Enhancing functional thinking from primary to upper secondary school (FunThink)

The main goal of the project is to improve functional thinking from a transnational perspective drawing on the partners’ specific and complementary expertise. Therefore, one of the project’s objectives is to develop digital-embodied, situated learning environments for inquiry that can be implemented in mathematics classrooms from primary to upper secondary school in order to support students’ functional thinking. These learning environments will innovatively combine promising elements such as learning with digital tools, real-world situations and embodied activities through inquiry that all have empirically proven their benefit in teaching about functions but have never been merged in a coherent way. Moreover, they will be worked out – alongside extensive teacher guides – in the sense of a comprehensive learning trajectory, i.e., they will enhance functional thinking in a coherent and continuous way bridging between different school grades, and hence, overcoming teaching different function classes and aspects in an isolated, non-interrelated way. As a further project objective, the conception of a corresponding pre-service teacher course is intended to enable pre-service teachers to effectively enhance their future students’ functional thinking through these learning environments. Particularly edited classroom videos showing more and less effective implementations of the learning environments will particularly encourage the reflection and professional exchange between the course participants about supporting students’ functional thinking – an important prerequisite for their future professional success.