Dept of Mathematics Education seminar: 14 October 2026

[14:00-15:00] Presentation 1 (40 mins Presentation + 20 mins Q&A): Simona Rasciute

Loughborough Business School, Loughborough University

Simona Rasciute

Child Mental Ill Health and Mathematics Attainment: The Role of School Absences

Using novel population-level linked administrative and survey data for England, we estimate the effect of child mental ill health on mathematics attainment and examine school absences as a mediator. Our empirical approach combines generalised full matching with instrumental variables to address the endogeneity of absences. Rich information on children, parents, households and neighbourhoods permits extensive adjustment for observed confounders, while sensitivity analyses quantify the potential influence of unobserved factors. We find sizeable direct and indirect effects: mental ill health raises absenteeism and absenteeism reduces mathematics attainment. These effects vary by gender and school stage, with larger penalties for boys.

[15:15-15:45] Presentation 2 (20 mins Presentation + 10 mins Q&A): Ian Jones

Department of Mathematics Education, Loughborough University 

Ian Jones

Comparative judgement (CJ) is used across education, psychology, political science, medicine and beyond: judges choose the better of pairs of objects, and the binary decisions are modelled statistically to produce a measurement scale. However, different disciplines use different terminology, publish in different venues and rarely cite one another. To help cohere CJ as a methodology across disciplines we set a shared research agenda. To do this 25 interdisciplinary CJ experts used a Delphi-like process: they proposed and judged research questions online, then winnowed and refined them at a two-day meeting. The result is 36 questions grouped into seven themes: comparative versus absolute measures, statistical methodology, multidimensionality, properties of the judges, judging prompts, properties of the objects being judged, and research about research methods. I will present the agenda, focusing on questions particularly relevant to research into learning.

[16:00-17:00] Presentation 3 (40 mins Presentation + 15 mins Q&A): Roberto Abreu-Mendoza

Department of Mathematics Education, Loughborough University 

Roberto Abreu-Mendoza

The developmental path to becoming a nonsymbolic proportional reasoner

Children have a remarkable ability to reason about visually presented nonsymbolic continuous proportions (e.g., the ratio of milk to chocolate syrup). However, when children encounter discrete proportions (e.g., the proportion of red to other-colored gummy bears), where items can be counted, their performance plummets. Recently, we found that sixth-to-eighth graders can be classified into three profiles based on their ability to compare continuous and discrete proportions: a Proportional Reasoning profile (39% of students), characterized by proportional magnitude processing for both continuous and discrete quantities; a Weak Magnitude profile (43%), whose performance is near chance and reflects weaker magnitude processing; and a Whole-Number Bias profile (18%), characterized by relying on whole-number strategies (i.e., choosing the image with the larger number of segments, indiscriminately) when comparing discrete quantities (Abreu-Mendoza et al., 2023).

This study provided insight into the different challenges students face when working with nonsymbolic proportional quantities, a key precursor to understanding rational numbers like fractions. However, several questions remained unanswered, including which profile may be the developmentally closest to achieving normative performance, whether any profiles are more persistent than others, and how these strategies are implemented. In this talk, I will present the preliminary results of two studies. In the first one, we characterize the cross-sectional and longitudinal patterns of transition between profiles among fourth- to eighth-grade students. In the second study, we examine the gaze patterns adults show when comparing nonsymbolic proportions and determine which strategies relate to better performance. Together, these studies will provide a clearer picture of the path to becoming a proportional reasoner