BERA is delighted to announce that the winner of this year’s Doctoral Thesis Award is Dr Carla Finesilver.

Carla’s thesis examined the particular difficulties with multiplicative thinking experienced by students with very low attainment in school mathematics, and the representational strategies they use for multiplication and division-based tasks.
Carla’s thesis has already been, and will continue to be, of use to others researching this field (e.g. Hodgen and Brown’s ICCAMS project), both in terms of her findings regarding the nature of children’s arithmetical understandings and strategies, and the new analytical frameworks developed for classifying and interpreting nonstandard student- and co-created representations.

BERA will publish aspects of Carla’s dissertation in Research Intelligence, the BERA Blog, and Insights. We congratulate Carla on her award and look forward to featuring her work in the coming months.