Calculus has been witnessing fundamental changes in its curriculum, with an increased emphasis on visualization. This mode for representing mathematical concepts is gaining more strength due to the advances in computer technology and the development of dynamical mathematical software. This paper focuses on the understanding of the function and its…

This research explored students' views of geometric objects through the implementation of a curriculum module that allowed them to explore the relationships between transformational geometry and linear algebra. The majority of the students were middle and secondary mathematics education majors enrolled in a one-semester geometry course that is…

The notions of "abstract" and "concrete" are central to the conceptualization of mathematical knowing and learning. Much of the literature takes a dualist approach, leading to the privileging of the former term at the expense of the latter. In this article, we provide a concrete analysis of a scientist interpreting an unfamiliar graph to show how…

The present research was carried out with the participation of 106 students in their last grade in Elementary School and revealed certain problems that these students faced in understanding the concept of area measurement. The students in the sample persisted on using measurement strategies that often led to failure. Our research plan comprises a…

This paper illustrates the role of a "Thinking-about-Derivatives" task in identifying learners' derivative conceptions and for promoting their critical thinking about derivatives of absolute value functions. The task included three parts: "Define" the derivative of a function f(x) at x = x[subscript 0], "Solve-if-Possible" the derivative of f(x) =…

In individual interviews, 220 students in grades 4, 6, 8, and 9 were given one task, and 72 eighth graders were given three tasks to answer two questions: (a) Is a square the unit of measurement for an area for students in grades 4-8? and (b) Does a square have a space-covering characteristic for students in grade 8? The answers to both questions…

Although children partition by repeatedly halving easily and spontaneously as early as the age of 4, multiplicative thinking is difficult and develops over a long period in school. Given the apparently multiplicative character of repeated halving and doubling, it is natural to ask what role they might play in the development of multiplicative…

Forty Swedish elementary students, 7-12 years of age and working in pairs, constructed a series of bar graphs and pie charts using a graphing application software as an instructional tool under the guidance of the researcher. After successive withdrawal of help, each pair drew a small number of graphic displays manually at the end of the data…

The design of technology tools has the potential to dramatically influence how students interact with tools, and these interactions, in turn, may influence students' mathematical problem solving. To better understand these interactions, we analyzed eighth grade students' problem solving as they used a java applet designed to specifically accompany…

Differing perspectives have been offered about student use of recursive and explicit rules. These include: (a) promoting the use of explicit rules over the use of recursive rules, and (b) encouraging student use of both recursive and explicit rules. This study sought to explore students' use of recursive and explicit rules by examining the…

In this paper, some aspects of French mathematical education theory concerning "problem situations" are taken into account. In this theoretical framework, the choice of problem situations is fundamental in order to allow pupils to make hypotheses, to mobilize their knowledge, to argue, and finally, to construct new knowledge. Certain factors…

The study describes students' patterns of thinking for statistical problems set in two different contexts. Fifteen students representing a wide range of experiences with high school mathematics participated in problem-solving clinical interview sessions. At one point during the interviews, each solved a problem that involved determining the…

Within mathematics education, classroom teachers, educational researchers, and instructional designers share the common goals of understanding and improving the teaching and learning of mathematics. Teachers work to help students learn; researchers study how people learn and teach mathematics; and designers develop instructional materials to…

This paper describes insights on how to promote mathematical reasoning in problem solving based on the mathematical experiences of participants in a long-term study in which the students engaged in strands of well-defined, open-ended mathematical investigations, as a context for research on the development of particular concepts and ways of…

This article builds on two previous ones in which we presented the processes of construction and consolidation of one student's knowledge structures about comparisons of infinite sets, according to a recently proposed theory of abstraction. In the present article, we show that under slight variations of context, knowledge structures that have…