Keyword: paradigm

ABSTRACT: The paper highlighted the nexus between various research paradigms vis-a-viz mathematics education. Research in education entails basing the process on three fundamental philosophical traditions – epistemology, ontology, and methodology. The trio formed the core of the paradigm likely to be employed to explain the research problem – in which case, mathematics education research problems. Thus, the paper argues that employing a research paradigm in mathematics education research has far-reaching effect in giving an expository analysis of the problem. The research paradigms that were discussed in this paper comprised of positivism, post-positivism, interpretivism and critical theory. In the end, the paper suggested that, in mathematics education, applying a given research paradigm in explaining a particular research problem is imperative, and can help in viewing the problem from philosophical perspective.