This paper extends work in the areas of quantitative reasoning and covariational reasoning at the undergraduate level. Task-based interviews were used to examine third-semester calculus students' reasoning about partial derivatives in five tasks, two of which are situated in a mathematics context. The other three tasks are situated in real-world…

A growing emphasis on computational thinking worldwide necessitates student proficiency in creating algorithms. Focusing on the use of counterexamples for developing student-invented algorithms, I reanalyze two pieces of data from previously published research, pertaining to two different cases of students' algorithmatizing activity. In both…

This study investigates middle school students' reasoning about parallelism and perpendicularity of two line segments. Data were collected from 83 middle school students through an identification task consisting of various examples and non-examples of the parallelism and perpendicularity of two line segments. One-to-one interviews were also…

The goal of this paper was to investigate the role of formal constraints (e.g. definitions, theorems) in geometric reasoning. Four students participated in a task-based interview including 2D Euclidean geometric locus problems. Data were obtained from observations, interviews, and video recordings and analyzed by Toulmin's argumentation model. The…

A few case studies have suggested students' struggles with the "temporal order" of epsilon and delta in the formal limit definition. This study problematizes this hypothesis by exploring students' claims in different contexts and uncovering productive resources from students to make sense of the critical relationship between epsilon and…

Research in psychology and in mathematics education has documented the ubiquity of "intuition traps" -- tasks that elicit non-normative responses from most people. Researchers in cognitive psychology often view these responses negatively, as a sign of irrational behaviour. Others, notably mathematics educators, view them as necessary…

Research on teaching high school mathematics shows that the topic of percentages often causes learning difficulties. This article describes a method of teaching percentages that the authors used in university bridging courses. In this method, the information from a word problem about percentages is presented in a two-way table. Such a table gives…

This study reports on an analysis of students' textbook task-solving in Swedish upper secondary school. The relation between types of mathematical reasoning required, used, and the rate of correct task solutions were studied. Rote learning and superficial reasoning were common, and 80% of all attempted tasks were correctly solved using such…

This paper reports a qualitative research that identifies Mexican high school students' social representations of mathematics. For this purpose, the social representations of "mathematics", "learning mathematics" and "teaching mathematics" were identified in a group of 50 students. Focus group interviews were carried…

This paper describes an action-research experience carried out with second year students at the School of Engineering of the National University of Entre Ríos, Argentina. Vector calculus students played an active role in their own learning process. They were required to present weekly reports, in both oral and written forms, on the topics studied,…

Many exercises in mathematical induction require the student to prove a divisibility property of a function of the integers. Such problems are generally presented as being independent of each other. However, many of these problems can be presented in terms of difference equations, and the theory of difference equations can be used to provide a…

In this article we derive all salient properties of analytic functions, including the analytic version of the inverse function theorem, using only the most elementary convergence properties of series. Not even the notion of differentiability is required to do so. Instead, analytical arguments are replaced by combinatorial arguments exhibiting…

Different technological artefacts may offer distinct opportunities for students to develop resources and strategies to formulate, comprehend and solve mathematical problems. In particular, the use of dynamic software becomes relevant to assemble geometric configurations that may help students reconstruct and examine mathematical relationships. In…

This note discusses a possible method for teaching an example of problem solving to intermediate grade students. Under the guidance of the instructor, students may see the links between the 'guess' method and the arithmetic operation 'strings'. This may help enhance their logical thinking ability as well as arithmetic operation skills. For…

The author argues that teaching students to program a computer enhances their logical reasoning, problem solving skills, understanding of models, and ability to examine one's work critically. (SD)