Best Practices in Argentina

A new report from the Argentinos por la Educación observatory, entitled "Radiography of Mathematics Learning in Argentina", offers different statistics by which the transformation of teaching is imperative.

In the PISA 2012 tests, the last in which the country participated with a valid sample, Argentina was ranked 59 among 65 educational systems that participated, with 388 points. The average was 494 points and Shanghai ranked number one with 613. The OECD estimates that 41 points are equivalent to one year of schooling. Therefore, a 15-year-old Argentine student achieved a learning level of the same level as a 10-year-old Chinese student.

Due to this problem, every day more countries are guiding the school curriculum based on a competency-based approach. In fact, international standardized measures such as PISA (OECD, 2013) make many curriculum developers consider them for the establishment of mathematical learning goals in school. However, its actual application in the classroom and in teacher training is not yet clear to teachers who should implement it. For this reason, a Mathematical Competence Model (MCM) feasible to use is proposed, not only in curriculum development, but also in teacher training and student learning. The MCM is presented as a structure or strategy that articulates the curricular contents understood as mathematical organizations, the mathematical processes involved in the development of these contents and the learning expectations, using the levels of complexity to define them (Solar, 2009; Solar, Azcárate and Deulofeu, 2012).

To account for how the MCM can be used, we show three research experiences that allow us to interpret and understand the development of mathematical competencies at the curricular, teacher training and student learning levels. At the curricular level, the research developed by Espinoza, Barbé, Mitrovich, Solar, Rojas and Matus (2008) meant a proposal to organize the mathematics curriculum in terms of mathematical competencies, using the Mathematical Competence Model (MCM) to articulate content with competencies. On the other hand, the work developed in Solar, Espinoza, Rojas, Ortiz, González and Ulloa (2011) allowed to characterize a permanent training work strategy with primary education teachers based on a didactic model robust enough to produce initial changes in conceptions. of teachers regarding mathematical competencies and their development in students. Finally, the works of García, Coronado, Montealegre, Giraldo, Tovar, Morales and Cortés (2013), which have focused on studying the relationship between the student's mathematical learning activity and mathematical competencies, have adapted the MCM to analyze the development of mathematical competencies in students.