The term ‘transition’describes a process of change, which involves discontinuities and often crisis. The ICMI Topic Survey by Gueudet et al.(2016) offers a recent overview on transitions, describing transitions in mathematics education from three distinct perspectives: epistemological, cognitive and socio-cultural. The authors then state that any change in one of the three dimensions can be considered a transition in mathematics education. The volume, a very comprehensive survey of the state of the art in this field, goes on to describe both the theoretical frameworks that have been adopted to understand transitions, and the topics and research questions that scholars have investigated in each of the theoretical perspectives adopted.

Gueudet et al.(2016) observe that much of the research related to the transition from school to university mathematics has addressed predominantly the epistemological and cognitive difficulties students face. Recently, considering what Lerman (2000) calls ‘the social turn’, two perspectives have been added to the study of this transition: the affective (eg Di Martino & Gregorio, 2019; Geisler & Rolka, 2021) and the socio-cultural (eg Hernandez-Martinez & Williams, 2013) perspective. This shift in focus was the first motivation for the development of this Special Issue of Educational Studies in Mathematics. On the one hand, we asked whether and how much the turn to a holistic view of transition—one that considers the socio-cultural and affective as well as the cognitive aspects of this phenomena—had inspired scholars and motivated studies about the transition into university mathematics outside the well-rehearsed consideration of cognitive difficulties that students encounter in mathematics at the start of a STEM degree. On the other, we wanted to contribute to this social turn, involving scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives.