Table of contents:
What levels of schooling or age groups do they have as their theme (if any at all!)
One article mentions work with grade 2 students, but otherwise, there aren't many. It seems like the journal is mostly isolated from classroom education
What kinds of issues are addressed? How are these distinctive?
The issues addressed are ethnomathematics, classroom teaching, and existence of mathematics education.
Articles:
How long are the articles?
About 5 pages each
Are they usually illustrated (and if so, how?)
Geometry and ethnomathematics articles have illustrations if any; most articles end with a quote or an image.
Are there a lot of references cited?
There are less than ten references for each article. What is the citation style? I looked into Turabian, MLA, Chicago, AMS... it doesn't seem like any of these!
Are there subheadings on the articles? If so, are they the subheadings that you expect, or not? No subheadings
What language is the article in? English
Overall:
What is on the front and back cover, and why?
Front cover - big 50.
Back cover - contributors, I believe. The 50 on this front cover is only in this particular journal; other journals have an image on them
What did you learn from the author identifications?
More men than women contributed in the fiftieth issue, which is similar to the first issue. In the 100th issue, however, there were much fewer men than women contributing.
What about the material on the inside of the front and back covers?
Front - table of contents, I believe
Back - Suggestions to contributors
Is there any material between the articles? If so, what is it? What kind of tone might it set?
None
Additional notes after taking a look at Bingjie Wang's article:
- Relatively easy to read
- No appendices in the articles - all data used is cited in-text
- Some articles written in first-person
- Focus on old vs new of mathematics education
- According to Wang, 96% of contributors to FLM are university professors
- The writing is not as dense as I've read
- There is a mix of research, opinion, and reflection in the article
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Looking at Bingjie Wang's article, I was surprised to see that only 4% of FLM's contributors are graduate students, as was similar with ESM and JRME, with university professors making up the majority of the other groups. Compare this to an only 60% contributor percentage in JME, where a much larger portion (than compared to the other journals) of teachers contribute (20%). What does this mean about the standards set forth by a journal? What is the rejection rate for each of these journals for graduate students? Is it higher to FLM, or are students not submitting much to FLM in the first place? Is there an invitation to teachers to write in FLM? I would be interested to discuss access to publishing and the acceptable styles of writing/publishing, etc. This reminds me of a story I heard in another class about Dr. Peter Cole, for example, who currently is lecturing (and researching?) at UBC. He completed his PhD thesis at SFU because although he started out as a PhD candidate at UBC, there were far too many standards UBC had for the way a thesis had to be written, etc. I am curious about how standards are established for publishing, and if there are any leftover trends from science journals embedded in mathematics education journals. Certainly, the foundation for mathematics education as a research area was still brought up in some articles in the 50th issue, so I wonder how many other trends are leftover from prior journals.
It seems as if the 50th issue and the first issue are similar in that there is nothing in between the articles like there is in the 100th issue. I had posted on Sophie's blog that I wanted to know if it was planned for there to be quotes in between articles from previous issues or not, and seeing that the 50th issue didn't have anything in between lets me know that this is a newer concept. I like how you mention that there were more men than women how had articles published in the journal in the early years, and that this has slowly changed. When looking at the authors' names I did not think about gender. So I am glad that you picked up on this.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you explored the idea of what standards are set forth by each journal for publication. I wonder why there are not more teachers who publish articles about mathematics education. It seems as if it would make sense for the people who are actually working in the field (ie. the teachers) to have some contribution to the journals with articles about the field, but it doesn't seem as if it is that common for teachers to publish articles. Also, is FLM a more research based journal and is that why there are more university professors who have articles published in it?
I like the questions you both raise about why FLM (and other journals for that matter) has such a vast majority of it's articles published by university professors. Clearly there must be a variety of reasons, but I'm curious (and feeling quite ignorant): do teachers publish in other locations? I mean in other settings outside of academics? In the university world publications are currency; they show you've got the chops and are contributing and active in the field. In my experience, graduate students publish less simply because they are starting from scratch, trying to figure out this whole new world, and it takes serious time and effort to get the ball rolling. I wonder about how difficult it would be for teachers to navigate the education research world without guidance. Could it be that there are some teacher co-authors who simply absorb their co-authors' university's accreditation? While many of the authors are easily google-able, it was not uniformly the case and that was my first guess as to the reason.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I would like to see in FLM is to increase the diversity of the background of contributors. I certainly don't mean the locations - I am indicating that most of the articles are coming out of academia instead of out of the classroom. According to Wang's investigation, 98% of the contributors to FLM are currently university professors. This isn't to say that university professors can't reproduce studies with the same environments as schools. However, the low percentage of teachers and graduate students contributing to FLM suggests that there may be an issue with accessibility to the journal. Are teachers aware that the journal requirement includes a continuation of the discussion in FLM? Is this made clear in the editing process? It would be interesting, as per Dr. Pimm's comment tonight, to pursue the profiles of the persons who were turned away during the editing process.
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