“Welcome Aboard!”“I like discovering and researching mathematics in everyday things.”Prof. Dr. Nils Buchholtz strengthens the Department of Education.

5 April 2022, by Buchholtz/newsroom

Photo: Fiona/PicturePeople

Prof Dr. Buchholtz will take up his professorship at Universität Hamburg in Summer Semester 2022.

Every year, Universität Hamburg welcomes numerous new researchers. This series introduces them and their areas of research. This time: educator Prof. Dr. Nils Buchholtz

Prof. Dr. Nils Buchholtz left Universität zu Köln to join Universität Hamburg. In April, he took up his professorship for mathematical education (lower secondary education) at the Faculty of Education.

My research area in brief:

I am primarily interested in the question as to which knowledge, which ideas, and which skills teacher training students and future math teachers need to acquire in their training and early careers to be suitably prepared for their professions, with student bodies now becoming more diverse and the use of digital media gaining traction.

Another starting point for my research has been math teaching in international comparison. For example, I am doing research with the international, externally funded MathMot project, which focuses on teaching quality in math lessons and the conditions for increasing the motivation to learn math in 6 different countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Portugal, and Serbia).

I have also been doing research for several years on the topic of outdoor mathematics and I have developed a few math walks in Hamburg. On these, secondary school students do a kind of relay, with different locations in the city, and solve math problems that require them to estimate size, take measurements using tools, and calculate purposefully—mathematical activities that are often short-changed in the classroom.

I explain what I do to friends and family as follows:

Many people in my circle do not recall their math lessons fondly. Math is a very polarizing subject. We hear things like: “My math days ended when we started using letters to do math problems.”

We also often see strong teacher-oriented lessons due to the amount of material in math classes. This is where math education research begins. It is very application-oriented research with the goal of better training teachers to help their pupils learn math.

To give just one example: a math teacher in a math lesson should be able to recognize the typical mistakes that school children make when using variables, meaning letters, and should also take into account how to integrate a viable basic understanding of variables when planning lessons. For example, what could the “x” mean in “3x + 4 = 1”? Teachers should be able to provide an answer to that question and I research how they can learn such strategies better during their teacher training.

I mainly use these methods:

I have a large repertoire of quantitative research methods when conducting my studies. However, I realized early on that interpreting the results of purely quantitative analyses is often not sufficient for drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of the aspects under investigation or new learning approaches in teacher training. This is why I also use qualitative or mixed methods when designing my research. In my current research project Math & The City, for example, I record mathematical walks on video and evaluate them qualitatively.

My research is important to society because:

I spent some time at the University of Oslo. Because Norway is a country that has a high level of educational justice in international comparisons, I have been looking more intensively at this topic since 2017. The group of learners that our students will later encounter in their teaching jobs are in many respects extremely diversified in a large city like Hamburg. I would like to sensitize my students while they are still studying to prepare them for encounters with vulnerable pupils. To do so, I am cooperating with colleagues in projects to develop lessons and advanced training on language-sensitive and inclusive math lessons.

Another great challenge for math lessons is dealing with ongoing digitalization. The pandemic has seen both good and bad developments. I think it is important that teachers already grasp in their studies that simply using digital technology in their lessons does not improve learning efficacy. It is only when the use of digital media and tools support subject-based learning processes that we can benefit from the advantages of digitalization. We are only just beginning to understand what digitalization actually means. Recognizing its added value and discussing it with students, for example, in the context of extracurricular learning, is one of my goals.

This is why students should come to my lectures:

I would like to impart to my students an application-oriented understanding of mathematics so that they can then impart this image to their own students. Mathematics plays a role in so many things in life, we just don’t always see it. We call it the “relevance paradox of mathematics.” I hope that my students share my desire to discover and study mathematics in everyday things. That it’s not easy becomes clear quickly because mathematics also means that we sometimes spend a long time trying to figure out a problem. This is also something that pupils need to learn in this fast-paced age.

These are my plans at Universität Hamburg (with regard to knowledge exchange, teaching, etc.):

We have already engaged in knowledge exchange with our mathematical walks. Hamburg teachers can contact us and we currently provide the material in digital form. In the long term, this project should become an integral part of extracurricular learning for all Hamburg math teachers and, by including our students, offered with personal supervision.

Reaching out to the world: I work with the following international and federal institutions and universities:

I have the great fortune of being able to access a large international network of researchers with whom I cooperate at various levels. As before, I continue to work closely with colleagues in Oslo so that, hopefully, we can also create something like a student exchange program in the long term.