Using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, we analyze lecturers’ views on the aims and teaching practices of mathematical modelling (MM) education in Norway and England. We aim to expose the tensions that exist within the activity of teaching MM at university, such as those between multiple, sometimes competing, aims for teaching MM, or between the lecturers’ professional identities and the structure of university degrees. Our conceptualization of these tensions might help lecturers consider how to overcome obstacles in their own contexts.

Non-mathematics specialists’ competence and confidence in mathematics in their disciplines have been highlighted as in need of improvement. We report from a collaborative, developmental research project which explores the conjecture that greater integration of mathematics and biology in biology study programs, for example through engaging students with Mathematical Modeling (MM) activities, is one way to achieve this improvement. We examine the evolution of 12 first-semester biology students’ mathematical discourse as they engage with such activities in four sessions which ran concurrently with their mandatory mathematics course and were taught by a mathematician with extensive experience with MM. The sessions involved brief introductions to different aspects of MM, followed by small-group work on tasks set in biological contexts. Our analyses use the theory of commognition to investigate the tensions between ritualized and exploratory participation in the students’ MM activity. We focus particularly on a quintessential routine in MM, assumption building: we trace attempts which start from ritualized engagement in the shape of “guesswork” and evolve into more productively exploratory formulations. We also identify signs of persistent commognitive conflict in the students’ activity, both intra-mathematical (concerning what is meant by a “math task”) and extra-mathematical (concerning what constitutes a plausible solution to the tasks in a biological sense). Our analyses show evidence of the fluid interplay between ritualized and exploratory engagement in the students’ discursive activity and contribute towards what we see as a much needed distancing from operationalization of the commognitive constructs of ritual and exploration as an unhelpfully dichotomous binary.

In this paper, a developmental research project involving offering mathematical modelling (MM) activities to university biology students is presented, and a particular aspect is studied, namely the project as a collaboration between mathematicians and mathematics educators. The aim of the paper is to investigate what characterizes their participation in the project, and how the characteristics of the project and its development might influence this participation. Interview data as well as observation data from the MM sessions are analysed, and findings show that the mathematics educator served as a broker influencing the practice of the mathematician. It is hoped that the findings of the study can be of use when planning future collaboration between mathematicians and mathematics educators.

The project we report from in this paper explores whether and how, biology students’ competence and confidence in – as well as appreciation for – mathematics in their discipline can be improved through greater integration of mathematics and biology in their study programme. Here, we examine biology students’ mathematical discourse as they engage with a biology-related Mathematical Modelling (MM) activity, the Digoxin task. We report commognitive analyses of data collected during sessions in which biology-related MM activities were introduced to undergraduate biology students (four sessions with 12 first-semester students).We focus on the interplay between students’ ritualised and exploratory engagement with the activity, particularly concerning graphing routines, and consider pedagogical implications.

The paper reports on the views and use of mathematical modelling (MM) in university mathematics courses in Norway from the perspective of lecturers. Our analysis includes a characterisation of MM views based on the modelling perspectives developed by Kaiser and Sriraman (2006). Through an online survey we aimed to identify the main perspectives held in higher education by mathematics lecturers and the underlying rationale for integrating (or not) MM in university courses. The results indicated that most respondents displayed a realistic perspective on MM when it came to their professional practice. There was a more varied response when it came to their views on MM in teaching. Regarding conditions influencing the use or non-use of MM in teaching, these mainly concerned the mathematical content and the institutional practices.