Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Development of a taxonomy for key terms in Mathematics Education and its use in a digital repository
Date of this Version
2013
Abstract
Although mathematics education is a young discipline, it has developed rapidly over the last 40 years. During this time, the community of mathematics education researchers, teachers’ trainers, and mathematics teachers has produced a large quantity of literature published in books, journals, and conference proceedings and on Internet, among other sources. Yet there is currently no taxonomy of key terms for the systematic classification of the documents in this discipline. In this article, we present the procedure by which we constructed a taxonomy for Funes, a digital repository of documents in mathematics education. We establish the conceptual framework on which the taxonomy is based, demonstrate how we tackled problems of ambiguity and synonymy in the controlled vocabularies, and describe a procedure by which the user can perform precise, relevant searches using the taxonomy.