Investigating the secondary–tertiary transition Ghislaine Gueudet Published online: 17 January 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract The secondary–tertiary transition has been studied in a great amount of research in mathematics education, adopting different focuses and theoretical approaches. I present here how these focuses led the authors to identify and study different students’ difficulties and to develop different means of didactical action. Individual, social, but also institutional phenomena are considered with different perspectives. Each perspective yields a particular view of transition. The association and comparison of these views makes it possible to build an organized outline of this complex object, combining several kinds of ruptures and long- term evolutions. Keywords Advanced mathematical thinking . Assessment . Institutions . Mathematical language . Mathematical reasoning . Proof . Secondary–tertiary transition Mathematicians, and mathematics educators, often mention transition from secondary to tertiary level as a major issue. The object they refer to remains nevertheless vague. Our aim in this paper is to display how mathematics education research makes it possible to understand and describe this object. This paper’ s origin is a course given at the 13th French mathematics didactics summer school. This course consisted of a literature review about secondary–tertiary transition for scientific students. These students can have different professional projects, such as working in physics, chemistry, computer science, or becoming an engineer or a teacher. But all of them are enrolled in university courses which might be very general but are the courses followed by the students who will eventually become professional Educ Stud Math (2008) 67:237–254 DOI 10.1007/s10649-007-9100-6 G. Gueudet Centre de Recherche sur l’Education les Apprentissages et la Didactique (CREAD), Rennes, France G. Gueudet (*) Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres (IUFM) de Bretagne, 153, rue Saint-Malo, 35043 Rennes Cedex, France e-mail: Ghislaine.Gueudet@bretagne.iufm.fr