Research and Innovation in the Development of an Educational Discipline

We characterize an educational discipline in terms of three forms of dissemination of knowledge: essays, research and innovation. We analyzed the content of 3,214 open access documents, published by the Colombian Mathematics Education community between 1996 and 2016. We established the model that best fits the behavior of the quantity of research, essay and innovation documents published over time and we analyzed the diachronic evolution of the proportion of each type of document. We determined if, from the diversity of its documentation, the discipline has consolidated. We found that this discipline, in Colombia, has consolidated in terms of the evolution of its documentary production. The characteristics of this evolution allow us to conjecture that the consolidation of an educational discipline implies four issues: the exponential growth in time of the documentary production of research and innovation; the increase in the proportion of research documents; the decrease in the proportion of essays; and the constant performance of the proportion of innovations. These issues show that, in the consolidation of a discipline that arises from and for practice, there is a permanent relationship between research and innovation.