
cators banding together to create new curricula. A series of papers from a National
Academy of Sciences (1997) symposium in recognition of the 40th anniversary of
Sputnik’s launch describes the impact. The science curricula were longer lived than
the mathematics curricula, which came to be known collectively as the “New Math”
in the 1960s. The new math was ultimately discredited in the public eye and replaced
by the “back to basics” movement in the 1970s.
In short, what we see at midcentury is social, political, and curricular upheaval.
What we see in mathematics education research is multivocal and nonconvergent.
Two synoptic sources come from NCTM and NSSE. The very first sentence of
NCTM’s 21st yearbook (Fehr, 1953/1995a) announces improbable ambitions:
“How does the human brain and nervous system acquire its store of knowledge?”6
(p. vii). The first chapter, “Theories of Learning Related to the Field of Mathematics”
(Fehr, 1953/1995b) begins with what is known about the physiology of the brain,
but rapidly acknowledges “how the physical behavior of this vast network of nerves
in the brain and nervous system produces the response a2 − b2 is (a − b)(a + b) is
totally unknown” (p. 2) and will be a long time coming. There are disquisitions on
animal learning, conditioning, connectionism, field theories, and more; there are
invocations of introspection and John Dewey’s (1910) How We Think and Gestaltism,
referencing Jacques Hadamard’s (1949) The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical
Field. But one is left without much assistance regarding either how thinking and
learning take place or how to improve them. In the rest of the yearbook, one finds
chapters on motivation, sensory learning (a concept that is in some ways an anteced-
ent of contemporary ideas on embodied cognition), the role of language, the role of
drill, transfer, problem solving, and more. But productive suggestions grounded in
actual observations of teaching and learning are not to be found.
The Gestaltists are a new entry in the historical mix. Hadamard (1949) and
Wertheimer (1945) are the two primary mathematical exponents, building on and
synergistic with efforts by Köhler (1947) and Duncker (1945). Hadamard’s famous
reflections on discovery (having immersed himself in a difficult problem and then
put it aside for a while, he saw the elements of a solution in a flash, and verified them
504  Review of Research in Education, 40

at leisure) were corroborated by anecdotal conversations with others and codified as

a four-step model of problem solving: (a) preparation, which involves immersion in
the problem; (b) incubation, which involves letting the subconscious mind work on
the problem; (c) illumination or inspiration, which produces a solution; and (d) veri-
fication. I will turn to theoretical and methodological issues concerning all of the
groups discussed here at the end of this section.
The 1951 NSSE yearbook, which focused on the teaching of arithmetic, paints a
different picture of the same scene. Buswell (1951) addresses conflicts between adher-
ents of associationism and Gestaltism as follows:

The very reason that there are conflicting theories of learning is that some theories seem to afford a better
explanation of certain aspects or types of learning, while other theories stress the application of pertinent
evidence or accepted principles to other aspects and types of learning. It should be remembered that the
factual data on which all theories must be based are the same and equally accessible to all psychologists.
Theories grow and are popularized because of their particular value in explaining the facts, but they are not
always applied with equal emphasis to the whole range of facts. (p. 144)

Looking ahead to the conflicts that took place in the 1990s between perspectives on
what counts in mathematics instruction (aka the math wars; see Schoenfeld, 2004),
between phonics and whole language (aka the reading wars; see Pearson, 2004), and
between some cognitive and situated learning theorists (see, e.g., Anderson, Reder, &
Simon, 1996; Greeno, 1997), we see the wisdom of Buswell’s perspective.
Likewise, in a remarkably prescient comment, Harold Fawcett (1951.) proposes
that research on arithmetic should take place in “actual classroom situations under
the direction of teachers interested in organizing their program in such a manner as
to learn and record the thought processes of their students as their number concepts
become enriched through guided experience,” and that the sources of data should
include accurate documentation of student thinking: “If a child could be encouraged
to talk as he works, to ‘think out loud,’ and if a recording could be made, the results
would be helpful” (p. 285). It would be some years before these became accepted as
mainstream techniques.7
Our final stop in the midcentury time band is the 1970 NSSE yearbook (Begle,
1970). That yearbook is distinctive for the ways in which it highlights the multivocal-
ism of the mathematics and mathematics education research communities at the
time, demonstrates the ways in which curricular activities were shaped by aspects of
the larger social context, and offers inklings of perspectives that would flower in the
late 20th and early 21st centuries. At the same time, it is notable for the ways in
which it reflects the dominant social narrative. The Sputnik era was concurrent with
the civil rights era. A social history of the time, emphasizing the civil rights struggles
of the 1950s and 1960s, tells a story very different from the one told by the yearbook
(e.g., Martin, 2013). More generally, there is a vibrant literature both in mathematics
education research (e.g., Berry, Ellis, & Hughes, 2014; Martin, 2012; Stinson &
Bullock, 2012) and in education research more broadly that offers counternarratives
to the mainstream story.
 Schoenfeld: Research in Mathematics Education    505

The NSSE yearbook reflects the American mathematical community’s reaction to

Sputnik. Post-Sputnik reform was undergirded by the desire to restructure education
in ways that created a much more mathematically and scientifically literate populace.
This, for mathematicians, meant focusing on mathematical structure. Armed with the
idea of a “spiral curriculum” as advanced by Bruner (1960), mathematicians began
“with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually
honest form to any child at any stage of development” (p. 33). They believed that “a
curriculum as it develops should revisit basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them
until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them” (p. 13).
The NSSE yearbook focused on underlying issues of mathematical structure in all
mathematical K–12 content areas. These included the study of sets, primes, and
clock arithmetic in the early grades, and in algebra, the study of groups, fields, com-
plex numbers, vector spaces, and a collection of vector-related topics that, today, are
typically seen in collegiate linear algebra courses at the sophomore level. A significant
part of the volume is devoted to elaborating on mathematical structure and how to
implement and evaluate these new ideas. With one notable exception—a forward-
looking chapter titled “Psychology and Mathematics Education,” by Lee Shulman
(1970)—students and student thinking did not receive major focal attention.
Shulman indicated the fundamental importance of an epistemological stance in
shaping how people go about their educational work. He observed that experimental
psychology was not at a point where it could make direct contributions to the prac-
tice of education, because laboratory studies do not reflect the complexity of class-
room learning environments. Echoing Buswell (1951), he noted that carefully
conducted empirical studies were needed to resolve questions of what works best in
what circumstances.

The Latter 20th and Early 21st Centuries: A New Field and
an Explosion of Knowledge
Until the latter part of the 20th century, research in mathematics education was
an orphan discipline, with neither an identity nor a home. It had roots in philosophy,
although those were often not explicitly recognized; it was shaped by mathematicians
and psychologists; it drew on empirical methods from the fields of statistics, measure-
ment, and psychology. Historically, many education researchers focused on mathe-
matics education, but those practitioners had no center of gravity—no professional
organizations, no journals of their own. Then, just as education as a field had become
professionalized in the early 20th century, mathematics education came together as a
discipline in the 1960s and 1970s.
The premier American mathematics education research journal—Journal for
Research in Mathematics Education (JRME)—was first published in 1970. Johnson,
Romberg, and Scandura (1994) provide a retrospective of the conditions that led to
its creation, which was, to put it simply, a long haul reflective of the state of the field.
The article is well worth reading for the historical context; given the large number of
506  Review of Research in Education, 40

high-quality mathematics education journals today, it may be as difficult for emerg-

ing researchers to imagine an intellectual universe without such journals as it is for
teenagers to imagine a world without cell phones.
The emergence of JRME was part of the zeitgeist. Educational Studies in
Mathematics published its first issue in 1968, and the first International Congress on
Mathematics Education was held in Lyon, France, in 1969; the first issue of the
Zentralblatt für Didaktik der Mathematik (now known as ZDM) was published in
1969. Mathematics education research now had a home base. It had one within
AERA as well. The Special Interest Group for Research in Mathematics Education
was one of the first to be founded after AERA established Special Interest Groups in
1971.
Much of the work done in the United States in the 1970s, however, was of the
“scientific” type that dominated math-ed research in the earlier parts of the century:
laboratory studies, controlled experiments, and factor analyses. Works such as
Piaget’s (1952) The Child’s Conception of Number and his 1960 volume The Child’s
Conception of Geometry had yet to have much of an impact in the United States.
Similarly, Jeremy Kilpatrick and Izsak Wirszup worked to bring the work of the
Soviets to the attention of the mathematics education community in the United
States (e.g., Kilpatrick & Wirszup, 1969, the first of 14 volumes translated from the
Russian; Krutetskii, 1976), but the research community as a whole was not ready for
that kind of work.
The years around 1980 proved to be a turning point for the field. In a review of
research on problem solving, Kilpatrick (1978) decried the sterility of research con-
ducted under the banner of “science,” suggesting that less “rigor” and more creativity
in research would be a good thing for the field. Similarly, in a review of a volume
reporting problem-solving studies conducted between 1968 and 1977, Schoenfeld
(1981) lamented the absence of theory in “Treatment A versus Treatment B” and
factor-analytic statistical studies, and the insular character of research in mathematics
education:

The name Piaget is not to be found once in a set of references that is 31 pages long! There are any number
of areas in problem solving in which it is difficult if not impossible to do good research unless one is
familiar with related research in the “cognitive sciences.” . . . Modeling techniques in artificial intelligence
and information-processing psychology are more advanced than our own. Others may not directly address
our most important questions, but they can provide us help along the way. (p. 389)

In 1980, the field’s first de facto research handbook was published, marking the
boundary between the precognitive and cognitive eras. In 487 pages, Research in
Mathematics Education (Shumway, 1980) summarized the state of the art prior to
1980. For example, David Johnson (1980b), in his chapter “Types of Research,”
listed five basic categories of education research:

The survey (to establish norms and baseline data . . . ), the experiment (involves the careful control of
variables in an experimental situation . . . ), the case study (involves the intensive study of individuals or
 Schoenfeld: Research in Mathematics Education    507

situations . . . ), evaluation (which, unlike those types considered up to this point, is primarily concerned
with changes that occur over time . . . ), and philosophical or historical research. (pp. 21–24)8

There are constraints even there: In “The Research Process,” Johnson (1980a) focuses
almost exclusively on statistical methods, with an emphasis on how to choose the
right “instruments” to measure the right “variables” when doing statistical analyses.
Neither of these two chapters, which serve as the research framing for the volume,
discusses the study of mental processes.

The Cognitive Revolution

Shumway’s (1980) volume represents the end of one era and the beginning of
another—the era of the cognitive sciences in education. There is an interesting irony
in the way that the cognitive sciences emerged, breaking the hold that behaviorism
had on psychology.9 A tenet of radical behaviorism (Skinner, 1945, 1958) was that
constructs such as “mind” were unnecessary: What counted in explaining people’s
actions were characterizations of overt, scientifically describable behaviors.
That, precisely, is what artificial intelligence (AI) provided. Pioneering AI pro-
grams, such as Newell and Simon’s (1972) General Problem Solver (GPS) solved
“cryptarithmetic” problems, played chess, and proved theorems in logic. The irony is
that the structure of the algorithms that GPS employed to solve problems was
abstracted from systematic observations of human beings solving problems. That is,
GPS’s overt, scientifically describable problem-solving strategies came from abstrac-
tions of the same strategies in humans. Thus, the study of human thought processes
was legitimized—in large measure by the creation of “machines who think” (e.g.,
McCorduck, 1979).
Mathematics education and AI made for a natural partnership. In the late 1970s,
mathematics education was just emerging from the “back to basics” movement.
Signaling a major change of course, NCTM’s An Agenda for Action (1980) made its
first recommendation as follows: “Problem solving must be the focus of school math-
ematics in the 1980s” (p. 2). The primary resource for thinking about problem solv-
ing was the work of George Pólya (1945), whose How to Solve It introduced the
notion of “heuristic strategies”—patterns of productive thinking that often help one
better understand and/or make progress toward the solution of a problem. Examples
of heuristic strategies include drawing diagrams, solving easier related problems and
exploiting either the methods or the results thereof, and establishing subgoals (trying
to get part of the way to a solution and then moving on from there).
Although it worked at a much finer level of grain size than Pólya, AI had focused,
successfully, on the use of certain problem-solving heuristics (Newell, 1983; Sleeman
& Brown, 1982). Moreover, AI and cognitive science, more generally, offered math-
ematics educators a number of tools and methods that substantially expanded the
math-ed repertoire. For example, protocol analysis—examining records of people
solving problems “out loud” to look for patterns of behavior—became a tool available
508  Review of Research in Education, 40

to the research community; so did the very idea of modeling people’s mathematical
behavior.
As one example of the intersection, Schoenfeld’s (1985) research on mathematical
problem solving was motivated directly by the desire to make Pólya-type heuristics
implementable, using AI-like methods to delineate the mechanisms by which the
strategies could be implemented. If protocol analysis could work with an eye toward
machine implementation, why not use it with an eye toward human implementa-
tion? That was the idea behind a 10-year program of research and development, in
which theoretical development and testing took place amid the dialectic between
laboratory work and the ongoing development of my problem-solving courses, in
what was effectively an early series of design experiments (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa,
Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003; Schoenfeld, 2006). Once the door opened to looking
closely at people’s mathematical activity (whether in the laboratory or the classroom),
a range of discoveries followed. There was the specification of problem-solving strate-
gies to the point that they could be learned and used. There was the documentation
of the fact that difficulties with monitoring and self-regulation (aspects of metacogni-
tion) could cause problem-solving failure, despite individuals having the knowledge
to solve problems; and there was evidence that people’s belief systems (about them-
selves and about what it meant to learn and do mathematics) shaped their mathemat-
ical behavior in fundamental ways. More broadly, the rapprochement between
mathematics education research and work in the emerging cognitive sciences opened
up a spectrum of research methods and foci that expanded the scope of the enterprise
in tremendously productive ways. This was true in a broader sense as well: Research
on reading and writing changed in comparable ways.
The world of mathematics education changed radically during the 1980s, as did
education research in general. By the end of the decade, student thinking was a major
focus of inquiry. Piagetian studies had entered the mainstream, with early beachheads
established in the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., Ginsburg & Opper, 1969) and with
methods such as the clinical interview coming into wide use (Ginsburg, 1981). The
cognitive perspective was well established, with constructivist underpinnings and the
understanding that investigations of student thinking in general required attention to
the knowledge base, problem-solving strategies, metacognition, and belief systems
(Schoenfeld, 1985; Silver, 1985). Moreover, there was the recognition that investiga-
tions into thinking and learning needed to be interdisciplinary—that mathematics edu-
cation was part of a larger enterprise, cognitive science and education.10
By the mid-1980s, NCTM was in a position to take stock and establish a research
agenda for the field. It held a series of conferences that led to a five-volume collection,
with specific volumes devoted to the teaching and assessing of mathematical problem
solving (Charles & Silver, 1988), effective mathematics teaching (Grouws, Cooney, &
Jones, 1988), learning and teaching of algebra (Wagner & Kieran, 1988), and number
concepts and operations in the middle grades (Hiebert & Behr, 1988), along with a
volume setting a general agenda for mathematics education research (Sowder, 1989).
 Schoenfeld: Research in Mathematics Education    509

The developments in research in mathematics education beginning in the 1980s

drew from and contributed to developments in research in education in general. The
NCTM research-agenda volume on problem solving (Charles & Silver, 1988) pro-
vides a case example. Chapter topics include warrants for the study of mathematical
epistemology (Greeno, 1988); treating mathematics as an ill-structured discipline
(Resnick, 1988); treating problem solving as an everyday practice (Lave, Smith, &
Butler, 1988); problem solving in contexts (Schoenfeld, 1988); metacognition
(Campione, Brown, & McConnell, 1988); assessment (Marshall, 1988; Silver &
Kilpatrick, 1988); reframing teaching as an act of problem solving (Carpenter, 1988);
and studies of teachers’ beliefs and conceptions (Thompson, 1988). Each of these
chapters was part of something larger, which cut across all of research in education
and, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, was flowering in multi- or interdisciplinary
research in education.
The chapters by Greeno (1988) and Resnick (1988), for example, reflected
attempts to understand authentic disciplinary practices and to conceptualize class-
room activities that would enable students to engage in a wide range of disciplines,
such as reading and writing, history, social studies, and science, in more authentic
ways. (Resnick & Klopfer, 1989, offer characterizations of parallel attempts in a
range of disciplines.) The chapter by Lave et al. (1988) was an early attempt to char-
acterize learning environments in which mathematics was seen as something that
developed and had meaning within real contexts. This was part of a larger movement
toward exploring everyday cognition (Rogoff & Lave, 1984) and its flip side, the
creation of learning environments for cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, &
Newman, 1989). All of these were part of the emerging situative perspective (e.g.,
Greeno, Collins, & Resnick, 1996). Assessment was, at long last, being problema-
tized; the challenge addressed by Marshall (1988) and Silver and Kilpatrick (1988)
was, and is, to craft assessments that capture what it means to engage in a discipline.
That issue is still very much with us (see, e.g., Ercikan, 2015).
Finally, studies of teachers and teaching, as reflected in the chapters by Carpenter
(1988) and Thompson (1988), were leaving behind the counting and correlational
techniques of earlier days (e.g., the “process–product paradigm,” which sought cor-
relations between teacher actions and student outcomes) and beginning to treat
teachers as problem solvers and decision makers. Mathematics education was part
and parcel of a huge expansion of research on teaching, as reflected in the third edi-
tion of the Handbook of Research on Teaching (Wittrock, 1986). The theme of teacher
decision making would, like all of the themes highlighted here, become a mainstream
topic in education research.
In sum, research in mathematics education underwent a major transformation
over the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Much was unsettled, but the field had
broken free of the paradigmatic straightjackets that dominated NCTM’s 1980 vol-
ume, Research in Mathematics Education (Shumway, 1980), and it was embarking on
many new directions that flourish to this day. One indication of the growth of the
510  Review of Research in Education, 40

field is the size of the 1992 Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and
Learning (Grouws, 1992), which is at least three times the size of its antecedent, con-
taining 771 pages (8½” × 11”) filled with small type. The coverage is far broader,
including not only direct descendants of the topics in the earlier volume (history,
epistemology, studies of teaching and learning) but also innovative expansions of
those topics (e.g., studies of teaching including discussions of the culture of the
mathematics classroom and of teacher beliefs, e.g., Thompson, 1984, 1988) and full-
fledged discussions of “critical issues” that had barely been on the horizon as subjects
of research a mere decade before—technology and mathematics education; ethno-
mathematics and everyday cognition; research on affect in mathematics education;
mathematics and gender; race, ethnicity, social class, and achievement in mathemat-
ics; and theorizing assessment of students’ knowledge in mathematics. All these chap-
ters represented well-grounded but early explorations into new areas, which would
flourish over the next two decades. But this was only the beginning.
Of fundamental importance is the fact that mathematics education had reached
the point where research and practice could work together in productive dialectic.
Research could inform practice in productive ways, and practice, in turn, could serve
as the site for meaningful research. Prior to the 1980s, research and development had
been at some remove—and, because of the differences in context, the results of labo-
ratory research typically failed to apply meaningfully in classrooms. In addition, the
statistical methods employed in classroom studies often failed to capture what really
mattered. But over the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st century,
research in mathematics education, and in education in general, took place increas-
ingly in “Pasteur’s quadrant” (Stokes, 1997),11 attending simultaneously to issues of
foundational knowledge and considerations of use.
This dialectic played out in multiple ways as the field flowered. For example, early
studies of children’s developing understandings of addition and subtraction of whole
numbers (see Carpenter, 1985) took place in the laboratory. Carpenter, Fennema,
Franke, and colleagues reasoned that such knowledge, in the hands of teachers, could
produce instruction that was more responsive to students’ understandings. They pro-
duced Cognitively Guided Instruction, a professional development program for
teachers that was “designed to help teachers understand student thinking and use this
knowledge to make instructional decisions” (Carpenter & Fennema, 1992, p. 457),
and which had significant positive impact on student learning (see, e.g., Carpenter &
Fennema, 1992; Carpenter, Fennema, & Franke, 1996).
More broadly, studies of teacher knowledge and beliefs and of how they played
out in instruction grew in scope and depth. Early pioneering studies by Thompson
(1984, 1988; see Thompson, 1992, for a review) established the central, though
subtle, role that teachers’ beliefs about mathematics and mathematics teaching play
in shaping their instructional practice. The works of Ball (1993, 1997) and Lampert
(1985; see also Ball & Lampert, 1999) elaborated on the complexity of teaching,
documenting both the knowledge and the subtlety of the decision making required.
 Schoenfeld: Research in Mathematics Education    511

Lampert’s 2001 book Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching provides an
extraordinarily rich characterization of the day-by-day, weekly, and yearly goals that
teachers have for their students, and the knowledge and beliefs they bring to bear in
the service of those goals. Teacher noticing (Mason, 2002; Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp,
2010) became established as a line of inquiry. In a major cross-cultural study, Stigler
and Hiebert (1999) provided evidence that teaching practices are much more closely
related within a nation’s borders than between nations. In sum, the field’s under-
standing of teaching grew tremendously, in both scope and detail.
A watershed event, politically and intellectually, was the publication of the NCTM
Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics in 1989. The standards
were NCTM’s attempt to enhance the quality of mathematics instruction nation-
wide. They were produced as a partial response to A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for
Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), an
influential report that decried the state of American education in a time of economic
crisis. An orchestrated response through federal agencies such as the National Science
Foundation was not possible at the time (see Schoenfeld, 2004, for details), so it fell
to the mathematics education research community to make change.
The NCTM standards represented a radical shift in the ways that curriculum
specifications were put forward. Curriculum specifications in general were nothing
new: Ever since the Committee of Ten (National Education Association, 1894) set
forth desiderata for school curricula in a wide range of content areas, representatives
of various fields have convened periodically to identify what should be taught. But all
such documents prior to the publication of the NCTM standards focused on identi-
fying the content that students should learn; for example, the Committee of Ten
report had sections on arithmetic, concrete geometry, algebra, and formal geometry.
The standards did, of course, list such content. But in addition, they focused heavily
on the processes of doing mathematics in which students should engage to become
mathematically proficient: mathematical problem solving, mathematical communi-
cation, mathematical reasoning, and making mathematical connections. Learning
mathematics was redefined to mean learning the processes of doing mathematics as
well as learning the content—a fundamental shift grounded in the work produced by
the research community.

The Standards and Their Impact

The NCTM standards had tremendous impact, catalyzing what has been called
the standards movement. The 1990s saw the creation of the National Science
Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996), the Standards for the
English Language Arts (National Council of Teachers of English, 1996), the National
Standards for History (National Center for History in the Schools, 1996), and more.
For better or for worse, the notion of standards became enshrined in law, both in the
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and in Race to the Top, part of the American
512  Review of Research in Education, 40

Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Race to the Top gave rise to the Common
Core State Standards for mathematics and English language arts (Common Core
State Standards Initiative, 2010a, 2010b) and the Next Generation Science Standards
(NGSS Lead States, 2013).
The standards movement took directions that were not predicted in 1989 with the
publication of the original standards. NCTM (1989) defined “standard” as follows:
“A standard is a statement that can be used to judge the quality of a mathematics cur-
riculum or methods of evaluation. Thus, standards are statements about what is val-
ued” (p. 2). The high-stakes accountability measures that were so central to No Child
Left Behind and Race to the Top were not part of the original plan at all. Another
unintended consequence was the math wars, which arose as part of a conservative
backlash to the process-oriented parts of the NCTM Standards (these wars were part
of the zeitgeist, parallel to the reading wars; see Schoenfeld & Pearson, 2009). What
is interesting, and saddening, is that the math wars took place in the absence of data.
The literature leading to the original Standards provided clear documentation of the
difficulties caused by traditional curricula and noted the positive impact of instances
of practice consistent with the ideas in the Standards—but, as there were no curricula
designed along the lines of the Standards, the evidence in favor of such curricula was
circumstantial. “Standards-based” curricula were developed and field tested during
the 1990s, while the math wars raged. The first clear evidence emerged with the
publication of Senk and Thompson (2003). All of the standards-based curricula
examined by Senk and Thompson offered “balanced diets” of skills, concepts, and
problem solving. Across the board, evaluations indicated that students who learned
from these curricula did about as well on tests of skills as students who learned from
more traditional, skills-oriented curricula—and they outperformed those students on
tests of conceptual understanding and problem solving.

Continued Growth
By the 1990s, research in mathematics education had undergone a significant
transformation and expansion, which has continued to the present. The Second
Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (Lester, 2007) grew to
two large volumes, covering more territory in more depth. Some of the work was
distinctively mathematical, but much of it reflected the expansion of education
research as a whole. The section titles of this handbook illustrate the broad range of
research in mathematics education now being conducted. Part I, on foundations, is
general. The opening chapter, by Paul Cobb (2007), whose subtitle is “Coping With
Multiple Theoretical Perspectives,” addresses theoretical/epistemological pluralism
by noting the contexts in which various approaches to studying human behavior—
including experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, sociocultural theory, and
distributed cognition—all contribute to our understanding. Silver and Herbst (2007)
expand the discussion by considering the dialectic between theory making and issues
of research and practice. They note that theories exist at various levels of detail and