Becoming and succeeding as an elite mathematics student involves navigating a demanding academic and cultural environment. Women and disadvantaged students are underrepresented on the mathematics courses with the highest entry requirements compared to mathematics courses more broadly, raising questions about how admissions systems operate and about the social and learning consequences for those who are admitted.
This presentation draws on my qualitative doctoral research examining access to elite mathematics courses across four universities. Through in-depth interviews with 45 participants, including students, teachers and lecturers, I develop a multi-dimensional account of how elite mathematics ability is understood, assessed and experienced within course cultures.
Using ‘ability’ as an organising concept, I show how its construction varies across the four universities, with different emphases on competition, independence and resilience. I present findings from the perspective of women participants that challenge common constructions of ‘confidence’ and highlight the importance of relational forms of resilience and the social aspects of learning.
Making the Transition: Supporting Mathematicians Moving into Education Research and Pedagogical Scholarship
Time (UK time)
Activity
09:30-10:00
Refreshments (Tea & Coffee)
10:00-10:15
Welcome and Housekeeping
10:15-11:00
Keynote: Mathematical Research to Education Research: Building Credible Scholarship
(Michael Grove, University of Birmingham)
11:00-11:15
Break
11:15-12:00
Panel discussion: Career Pathways and Trajectories
(Alison Voice, University of Leeds & other workshop speakers)
12:00-13:00
Lunch break - Catered
13:00-13:45
Talk 1: Funding and working with PhD students
(Samantha Pugh, University of Leeds)
13:45-13:50
Break
13:50–14:35
Talk 2: Data Collection and Analysis
(Cosette Crisan, UCL)
14:35-15:00
Break (Tea & Coffee)
15:00-15:45
Talk 3: Publishing in Mathematics Education Journals
(Chris Sangwin, University of Edinburgh)
15:45-16:00
Closing Remarks and Networking
Part of the IMA/RSS/LMS Higher Education Teaching and Learning Workshop Series 2025/26.
Are you a mathematician with an interest in education research, but unsure how to get started? Join us on 29 April 2026 at the University of Leeds (and online) for a one-day workshop designed specifically for mathematicians making the move into pedagogical scholarship. Hear from leading colleagues (including Prof Michael Grove, Prof Chris Sangwin, Prof Cosette Crisan, Prof Samantha Pugh, and Prof Alison Voice) on how to translate your mathematical research skills into rigorous education research, navigate funding, and publish in mathematics education journals. You will also have the opportunity to connect with peers navigating the same transition, and to build collaborative research partnerships that extend beyond the day.
📅 Date: Wednesday 29 April 2026
✴️ Hybrid: in-person at the University of Leeds and online
🌐 Workshop website
🔗 Registration form (no registration fee)
In-person registration deadline: Friday 17 April 2026
Online registration deadline: Wednesday 22 April 2026
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us:
Dr Costas Loizou c.loizou@leeds.ac.uk & Prof Kevin Houston K.Houston@leeds.ac.uk
We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting event.
NOTES: Unusual Location.
Explaining your research to other specialists is hard enough. Explaining it to the general public -- people who may not share your enthusiasm for notation, definitions, and carefully stated lemmas -- can be even more challenging. Yet public engagement is an important part of academic life, and mathematicians now have many opportunities to share their work beyond the university.
In this talk I’ll discuss practical ways to tell the public about your research without losing them somewhere around the first equation. We’ll look at how to find the hook in your work, how to replace technical detail with intuition and examples, and how to turn abstract mathematics into something people can actually picture.
Ideally, by the end you’ll have a few techniques for explaining your research to non-mathematicians -- whether in a public lecture, an article, or when someone innocently asks what you do.
NOTES: Online Only.
Team-Based Learning (TBL) is most commonly associated with medical and professional education, yet its structured collaborative framework may offer particular advantages in formal sciences. In this seminar, I will present the implementation of TBL in a basic undergraduate course in mathematical statistics at the University of Tartu.
The course serves students from diverse programmes and backgrounds, including medicine, engineering, and natural sciences, many of whom approach statistics with considerable anxiety. I will briefly outline the core components of TBL and describe how these elements were adapted to my course.
Special attention will be given to the practical implementation of TBL within a virtual learning environment (Moodle). I will also reflect on pedagogical challenges, student responses, and the implications of shifting responsibility for learning from lecturer to students.
NOTES: Unusual location..
In recent years, the integration of gamification into educational settings has garnered significant attention as a means to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes. By leveraging gamified elements such as points and leaderboards, educators aim to promote active participation and motivation amongst students, issues that are being felt across the higher education sector. This study investigates the effect of gamification on student engagement in a large, level one, flipped statistics course. This talk will describe the motivation for introducing gamification into the course, share how it was implemented, present results on the effect this had on student engagement with course materials and share student feedback on the process. The findings suggest that gamification strategies, when effectively implemented, can have a positive impact on student motivation and engagement. The talk will conclude with recommendations for educators and potential challenges such as superficial engagement and demotivation.
In this presentation, I will draw on reflections from a collaborative project with students at Monterrey University, developed as part of a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) course. This experience provided a valuable opportunity to explore the impact of varied teaching styles and assessment methods in supporting student engagement across different educational contexts. Through this collaboration, I examined how flexibility in teaching, incorporating discussion-based sessions, guided problem-solving, and reflective tasks, can help students transition towards greater independence and confidence in their learning. I will discuss how the use of varied assessments, including formative and assessment approaches, encourages deeper understanding, promotes self-regulation, and helps students connect mathematical ideas. The session will share insights from both staff and student perspectives, highlighting how intentional diversity in teaching and assessment design can improve motivation, and meaningful engagement in mathematics education.
This seminar is particularly aimed at PhD students and postdocs, but everyone is welcome. The goal of this session is to share some tips and tricks about proving that you're a good teacher in job applications and interviews. Most of this is specific to the UK, but there will be some information about the USA.
There will be lots of time for discussion and demonstrations in this session, so prepare your job hunting anecdotes!
This is discussion forum joint between Leeds School of Maths and Imperial College London's Department of Maths on the subject of supporting international students. We'll be joined from Imperial by Dr. Charlotte Kestner, their deputy head of Maths, Dr. Chris Hallsworth, their Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Inkeri Hibbins, their head of the student hub (which is roughly equivalent to our Student Information Service).
Our big increase in the proportion of international students this year has changed some of the dynamics of many aspects of our degree programmes, such as small group teaching, and pastoral care. Imperial's undergraduate Maths cohort has routinely been over 60% international for many years now, and hopefully this forum will give all of us a chance to learn from each other and reflect on our own experiences.
