Hanan Innabi
Senior Lecturer
Unit for Subject Matter Education with specialization in MathematicAbout Hanan Innabi
Research Interests
My initial theme was ‘Teaching mathematics for critical thinking’. My master’s thesis was entitled ‘Aspects of Critical Thinking for Secondary Mathematics Teachers in Jordan’. In my PhD thesis, I studied students’ understanding of the relationship between sample and population as a tool that can be used in their daily lives as critical thinkers. Later, most of my work was in the field of critical thinking—in particular, areas related to statistical reasoning.
During my years working within the framework of critical thinking, I realized that this term is associated with the learning that continues beyond the end of formal instruction, meaning preparation for future learning or ‘learning how to learn’. This is the ‘generative learning’ that variation theory has adopted. Accordingly, my theme matured to ‘Teaching mathematics for sustainability’—in particular, ‘teaching statistics for sustainability’. I see that in order for learning to be sustainable, students must learn in a powerful way, and this requires them to interact with patterns of variation. Within the framework of my interests, the gender gap was one of my concerns, so I studied the quality of learning that boys and girls in Jordan possess in mathematics. I have undertaken large-scale quantitative studies, for which I worked on 1999 and 2015 TIMSS data. In addition, I have been working on the issue of traditional public perceptions about the nature of mathematics and the nature of its teaching and learning. Currently, I am working on connecting the basic idea in statistics, which is variation, with the variation theory of learning and describing the important need to focus on statistical variation.
Teaching Interests My experience in higher education was mainly for pre-service and in-service secondary and elementary teacher programs, mainly for mathematics teachers. My experience was in four Arab countries: Jordan, UAE, Oman and Qatar. I taught graduate and undergraduate courses related to curriculum, assessment, learning, pedagogy and thinking skills, in addition to supervising master’s students in mathematics education.
Keywords Mathematics education, critical thinking, variation theory, sustainability