איילון מיכל, פרופ'
תחומי מחקר:
Michal Ayalon is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics Education at the University of Haifa, Israel. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics education at the Weizmann Institute of Science and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include promoting argumentation in the mathematics classroom, formative assessment, teacher noticing, mathematics teacher education, and the teaching and learning of functions and analysis.
Michal leads several research and development initiatives in mathematics education at the University of Haifa. One ongoing project focuses on promoting mathematical argumentation in the classroom by supporting both students’ engagement in argumentation and teachers’ pedagogical expertise in facilitating it. The project combines the analysis of classroom factors that enable argumentation—such as task design, teaching strategies, and student characteristics—with the development of professional learning tools. A recent strand of this work integrates research on argumentation and teacher noticing through the lens of critical classroom events.
Another project, Mathematics Video-Clip, supports teachers' professional learning about the teaching of mathematical modeling through the analysis of video clips from real classroom lessons. A third project, conducted in collaboration with Yael Boim-Fein, Director of the Institute for Gender Equity in Education, focuses on developing teachers’ professional expertise and awareness to notice gendered critical events during modeling lessons and to implement practices that promote girls’ participation in mathematics classrooms. A fourth project, in collaboration with Esther Levenson (Tel Aviv University), aims to promote accountable mathematical talk in elementary classrooms. The project involves the professional development of math coordinators and joint implementation with teachers in their schools.
Another ongoing project, conducted with Tali Raveh and supported by an ISF grant, investigates the role of executive functions (EFs) in learning middle-school geometry. While EFs are known to correlate with arithmetic, their influence on geometry has remained underexplored. The project uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine how core EFs—inhibition, working memory, and shifting—support geometric thinking. It combines lab-based EF assessments with geometry-specific tasks to identify distinct sources of difficulty among students and explore how these might be addressed in teaching.
In previous years, Michal has led several national projects. The HAKLIM-5 project used “critical events” as a framework for the professional development of prospective secondary-school mathematics teachers. The Math Teachers Edit Teacher Guide project, developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science, focused on involving teachers in editing mathematics teacher guides. She also directed Mesimatica, a collaborative project for designing formative assessment tasks in mathematics.
Michal currently heads the Mathematics Education Department in the Department of Education at the University of Haifa and serves on various academic and national committees. She has published her work in leading international journals and serves as associate editor of the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education and as a member of the editorial board of Teaching Mathematics and Its Applications. She chaired the 46th Annual Meeting of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) in 2023 and the Jerusalem Conference of Research in Mathematics Education (JRCME) in 2017. She has twice led the International Conference on Formative Assessment Tasks in Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute and served as co-chair of the working group on formative assessment at the 11th Conference of the International Society for Design and Development in Education (ISDDE). She currently co-leads the working group on formative assessment at the Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME).
Michal supervises a vibrant research group of master’s and doctoral students engaged in a range of topics in mathematics education, including teacher noticing, argumentation, formative assessment, and the professional development of teachers and teacher educators. The group offers a collaborative space for shared learning and mutual support, and Michal considers it a privilege to accompany these students on their academic and professional journeys.
