New Applications of the Mathematics A-lympiad

The Mathematics A-lympiad is an international competition for teams of 4 students (upper secondary education), organized by the Freudenthal Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The teams work on a very open ended problem situation in which mathematical problem solving and higher order thinking skills must be used to solve a real world problem. The result of the assignment is a written report. We can identify a small number of schools in the Netherlands that repeatedly enter the final round. What is it that makes a school successful? To get more insight in these ‘successfactors’, research has been started. Factors like schoolculture, teachingstrategies, a well thought-out long-range plan in developing skills seem to be important. How to implement these factors in an ‘average’ school to make it an ‘outstanding’ school (in scoring in the A-lympiad) is of course the most interesting part of this research. Different tendencies give rise to interest in these factors and their implementation. There is the recent curriculum-change in the Netherlands, which forces Dutch math-teachers to assess ‘higher order skills’ of their students in mathematics. Results of the findings on ‘succesfactors’ in winning the A-lympiad are used for teacher-training. Another tendency is that all over the world there is considerable interest in evaluating the attempts to operationalise ‘higher order skills’. The limitations and undesired effects of traditional testing are acknowledged and recognised. Many people are in search of suitable tests/tasks that fit within the bounds of ‘fixed time’ and ‘paper and pencil’, but which also attempt to assess the process goals and higher order skills.