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This paper belongs to a field of research that has appeared comparatively recently, namely, the study of mathematics competitions. The paper utilizes historical-theoretical methodology and is devoted to changes in the way in which mathematics competitions have been conducted in Russia in recent decades. Mathematics competitions, like mathematics education as a whole, are seen as part of a social process, and changes in them are seen as expressions of new social needs and possibilities. The analysis of the system of competitions, as it evolved in the USSR, and the literature devoted to them, makes it possible to identify certain challenges recognized by the mathematics community. In this paper I discuss examples of new competitions that have emerged to address these challenges. It is noted that new types of competitions have emerged, including team competitions and competitions involving mass participation by students. Also discussed is the emergence of new competitions with subject matter closer to that of ordinary school mathematics than that of old, traditional competitions. An analysis of the situation in Russia reveals the existence of a significant group of mathematics educators, parents, and children interested in the development of mathematics competitions. Also, in the paper I call attention to certain questions that I consider worthy of further study.

This paper explores the associations between math-gender stereotypes and two dimensions of student engagement -- class engagement and disengagement -- among Russian engineering students. The data collected in three Russian universities (n = 2,074) were utilised. Structural equation modelling was employed to test hypotheses about relationships between key variables and their variations for male and female subsamples. We revealed that the students' attribution of math-gender stereotypes to faculty slightly decreased class engagement and increased disengagement for both male and female students. Therefore, we hypothesise that male students can be more overconfident about their future performance in exams on math-related subjects because of a better reputation in the eyes of instructors, which can result in less engagement and, as a consequence, lower academic outcomes. These findings demonstrate the high importance of faculty in encouraging engineering student engagement and providing a bias-free learning environment.

The aim of this paper is to describe the innovative teaching approach used in the Southern Federal University, Russia, to teach accounting via a form of matrix mathematics. It thereby contributes to disseminating the technique of teaching to solve accounting cases using mutual calculations to a worldwide audience. The approach taken in this course provides useful insights for both accounting educators and accounting students by providing an alternative explanation and understanding of the main principles of accounting, and does so using a simple game simulation. This paper provides readers with an awareness of the broader international environment of accounting education and of the techniques that can be adopted in the teaching of accounting. The paper also demonstrates that any accounting operation can be represented by matrix equations, and, as a result, adds to the understanding of alternative processes of recording transactions and the mathematical generation of essential accounting reports. The paper thereby reveals the potential value of matrix-based approaches to accounting within the accounting educational environment.

The paper discusses an example of an educational project in modern mathematics in which school students create mathematics that is new to them. The mathematical results produced by the students in the theory of definability also have an "absolute" novelty, i.e., are the basis for professional publications. The described course was based on recent results of this article's authors in the theory of definability. The new results were obtained by a group of 10 schoolchildren from different regions of Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper belongs to a field of research that has appeared comparatively recently, namely, the study of mathematics competitions. The paper utilizes historical-theoretical methodology and is devoted to changes in the way in which mathematics competitions have been conducted in Russia in recent decades. Mathematics competitions, like mathematics education as a whole, are seen as part of a social process, and changes in them are seen as expressions of new social needs and possibilities. The analysis of the system of competitions, as it evolved in the USSR, and the literature devoted to them, makes it possible to identify certain challenges recognized by the mathematics community. In this paper I discuss examples of new competitions that have emerged to address these challenges. It is noted that new types of competitions have emerged, including team competitions and competitions involving mass participation by students. Also discussed is the emergence of new competitions with subject matter closer to that of ordinary school mathematics than that of old, traditional competitions. An analysis of the situation in Russia reveals the existence of a significant group of mathematics educators, parents, and children interested in the development of mathematics competitions. Also, in the paper I call attention to certain questions that I consider worthy of further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political changes in the USSR and Russia almost coincided with the beginning of an unprecedented leap in the development of information technologies in the country (and to a certain extent spurred it). Gradually, many different initiatives emerged to apply these technologies in education in general, and in mathematics education. In the paper, we discuss several examples of didactical innovations in teaching and learning mathematics with technology, namely, LOGO-based microworlds, dynamic geometry and computer algebra systems, as well as verifiers. The examples we provide, along with the theoretical perspective of productive learning and thinking, seem to demonstrate the innovative potential of new tools to make learning more visual, dynamic, and interactive. However, the issues of aligning with curriculum and standard examinations, teacher professional development, and rapid changes in technologies, require more attention by mathematics educators. The presence of such opposite trends makes the task of analyzing the history of the development of mathematics teaching technologies and underlying pedagogies relevant and important for predicting the development of this field in the near (and far-extended) future, and eventually preventing the repetition of errors in this new direction for mathematics education. In the paper we focus primarily on problems and processes in Russia, but they are investigated in connection with and against the backdrop of global trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a long time, Soviet students learned 'pure' mathematics in their mathematics classrooms, while applications of mathematics were introduced in their science (mainly physics) classrooms. This approach was a part of a uniform and rigid national curriculum. Even when in the 1990s the world was moving towards including applications in school mathematics, Russian students continued to engage in pure mathematics learning in their mathematics classrooms. It was physics teachers' responsibility to teach applications of mathematics; therefore, physics courses were highly mathematics-intensive, making extensive use of mathematics from algebra to calculus in the formulation of scientific laws and the investigation of their consequences. The collapse of the Soviet Union and some liberalization in educational policy led to changes in graduation requirements in mathematics and physics as well as diversity in mathematics and physics curricula in schools. Based on a review of textbooks, standards, curriculum documents, and other resources, in this paper we analyze changes that affected the teaching and learning of mathematics in physics classrooms in Russia from the Soviet period to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and Russia, the largest of the countries formed in its place, has gone through notable changes in the period since then. This paper is devoted to the study of how (and whether) the mathematics curriculum has changed. At one time, before the revolution of 1917, Russian mathematics education was closely connected with Western European mathematics education (above all, German and French). Subsequently, their paths diverged, and later, Russian mathematics education became very highly regarded around the world. What, then, has happened over the last three decades? To what extent does the Russian curriculum today differ from the old Soviet curriculum and from contemporary curricula in other countries? The answers to these questions are of interest to an international audience already because they help in understanding the processes and distinctive characteristics of the development of mathematics education, including differences that might be concealed even behind identical terms. Based on a detailed analysis of Russian standards and textbooks, conclusions are drawn about the processes in the transformation of the curriculum that have occurred over thirty years, including the conclusion that the period of transition that began in the late 1980s is still not over. The Russian curriculum, of course, is not exactly the same as the curriculum of Soviet times, but the differences between them are by no means revolutionary. The paths of the development of mathematics education in Russia and in Western Europe and the United States, having at some point diverged, have still not come back together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orienteering problem (OP) is a routing problem, where the aim is to generate a path through set of nodes, which would maximize total score and would not exceed the budget. In this paper, we present an extension of classic OP—Orienteering Problem with Functional Profits (OPFP), where the score of a specific point depends on its characteristics, position in the route, and other points in the route. For solving OPFP, we developed an open-source framework for solving orienteering problems, which utilizes four core components of OP in its modular architecture. Fully-written in Go programming language our framework can be extended for solving different types of tasks with different algorithms; this was demonstrated by implementation of two popular algorithms for OP solving—Ant Colony Optimization and Recursive Greedy Algorithm. Computational efficiency of the framework was shown through solving four well-known OP types: classic Orienteering Problem (OP), Orienteering Problem with Compulsory Vertices (OPCV), Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (OPTW), and Time Dependent Orienteering Problem (TDOP) along with OPFP. Experiments were conducted on a large multi-source dataset for Saint Petersburg, Russia, containing data from Instagram, TripAdvisor, Foursquare and official touristic website. Our framework is able to construct touristic paths for different OP types within few seconds using dataset with thousands of points of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students' socioeconomic status (SES) is not only directly related to mathematics achievement but also indirectly related to mathematics achievement through their unequal opportunity to learn (OTL). Despite a plethora of studies about how mathematics achievement is associated with SES and OTL, few systematic studies have examined the differential role SES plays in the relationship between curriculum-based mathematics performance and application-based mathematics literacy. To bridge the gap in the literature, this study aims at addressing the relationship between curriculum-based mathematics and application-based mathematics while considering the OTL associated with students at the two different assessment time points. Using the unique data set from the Russian Federation in which a subset of the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) student sample also took the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessment 1 year later, we found that lower SES students had difficulties in transferring their curriculum-based mathematics knowledge and skills to mathematics literacy, which plays an important role in the present society's high-complexity demands. These results suggest that students with a lower SES need to receive greater attention and focus on their mathematics learning so as to improve their capacity to interpret and evaluate real-world problems mathematically and to make better decisions using this competency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays robotics is one of promising avenues in the sphere of emerging technologies. In the teaching/learning environment we deal with educational robotics, which is a mixture of theory and practice, knowledge of computer technology, Mathematics and Physics. The two vectors are combined in educational robotics: the educational vector and the technological vector. As an academic discipline and an area of practical application, Robotics means a very broad spectrum of modern knowledge of diverse academic engineering specialties (fields of expertise). That means that Robotics is interdisciplinary in nature. The work provides an overview of the research aimed at studying Robot – Man interaction. Besides, the work considers some promising international cooperation between children from around the world on the development of robotics, and the experience and benefits gained from such cooperation. As an example of the international cooperation in the sphere of Robotics, the two countries, Russia and Kazakhstan, are considered. The article gives an example of the international cooperation of some educational centers, describes the experience of the work on robotics with children of various ages, and the cooperation of various schools working in this field in Kazakhstan and Russia. The working experience in the sphere of social robotics aimed at helping people has become a priority for the children from the interdisciplinary teams from Russia and Kazakhstan. Interaction and cooperation in the sphere of robotics was also used for introducing unconventional curricula, which included courses on robotic technologies as tools for considering social aspects of robotics and artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an empirically grounded analysis for two fundamentally different models of mathematics teachers' beliefs about student diversity in Russian secondary schools: exclusive and inclusive models. Although teachers' beliefs are considered a central factor for the differentiated approach, teachers' beliefs could be stereotyped and, consequently, the evaluation of a student's ability would be systematically shifted and decisions about the possibility of teaching a student would be incorrect. Semi-structured interviews with 30 mathematics teachers allowed us to investigate what criteria teachers claim to employ while classifying students in the classroom and what expectations they have for each group of students. It was found that within the exclusive model, teachers have an image of a "normal" student and use discrete categories for labelling students with reference to the "normality". Within the inclusive model, teachers tend not to match students with discrete categories; rather they prefer to compare a student only with herself or himself. Research findings are discussed in the context of a possible "fixed effect" on a student's development. However, there is a need for further investigation of a connection between teachers' belief systems, teaching practices and student achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study tested the possibility of operationalizing levels of knowledge acquisition based on Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive growth. An assessment tool (SAM-Math) was developed to capture a hypothesized hierarchical structure of mathematical knowledge consisting of procedural, conceptual, and functional levels. In Study 1, SAM-Math was administered to 4th-grade students (N = 2,216). The results of Rasch analysis indicated that the test provided an operational definition for the construct of mathematical competence that included the three levels of mastery corresponding to the theoretically based hierarchy of knowledge. In Study 2, SAM-Math was administered to students in 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th grades (N = 396) to examine developmental changes in the levels of mathematics knowledge. The results showed that the mastery of mathematical concepts presented in elementary school continued to deepen beyond elementary school, as evidenced by a significant growth in conceptual and functional levels of knowledge. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for psychological theory, test design, and educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]