Ignacio Fernández Balboa is a PhD student in Education in the Department of Experimental, Social and Mathematical Didactics at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE).

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Primary Education with Honors, with a specialization in music, from the University of Alcalá (UAH) and he received two awards for excellent academic records from the Government of the Region of Madrid during the accomplishment of the aforementioned degree. His undergraduate dissertation illustrates the differences between the approaches to the teaching of Mathematics followed in the last years of primary education in Spain and Singapore by focusing on the teaching of areas of 2D shapes.

Ignacio also holds a Master’s degree in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language from the University of Alcalá (UAH). In this case, his dissertation’s aims are to establish a theoretical framework setting out the state of the question in relation to the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) for children and to outline and describe a selection of available textbooks to teach them SFL.

Moreover, he is a DELE examiner, that is, he tests international students who want to get the Diploma of Spanish as a Foreign Language (DELE), which is an official certificate issued by the Instituto Cervantes.

After his Master’s degree, he got a one-year research initiation scholarship at UAH in the field of Mathematics Education and then he enrolled in the Doctoral program in Education at UCM. He is currently in his last year of the PhD program and his research, which is funded by a Banco Santander and UCM scholarship, addresses the study of the mathematics teacher educators’ noticing competence. At present, Ignacio is also studying a Bachelor’s degree in Pedagogy at National Distance Education University (UNED) and he belongs to SiMiS study group (Studying and improving Mathematics instruction in secondary schools in Spain) at Real Colegio Complutense, whose co-chairs are Dr. Jon Star (HGSE) and Dr. Nuria Joglar (UCM), who are his thesis directors as well.