|
Research theme: Modelling financial products As workplaces become increasingly organised around IT systems, the tendency is for mathematical processes to become less visible when the mathematics becomes performed by IT. This is particularly true of financial workplaces, where IT has become all-pervasive in the past 20 years. The nature of the mathematical skills required by employees changes: there is a shift in requirement from fluency in doing explicit “pen and paper” mathematical procedures to a fluency with using and interpreting output from IT systems and software, and the mathematical models deployed within them, to carry out mathematical procedures in order to inform workplace judgements and decision-making - taken altogether this is what we call TmL. Significantly, TmL skills have a very broad form: whereas pen-and-paper techniques may have been for most employees a matter of narrowly following through a calculation without having to worry about the context or meaning of that calculation, TmL are concerned with using calculations appropriately in contexts. A significant feature of TmL as we have seen it in financial services companies is that the mathematics involved seems not much different from what appears in the secondary school mathematics curriculum (for example, calculating compound interest). Yet the effect of workplace context is to introduce a significant degree of complexity to even the simplest mathematics, since any mathematical procedure is not an isolated mathematical exercise but is part of a set of decisions and judgements that have to be made about what is generally a complex process. Moreover, this complexity is, for the most part, hidden in the IT models, only unexpectedly surfacing when customers ask difficult questions or different parts of a company need to communicate across knowledge boundaries. Our ideas for learning opportunities in finance focus on developing employee understanding of models of financial products. In place of the "black box" IT systems that are part of the workplace, we offer “open” spreadsheets, which allow employees to build models of financial products and situations, which open up the closed calculations of the IT system. These offer a dynamic picture of a situation, where “input” quantities can be changed and the effects on outputs can be observed. Moreover, we propose collaborative activities where employees have to work together and communicate their results to others, thus encouraging the development of using TmL to make explanations to customers. The modelling of financial products has a counterpart in the Modelling of manufacturing processes. Learning opportunities within this theme Publications about this theme Kent, P., Noss, R., Guile, D., Hoyles, C., & Bakker, A (2007). “Characterising the use of mathematical knowledge in boundary crossing situations at work”. Mind, Culture, and Activity 14, 1-2, 64-82. Bakker, A., Kent, P., Hoyles, C., Noss, R. and Bhinder, C. (2006). “'It’s not just magic!' Learning opportunities with spreadsheets in the financial sector". In D. Hewitt (Ed.), Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics, 26, 1, 17-22. Available online: Bakker, A., Hoyles, C., Kent, P. & Noss, R. (2005). "Designing learning opportunities for Techno-mathematical Literacies in financial workplaces: A status report". Paper presented at the TLRP Conference, Warwick University, November 2005. Bakker, A., Hoyles, C., Kent, P. & Noss, R. (in preparation). "Learning through boundary crossing with computational artefacts". | |
|
|
Techno-mathematical Literacies in the Workplace project
home
|
www.tlrp.org/dspace/handle/123456789/493