A Topic Study Group (TSG) is designed to gather a group of congress participants who are interested in a particular topic in mathematics education. A Topic Study Group will serve as mini-conference and will display the progress of the discussion in the intervening years since ICME-12. Topic Study Groups will therefore promote the discussion of a variety of perspectives on the theme of the Group. The TSG will consist of high-standard discussions enabling the newcomer to get a broad overview on the state-of-the-art and allowing the experts to lead discussions at a high level. The team will provide the audience of their TSG not with a nation-ally framed insight into the strands of the discussion of the theme, but will give an overall over-view on the international discussion as broadly as possible and allowing for insight into less well-known strands of the discussion from under-represented countries. For ICME-13, the TSG is the major arena for participation. Participants are expected to associate themselves with one TSG and to stay in that group for all three to four sessions.

In order to achieve these aims the TSG will develop a program with sufficient presentation and discussion time by not including too many contributions, i.e. not a presentation of many 10-minutes-papers shall take place, but longer presentations (minimally 15 minutes) with sufficient discussion time are expected. The presentations of the TSG will come from two sources: submissions and invitations On the one hand, the TSG will get contributions from papers sub-mitted during an official submission procedure. For the submitted papers a review process will take place, which may lead to the non-acceptance of some papers for this TSG. However, it is possible that all papers dealing with mathematics education and which meet the usual scientific standards can be presented at ICME-13 in special sessions for posters sessions and oral communications. On the other hand, presentations can be elicited by the team who can invite experts to give an overview on the discussion or to enrich the TSG in another special way. It is expected that these invited experts will devote themselves to one TSG by staying the whole time and not changing between various Topic Study Groups during ICME-13.

Organisational structure:

• The team of each TSG consists of two co-chairs, two team members (suggested by the co-chairs), one local member, one liaison person from the IPC,
• All team-members, especially the co-chairs, of a TSG are expected to be present at ICME-13. Team members, who will not be able to participate, might be replaced by other re-searchers in order to allow a complete team to run the sessions at ICME-13.
• At ICME-13, the TSGs will have 360 minutes as four 90 minutes timeslots to their disposal.
• The team of the TSG will organise the review process using reviewer tools (provided by Conftool) in order to identify interesting and high quality papers, bearing in mind the necessity of a richness of perspectives. In addition, the team will provide the necessary feed-back to encourage papers from under-represented countries.