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Although women's representation in STEM fields and occupations has increased, science and math continue to be stereotyped as male domains. This paper links psychological and sociological explanations for gendered disparities in STEM by examining the relationship between the local "micro-situational" female learning environment and the gender gap in academic self-concept in math and science. We applied hybrid models to TIMSS 2015 data comprised of a pseudo-panel of repeated measures for individual student and peer achievement, academic self-concept, utility value, and interest-enjoyment value in math/science (at age 14). We analyzed data from three countries, including a subsample of students who were taught by the same teacher in both math and science, thus eliminating unobserved teacher heterogeneity. Results indicate that female peer climate in the classroom is important for understanding how girls' self-concept in math/science is formed, even though it was unrelated to the gender gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fractions are challenging for both typically achieving children and adults. Although some prior research has focused on fraction difficulties of children with mathematics difficulties (MD), persistent difficulties encountered by adults with MD remain unknown. It is possible that these adults may be able to compensate for some deficits. In this study, we administered an un-timed, paper-based fraction achievement test to French adults with and without MD to compare their knowledge of fractions. Compared with controls, adults with MD performed worse in fraction number lines, fraction concepts, fraction arithmetic, and word problems. However, no difference in performance between the two groups was observed on symbolic representations. This suggests that adults with MD might be able to perform rote procedures such as transcoding from a verbal to a symbolic representation but are severely impaired for fraction number line, fraction concept, and fraction arithmetic. Exploratory error pattern analyses for fraction number line and fraction arithmetic further revealed mistakes similar to those observed in prior studies on children with MD, indicating core deficits in fraction understanding in individuals with MD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics plays a fundamental role in ecological research, yet its uses remain strikingly separate from advances in the environmental social sciences and humanities. In this paper, I work to address this impasse and outline the motivation and scope for an ‘ecological mathematics’, an approach to doing mathematics in environmental research which foregrounds relationship, embodiment and human difference. I begin by tracing the historical emergence of mathematics in ecology, noting how life processes have been conceptualised in a way which forces them to fit the ideals of mathematical models transplanted from the physical sciences. I then investigate the cultural factors shaping the evolution of mathematical thought, eliciting a malleability in how mathematical knowledge relates to the more-than-human world. This provides a place from which to rethink the role of abstraction in ecological thought, and develop mathematical methods grounded in ecological concepts. Drawing on ethnographic and perceptual accounts of space and time, I work with topological concepts from both mathematics and the social sciences to suggest a new correspondence between these subjects, elaborating a way of employing mathematical techniques which enliven, rather than deaden, the ecologies under study. The paper concludes with important philosophical clarifications to the approach of an ecological mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]