Dr Dung Tran is a lecturer in the College of Arts & Education at Victoria University.

Prior to joining VU, he worked at North Carolina State University, USA for more than two years developing and researching Massive Open Online Courses for Educators (MOOC-Eds). He is a native of Hue city, Vietnam, graduated from the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA with a PhD in Mathematics Education and a PhD Minor in Statistics. He also earned a Master of Education in Mathematics Education and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in Vietnam.

His interests focus on mathematics curriculum development, specifically the impact of mathematical modeling and learning trajectories in curriculum design on student learning, with statistics being the focal content area. He has extensive experience in curriculum analysis and development at the middle and high school levels, conducting sizeable clinical interviews with elementary children, and analysing a diversity of both quantitative and qualitative data. He taught both mathematics and methods courses for pre-service high school mathematics teachers at Hue University College of Education in Vietnam for five years.

Publications

Selected refereed journal manuscripts

Tran, D. (2016). Statistical Association: Alignment of current U.S. high school textbooks with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. School Science and Mathematics, 116(5), 286-296.

Tran, D., Reys, B., Teuscher, D., Dingman, S., & Kasmer, L. (2016). Curriculum Standards Analysis: An important research area. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 47(2), 118-133.

Teuscher, D., Tran, D., & Reys, B. (2015). Geometry and measurement in the middle grades in the Common Core: What’s new and how can teachers support student learning? School Science and Mathematics, 115(1), 4-13.

Tran, D., & Dougherty, B. (2014). Authenticity of mathematical modeling. Mathematics Teacher, 107(9), 672-678.

Tran, D. (2013). Stay or leave: What are the factors to persist in mathematics doctoral programs in the U.S.? Perspectives from international students. Notices of the AMS, June/July 2013, 751-756.

Selected refereed conference proceedings

Tran, D., Ta, T. M. P., Nguyen, T. T. A., Nguyen, T. D., Nguyen, G. N. (2016, July). Authenticity of tasks and students modeling competencies. To appear in Proceedings of the 13th International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME), Hamburg, Germany.

Tran, D., Lee, H., Doerr, H. (2016, July). Developing Teachers’ Reasoning about Comparing Distributions: A Cross-Institutional Effort. Paper to appear in the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australia (MERGA) 39, Adelaide, SA.

*Ziols, R., Fonger, N. L., Tran, D., & Elliott, N. (2015). Children’s reasoning with fraction representation systems. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, East Lansing, MI, 266.

Fonger, N., Tran, D., & Elliot, T. (2015, April 13-15). Variation in Children’s Understanding of Fractions: Preliminary Findings. Paper presented at the 2015 NCTM Research Conference, Boston, MA.

Lee, S. H., Tran, D., & Nickell J., Doerr, M. H. (2015, Feb 4-8). Simulation approaches for informal inference: Models to develop understanding. Paper presented at the 9th Congress of European Research in Mathematics Education, Prague, Czech Republic.

He has given more than 20 oral presentations in professional conferences.

Teaching responsibilities

Teaching a range of mathematics, statistics, and mathematics education, and research methods units in the Bachelor of Education (P-12), Master of Teaching (Secondary, Primary), and Master of Education courses.

Coordination of EEC1106 Teaching Primary Mathematics 1.

Supervision

Completions: Phuong Ta, Hue University College of Education Vietnam

Current supervision: Co-supervision of one PhD student and one masters student at VU and supervision of one masters student at Hue University College of Education.

Professional memberships

  • Mathematics Education Research Group of Australia (MERGA)
  • National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) – USA

Areas of expertise

  • Curriculum development & analysis
  • Learning trajectories
  • Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
  • Mathematical modelling
  • Mathematics education
  • Statistics education

Contact details

(03) 9919 5471